followed in twenty-four hours by that of his wife, who died after the birth of a daughter, brought sorrow upon Roosevelt which made the burden of his political work heavier and caused him to consider how he should readjust his life, for he was first of all a man of deep family affections and the loss of his wife left him adrift.

To S. N. D. North, editor of the Utica Herald and a well-wisher of his, he wrote from Albany on April 30, 1884:

DEAR MR. NORTH: I wish to write you a few words just to thank you for your kindness towards me, and to assure you that my head will not be turned by what I well know was a mainly accidental success. Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over success or defeat.

I have very little expectation of being able to keep on in politics; my success so far has only been won by absolute indifference to my future career; for I doubt if any one can realize the bitter and venomous hatred with which I am regarded by the very politicians who at Utica supported me, under dictation from masters who were influenced by political considerations that were national and not local in their scope. I realize very thoroughly the absolutely ephemeral nature of the hold I have upon the people, and the very real and positive hostility I have excited among the politicians. I will not stay in public life unless I can do so on my own terms; and my ideal, whether lived up to or not, is rather a high one.

For very many reasons I will not mind going back into private life for a few years. My work this winter has been

very harassing, and I feel both tired and restless; for the next few months I shall probably be in Dakota, and I think I shall spend the next two or three years in making shooting trips, either in the Far West or in the Northern woods — and there will be plenty of work to do writing.1

This letter is a striking revelation of the inmost intentions of the man of twenty-five, who already stood on a pinnacle where hard heads and mature might well have been dizzy. Evidently he knew himself, and even in his brief experience with the world he understood how uncertain and evanescent are the winds of Fame. If he had ever suffered from a "swelled head," he was now cured. He felt the emptiness of life's prizes when the dearest who should have shared them with him were dead.

1 Douglas, 41-42.

CHAPTER III

AT THE FIRST CROSSROADS

HE year 1884 was a Presidential year, and

TH

Roosevelt was one of the four delegates-atlarge1 of New York State to the Republican National Convention at Chicago. The day seemed to have come for a new birth in American politics. The Republican Party was grown fat with four and twenty years of power, and the fat had overlain and smothered its noble aims. The party was arrogant, it was corrupt, it was unashamed. After the War, immense projects involving huge sums of money had to be managed, and the Republicans spent like spendthrifts when they did not spend like embezzlers. I do not imply that the Democrats would not have done the same if they had been in command, or that there were not among them many who saw where their profit lay, and took it. The quadrupeds which feed at the Treasury trough are all of one species, no matter whether their skins be black or white.

But now a new generation was springing up, with

1 The other delegates-at-large were President Andrew D. White of Cornell University, J. T. Gilbert, and Edwin Packard.

its leaven of hope and idealism and its intuitive faith in honesty. More completely than any one else, Roosevelt embodied to the country the glorious promise of this new generation. But the old always dies hard after it has long been the blood and mind of a creed, a class, or a party. Terrible also is the blind, remorseless sweep of a custom which may have sprung up from good soil, not less than one spawned and nurtured in iniquity. Frankenstein laboriously constructing his monster seems to personify society at its immemorial task of creating institutions; each institution as it becomes viable rends its creator.

So the Republican Party lived on its traditions, its privileges, its appetites, its arrogance, and it refused to be transmuted by its youngest members. In 1876 it resorted to fraud to perpetuate its hold on power. Unchastened in 1880, three hundred and six of its delegates attempted through thick and thin to force the nomination of General Grant for a third term. The chief opposing candidate was James G. Blaine, whose unsavory reputation, however, caused the majority of the convention which was not pledged to Grant to repudiate Blaine and to choose Garfield as a compromise. Then followed four years of factional bitterness in the party, and when 1884 came round, Blaine's admirers pushed him to the front.

Blaine himself was not a person of delicate instinct. The repudiation which he had twice suffered by the better element of the Republican Party, seemed only to redouble his determination to be its candidate. He had much personal magnetism. Both in his methods and ideals, he represented perfectly the politicians who during the dozen years after Lincoln's death flourished at Washington, and at every State capitol in the Union. By the luck of a catching phrase applied to him by Robert G. Ingersoll, he stood before the imagination of the country "as the plumèd knight," although on looking back we search in vain for any trait of knightliness or chivalry in him. For a score of years he filled the National Congress, House and Senate, with the bustle of his egotism. His knightly valor consisted in shaking his fist at the "Rebel Brigadiers" and in waving the "bloody shirt," feats which seemed to him heroic, no doubt, but which were safe enough, the Brigadiers being few and Blaine's supporters many. But where on the Nation's statute book do you find now a single important law fathered by him? What book contains one of his maxims for men to live by? Many persons still live who knew him, and remember him, but can any of them repeat a saying of his which passes current on the lips of Americans? So much sound and fury, so much