As we range about, through this dim pre-collegiate life of our great American, finding in his recorded words and acts the germs of the great deeds which characterized him later, we ask again and again, “But what was the one dominant quality in him which gave him the greatness which the world now ascribes to him?" We can pick out several without which he could not have achieved what he did. Yet, back of all the others, the one factor which most arrests our attention is the dynamic factor, the energy, which seemed never to tire and drove him to express himself in scores of ways, joining now with one group of faculties and now with another, so that not only was "No human endeavor outside his range of interest", as the ancient phrase put it, but there was hardly one which he did not actually seek and eagerly pursue and in it attain excellence. The driving power in this phenomenal man combined chemically with all his varied faculties and interests and made them function with rare vigor. This was the same element which figured in his remaking of himself, physically and spiritually. When Pandora, in the ancient legend, looked into her box of gifts, bestowed by the gods, she found that all the gifts had escaped, save hope only. When the sickly child Theodore examined his gift box, he found that almost his only valuable possession was his will. Straightway, with that he began to remake his life, corporeal and spiritual. And, as it transpired afterward, he did much to remake, to help reform his beloved country. Discovering that dauntless will within his breast, he found what Archimedes vainly sought, - a fulcrum by which his native land and even the entire world might be moved, and moved forward. This dynamic element in Roosevelt was what John Morley sensed when he said, in England, after visiting the United States: "I saw there two things which were extraordinary- Niagara Falls and Theodore Roosevelt." Yes, and was it not Power which he saw in both? Was it not what was detected in Napoleon Bonaparte by that member of the Directory, in 1799, who said to a fellow member, as Bonaparte, a new man, entered the assembly hall and looked about him, "I think that in him we have found our master"? The dynamic element in both Bonaparte and Roosevelt was strikingly similar. But in other essential qualities they differed widely. The Corsican brigand looked out upon the world as an arena where he might exalt himself by ruthless victories. The American patriot-whose plans rarely ranged beyond the borders of his native land-looked forth over that beloved land as his "world", and in the words of King Arthur of the Round Table, he "longed for power on that dark world to lighten it, and power on that dead world to make it live." CHAPTER III THE CLASS OF '80 Almost any graduate of almost any class of almost any college or university in the United States will tell you, in confidence, that his class was "The famous class of ", or "The wellknown class of - -", and then the year is named. Now and then some daring graduate breaks through the commonplace and declares that his class was remarkable for not being remarkable. We of the Harvard Class of eighteen hundred and eighty feel, however, that we need not resort to this tour de force, but may say proudly - yet quietly and modestly, as is becoming in those who but reflect glory that we are indeed of "the famous class of '80." And our class is famous largely because Theodore Roosevelt entered it, in 1876, and graduated with it. When he came to Harvard, and while he remained there, his life was of one piece with his previous life. It was no fault of his that he had been born into a family that was characterized by all the conventions and customs of thinking and |