"I think we must set before ourselves the desire not to accept less than the possible, and at the same time not to bring ourselves to a complete standstill by attempting the impossible. It is a good deal as it is in taking care through the engineers of the lower Mississippi River. No one can dam the Mississippi. If the nation started to dam it, the nation would waste its time. It would not hurt the Mississippi, but it would not only throw away its own means, but would incidentally damage the population along the banks. You can't dam the current. You can build levees to keep the current within bounds and to shape its direction. I think that is exactly what we can do in connection with these great corporations known as trusts. You can not put a stop to or reverse the industrial tendencies of the age, but you can control and regulate them and see that they do no harm.

"A flood comes down the Mississippi-you cannot stop it. If you tried to build a dam across it, it would not hurt the flood and it would not benefit you. You can guide it between levees so as to prevent its doing injury and so as to insure its doing good. Another thing; you don't build those levees in a day or in a month. A man who told you that he had a patent device by which in sixty days he would solve the question of the floods along the lower Mississippi would not be a wise man; but he would be a perfect miracle of wisdom compared to the man who tells you that by any one patent remedy he can bring the millennium in our industrial and social affairs."

Here is his rule-to work for what he can get, with the understanding that what he seeks is at least a step in advance. But he tells us that we must set to work in a manner as far removed as possible from hysteria, in a spirit of sober determination not to submit to wrong and not to wrong others. It is not wise to make promises that will stir up the enthusiastic, but which no man can keep. Measure your end by your means,-with the proviso that your end be in the right direction. We climb mountains, not by leaps, but step by step.

Here is what he has to say, and wisely so, about class distinctions. It probably would not stand muster across the waters, but it is first

class Americanism and true modernism and Rooseveltism. It is from an address made in Syracuse, N. Y., in September, 1903.

"We can keep our government on a sane and healthy basis and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill or foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people towards great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental question of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section it departs from the old American ideal."

We may quote another saying of his in this direction, one of which no thinking man can question the wisdom and justice:

"No man is happy if he does not work. Of all miserable creatures the idler, in whatever rank of society, is in the long run the most miserable. If a man does not work, if he has not in him not merely the capacity for work but the desire for work, then nothing can be done with him. He is out of place in our community. We have in our scheme of government no room for the man who does not wish to pay his way through life by what he does for himself and for the community. If he has leisure which makes it unnecessary for him to devote his time to earning his daily bread, then all the more he is bound to work just as hard in some way that will make the community the better off for his existence. If he fails in that, he fails to justify his existence. Work, the capacity for work, is absolutely necessary; and no man's life is full, no man can be said to live in the true sense of the word, if he does not work. This is necessary; and yet it is not enough. If a man is utterly selfish, if utterly disregardful of the rights of others, if he has no ideals, if he works simply for the

sake of ministering to his own base passions, if he works simply to gratify himself, small is his good in the community. I think even then he is probably better off than if he is an idler, but he is of no real use unless together with the quality which enables him to work he has the quality which enables him to love his fellows, to work with them and for them for the common good of all."

In this enters his doctrine of the "strenuous life," first given forth in 1899, in a speech to the Hamilton Club, Chicago. These are the words in which he enunciates it:

"I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph."

That is Roosevelt himself; the strenuous life is the life he has led. As this chapter contrasts the larger good with the demands of expediency, let us give his views regarding the latter:

"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. He is bound to do all the good possible. Yet he must consider the question of expediency, in order that he may do all the good possible, for otherwise he will do none. As soon as a politician gets to the point of thinking that to be practical he has got to be base, he has become a noxious member of the body politic. That species for practicability eats into the moral sense of the people like a cancer, and he who practices it can no more be excused than an editor who debauches public decency in order to sell his paper.

He tells us further that: "Practical politics must not be construed to mean dirty politics. On the contrary, in the long run, the politics of fraud and treachery and foulness are unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicans is the one who is clean and decent and upright. The party man who offers his allegiance to party as an excuse for blindly following his party right or wrong, and who fails to try to make that party in any way better, commits a crime against his country."

Believing firmly in such sentiments, he was a strong advocate of civil service reform, of selecting the man who was to serve the country in any field on the basis of his character and attainments, not on that of his party services. This fitted him well to fill the office of Civil Service Commissioner, and he did splendid work in this position. He cared nothing for a man's politics; he cared much for his fitness for the work to be done. Finding that the idea was entertained that only Republicans had any chance to enter the public service during a Republican administration, he sent for all the representatives of Southern newspapers in Washington and told them flatly that nothing of the kind should exist while he was in office. He found that the South was far from having its share of positions, and said, in his decisive way:

"I assume, on general principles, that most of your educated young men are Democrats; but you may give them my absolute guaranty that they will receive the same consideration in every respect as the young men in other parts of the country, that no one will enquire what their politics are, and that they will be appointed according to their deserts and in the regular order of apportionment. This is an institution not for Republicans, and not for Democrats, but for the whole American people. It belongs to them, and will be administered, as long as I stay here, in their interest without discrimination."

He meant every word of it. Soon bright young Southerners began to swarm to the examinations and it was not long before the South was fairly represented in the government service.

Roosevelt was not the chairman of the Civil Service Commission; but his personality shone through so clearly that men looked on him as the Commission. When he went in he found 14,000 government officers under the civil service rules; when he went out he left 40,000 and he received the warm thanks of President Cleveland, into whose term his service had extended.

Another matter which naturally bore upon Roosevelt's mind as President was the question of national finances. As a Republican, he favored a protective tariff, but he was strongly imbued with the idea that those who had accumulated large wealth should be made

specially to aid the government from their superabundance. For this purpose he favored both an income tax and an inheritance taxthe latter in especial, since a Supreme Court decision had put an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of an income tax. In several of his messages he spoke strongly on this subject. In that of December, 1906, he said:

"The National Government has long derived its chief revenue from a tariff on imports and from an internal or excise tax. In addition to these there is every reason why, when next our system of taxation is revised, the National Government should impose a graduated inheritance tax, and, if possible, a graduated income tax. The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government. Not only should he recognize this obligation in the way he leads his daily life and in the way he earns and spends his money, but it should also be recognized by the way in which he pays for the protection the State gives him.

"As the law now stands it is undoubtedly difficult to devise a national income tax which shall be constitutional. But whether it is absolutely impossible is another question, and if possible it is most certainly desirable. I feel that in the near future our national legislators should enact a law providing for a graduated inheritance tax by which a steadily increasing rate of duty should be put upon all moneys or other valuables coming by gift, bequest, or devise to any individual or corporation. It may be well to make the tax heavy in proportion as the individual benefited is remote of kin. In any event, in my judgment the pro rata of the tax should increase very heavily with the increase of the amount left to any one individual after a certain point has been reached. It is most desirable to encourage thrift and ambition, and a potent source of thrift and ambition is the desire on the part of the bread-winner to leave his children well off. This object can be attained by making the tax very small on moderate amounts of property left; because the prime object should be to put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of those swollen fortunes which it is certainly of no benefit to this country to perpetuate.”