THE NEW PRESIDENT AND THE PEOPLE

The youngest of the chief magistrates. - Popular imagination stirred by his swift rise. — The most thoroughly national man ever in the White House; the East and the West, the North and the South, all claim him. — The first President since the Civil War too young to remember its sectional bitterness. President Roosevelt's own story of how he became a complete American. The country delighted with his vim, his enjoyment of public honor, and freedom from pretence. Refuses to shut the door of hope on any man because of race or color. — Dines labor leaders, but refuses to let either unions or trusts dictate to him. - A man who gets things done. His trust in the people and their trust in him.

THE people liked the novelty of a new kind of President in the White House. In the first place, President Roosevelt was invested with the charm of youth. He was forty-two when called to the Presidency, and therefore several years the junior of the youngest of his predecessors, General Grant. He was still more youthful in spirit.

The popular imagination was stirred by the swiftness of his rise. Less than four years and a half before, he was as far removed from the usual line of presidential succession as the New York police com

missionership, and was saying to a friend, "You may consider me politically dead." It was only four years since he was a mere assistant secretary in a department at Washington. Within the space of three years, fortune had crowded into his life a service in war, the governorship of New York, the VicePresidency, and now the Presidency of the United States.

He was the first President with a long lineage since Washington, and the wealth of his family was far older and greater than that of Washington. The Roosevelts had been able to keep their heads above water in the social swim of New York for at least half a dozen generations. The plain people welcomed the momentary change from the line of logcabin presidents to a President who was born in a brown-stone front. The children of poverty had been taught by the example of Abraham Lincoln that they, too, might make their lives sublime. Mr. Roosevelt's fellow-citizens welcomed the example which his rise set before the scions of the rich, who might learn thereby that the republic has work for all who are not above taking off their coats and doing it.

Mr. Roosevelt marked another departure from custom. He was a writer of books, and as a rule Presidents have been the least bookish of men. He alone had spanned the wide gulf between literature and political success.

The new President was the most thoroughly national man who ever sat in the White House. No American ever lived the life of his nation more completely than he had lived it. The East claimed him as its own because of his Eastern birth and education. The West claimed him because of his enthusiastic love of Western life, because he had worked and played in its boundless fields. Even the South, which had not seen one of its own citizens. chosen President in more than half a century, could claim him as a grandson. In him the sections were united, innocent of the old estrangement, for he was in petticoats in 1861, and was the first President since the Civil War who was too young to have had a part in its bitterness.

Himself well-to-do and college-bred, the cultivated and the prosperous felt they had a kinsman in the White House; indeed, that we had "a gentleman for President." At the same time he had toiled hard