needs, and
all the windings of official caste and professional snobbery. It is his
supreme business to see that the servants of life stay in their
place--that government, industry, "causes," science, all the creatures of
man do not succeed in their perpetual effort to become the masters.

I have Roosevelt in mind. He haunts political thinking. And indeed, why
shouldn't he? What reality could there be in comments upon American
politics which ignored the colossal phenomenon of Roosevelt? If he is
wholly evil, as many say he is, then the American democracy is
preponderantly evil. For in the first years of the Twentieth Century,
Roosevelt spoke for this nation, as few presidents have spoken in our
history. And that he has spoken well, who in the perspective of time will
deny? Sensitive to the original forces of public opinion, no man has had
the same power of rounding up the laggards. Government under him was a
throbbing human purpose. He succeeded, where Taft failed, in preventing
that drought of invention which officialism brings. Many people say he
has tried to be all things to all men--that his speeches are an attempt
to corral all sorts of votes. That is a left-handed way of stating a
truth. A more generous interpretation would be to say that he had tried
to be inclusive, to attach a hundred sectional agitations to a national
program. Crude: of course he was crude; he had a hemisphere for his
canvas. Inconsistent: yes, he tried to be the leader of factions at war
with one another. A late convert: he is a statesman and not an
agitator--his business was to meet demands when they had grown to
national proportions. No end of possibilities have slipped through the
large meshes of his net. He has said some silly things. He has not been
subtle, and he has been far from perfect. But his success should be
judged by the size of his task, by the fierceness of the opposition, by
the intellectual qualities of the nation he represented. When we remember
that he was trained in the Republican politics of Hanna and Platt, that
he was the first President who shared a new social vision, then I believe
we need offer no apologies for making Mr. Roosevelt stand as the working
model for a possible American statesman at the beginning of the Twentieth
Century.

Critics have often suggested that Roosevelt stole Bryan's clothes. That
is perhaps true, and it suggests a comparison which illuminates both men.
It would not be unfair to say that it