does not go very far in purpose or achievement, but limited as it
is, it does tend to give the agitation for reform the benefit of a much
more positive significance and a much more dignified task.

Mr. Roosevelt has imparted a higher and more positive significance to
reform, because throughout his career he has consistently stood for an
idea, from which the idea of reform cannot be separated--namely, the
national idea. He has, indeed, been even more of a nationalist than he
has a reformer. His most important literary work was a history of the
beginning of American national expansion. He has treated all public
questions from a vigorous, even from an extreme, national standpoint. No
American politician was more eager to assert the national interest
against an actual or a possible foreign enemy; and not even William R.
Hearst was more resolute to involve his country in a war with Spain.
Fortunately, however, his aggressive nationalism did not, like that of
so many other statesmen, faint from exhaustion as soon as there were no
more foreign enemies to defy. He was the first political leader of the
American people to identify the national principle with an ideal of
reform. He was the first to realize that an American statesman could no
longer really represent the national interest without becoming a
reformer. Mr. Grover Cleveland showed a glimmering of the necessity of
this affiliation; but he could not carry it far, because, as a sincere
traditional Democrat, he could not reach a clear understanding of the
meaning either of reform or of nationality. Mr. Roosevelt, however,
divined that an American statesman who eschewed or evaded the work of
reform came inevitably to represent either special and local interests
or else a merely Bourbon political tradition, and in this way was
disqualified for genuinely national service. He divined that the
national principle involved a continual process of internal reformation;
and that the reforming idea implied the necessity of more efficient
national organization. Consequently, when he became President of the
United States and the official representative of the national interest
of the country, he attained finally his proper sphere of action. He
immediately began the salutary and indispensable work of nationalizing
the reform movement.

The nationalization of reform endowed the movement with new vitality and
meaning. What Mr. Roosevelt really did was to revive the Hamiltonian
ideal of c