oil all the calm
equipoise, the quiet onward flowing of the Stream of Thought, and with
one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis came up, though I
scarcely know how, I have managed to keep him out. And now, oh, Gentle
Reader, here he is! I know very well that he is in everything, and right
in the middle of everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy
uproarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment he
appears. The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of Thought--will all
become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle Reader) all thunder and spray and
underneath the mighty grinding of the wheels--the wheels of the Nation
and the Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background--in the red
background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theodore--just the
face of Theodore in this book shining at us--readers and writer and
all--out of a huge rosy mist!

But I have been driven to it. The fact seems to be that I must find at
just this point in the book, if I can, a word. And the word will have to
be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to
everybody the moment it is used--of a certain tone or quality, or hum or
murmur of being. No one regrets this more than I, because it is so
unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book
or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E
V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very
largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using
every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone
now abroad in our world--a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of
goodness.

This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly associated
with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of course it
over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about America which we want
our President to read.

One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the
largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the
word Roosevelt would do it best.

I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt's
goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is. We might all disagree
about that. I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what
even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in
advertising goodness. While we might all disagree as to his goodness
being the kind t