se
which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can
fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against
him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in
his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his
is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's
breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is
deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men
in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that
he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to
become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought
(or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in
Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest
bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that
hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and
example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the
country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.

Yet it seems impossible--or certainly impossible for one on the
outside--to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general
conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation
of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the
corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality
in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician
to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the
ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses,
both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much
wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is
worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching
and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort
at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we
have already seen more than once, the American people is making.
Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or
certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no
need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence
either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the
President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial
fabric.

Mea