four years before from free silver to anti-imperialism. President
McKinley, according to his custom, made no active campaign; but Bryan
and Roosevelt competed with each other in whirlwind speaking tours from
one end of the country to the other. The war-cry of the Republicans was
the "full dinner pail"; the keynote of Bryan's bid for popular support
was opposition to the Republican policy of expansion and criticism of
Republican tendencies toward plutocratic control. The success of the
Republican ticket was overwhelming; McKinley and Roosevelt received
nearly twice as many electoral votes as Bryan and Stevenson.

When President McKinley was shot at Buffalo six months after his
second term began, it looked for a time as though he would recover. So
Roosevelt, after an immediate visit to Buffalo, went to join his family
in the Adirondacks. The news of the President's impending death found
him out in the wilderness on the top of Mount Tahawus, not far from the
tiny Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds, the source of the Hudson River. A ten-mile
dash down the mountain trail, in the course of which he outstripped all
his companions but one; a wild forty-mile drive through the night to the
railroad, the new President and his single companion changing the horses
two or three times with their own hands; a fast journey by special train
across the State--and on the evening of September 14, 1901, Theodore
Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth President of the
United States.

Before taking the oath, Roosevelt announced that it would be his aim "to
continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President McKinley for the
peace, prosperity, and honor of our beloved country." He immediately
asked every member of the late President's Cabinet to continue in
office. The Cabinet was an excellent one, and Mr. Roosevelt found it
necessary to make no other changes than those that came in the ordinary
course of events. The policies were not altered in broad general
outline, for Roosevelt was as stalwart a Republican as McKinley himself,
and was as firmly convinced of the soundness of the fundamentals of the
Republican doctrine.

But the fears of some of his friends that Roosevelt would seem, if he
carried out his purpose of continuity, "a pale copy of McKinley" were
not justified in the event. They should have known better. A copy of any
one Roosevelt could neither be nor seem, and "pale" was the last epithet
to be applied to him with justic