Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 113
| “Every day,” said Mr. Procter as we lay in the grass up in the Berkshires last summer and looked out over the peaceful valley, “every day I went to the office as to an entertainment. I knew something was sure to turn up to make our work worth while, with him there. When he went away, I had heart in it no longer.” |
| The thing that turned up at regular intervals was an investigation by Congress. Some-times it was charges of one kind or another; sometimes the weapon was ridicule; always at the bottom the purpose was the same: to get rid of this impudent thing that was interposing itself between the legislator and the patronage that had been to him the sinews of war till then, costly sinews as he often enough had found out, but still the only ones he knew how to use. Mr. Roosevelt met every attack with his unvarying policy of candor; blow for blow where that was needed; at other times with tact so finished, a shrewdness of diplomacy at which the enemy stared in helpless rage. For the country was visibly falling in behind this wholesome, good-humored fighter. I remember yet with amusement the “withering charge,” as he called it, which one of the Washington |