Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| came in to ask you if you would n’t help a young man who wants to get into the public employment. He is a fine fellow, has got all the qualifications. All he needs is influence to get him a place. Without influence you cannot do anything.” |
| The fight will be over the day the American people get that notion out of their heads, not before. They can drop it now, for it is all that really is left. Roosevelt won them the right to do that. He won his father’s fight that he had made his own. I know how much that meant to him. |
| The country got more out of it: it got a man to whom great tasks and great opportunities were to come with the years, trained in the school of all schools to perfect skill in dealing with men, in making out their motives and their worth as fighting units. The devious paths of diplomacy have no such training-school for leadership as he found in Washington fighting for a great principle, touching elbows every day with men from all over the country, with the leaders in thought and action, in politics, in every phase of public life. He went there, a fearless battler for the right, and |