Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| in such a case, that was why.” Counting for one in the place where he stood, when that was the thing to do, then and always, he has got to the place where he counts for all of us, should such days come back, as please God they will not; and nowhere, I think, in the land is there any one who doubts that “order and the Republic” are safe in his hands. |
| But in his youthful mind these things were working yet, unidentified. His was a healthy nature without morbid corners. The business of his boyhood had been to make himself strong that he might do the work of a man, by which he had in mind chiefly, no doubt, the horse and the gun—the bully, perhaps, whom he had not forgotten—but the hunt, the life in the open. Now, among his fellows, it was to get the most out of what their companionship offered. He became instantly a favorite with his class of a hundred and seventy-odd. They laughed at his oddities, at his unrepressed enthusiasm, at his liking for Elizabethan poetry, voted him “more or less crazy” with true Harvard conservatism, respected him highly for his scholarship on the same solid ground, and fell in even with his notions for his own sake, as afterward |