Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| block. Those who complain know this perfectly well, and their complaining betrays them. Again, with honest money—I did not need any financier to tell me that a short-weight dollar is not an honest dollar to pay full-weight dollar debts with.” |
| I thought of the wise newspaper editors who had been at such pains to explain to us how Roosevelt was responsible for the “unsettled condition” of Wall Street. Their house of cards, built up with such toilsome arguing, was just then falling to pieces, and the news columns in their own papers were giving us an inside view of what it was that had been going on in the financial market, and why some securities remained “undigested.” Water and wind are notoriously a bad diet; and what else to call the capitalization of a concern at thirty millions that rated itself at five, would puzzle, I imagine, even a “financial expert.” |
| And has he then no faults, this hero of mine? Yes, he has, and I am glad of it, for I want a live man for a friend, not a dead saint—they are the only ones, I notice, who have no faults. He talks, they say, and I hope he will keep on, for he has that to say which the world needs |