Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
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| to applaud when he stopped, so breathlessly had they hung upon every word. But they made good their omission. Talk about rousing the military spirit which some of my good friends so dread—I think he kindled something that day in those little hearts, whom, unthinking, we had passed by, that will tell for our country in years to come. I should not be afraid of rousing any amount of the fighting spirit that is bound to battle for the weak and the defenseless and the right. And that is the kind he stirs wherever he goes. |
| Sometimes, when I speak of the children of the poor, some one says to me,—once it was the great master of a famous school,—“Yes, they have their hardships; but God help the children of the rich who have none!” And he is right. In his life Theodore Roosevelt furnishes the precise antidote for the idleness and the selfishness that threaten to eat the heart out of theirs. His published writings fairly run over, from the earliest day, with the gospel of work, and surely he has practised what he preaches as few have. “Theodore Roosevelt, a bright precocious boy, aged twelve,” wrote a distinguished New York physician of him, in his |