as the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Early in the
summer, his old college friend and steadfast admirer, Charles
Washburn, remarked: "I would not like to be in McKinley's shoes.
He has a man of destiny behind him." Destiny is the one artificer
who can use all tools and who finds a short cut to his goal
through ways mysterious and most devious. As I have before
remarked, nothing commonplace could happen to Theodore Roosevelt.
He emerged triumphant from the receiving-vault of the
Vice-Presidency, where his enemies supposed they had laid him
away for good. In ancient days, his midnight dash from Mount
Marcy, and his flight by train across New York State to Buffalo,
would have become a myth symbolizing the response of a hero to an
Olympian summons. If we ponder it well, was it indeed less than
this?

In 1899, Mr. James Bryce, the most penetrating of foreign
observers of American life had said, in words that now seem
prophetic: "Theodore Roosevelt is the hope of American politics."



CHAPTER X. THE WORLD WHICH ROOSEVELT CONFRONTED

To understand the work of a statesman we must know something of
the world in which he lived. That is his material, out of which
he tries to embody his ideals as the sculptor carves his out of
marble. We are constantly under the illusions of time. Some
critics say, for instance, that Washington fitted so perfectly
the environment of the American Colonies during the last half of
the eighteenth century, that he was the direct product of that