environment; I prefer to think, however, that he possessed
certain individual traits which, and not the time, made him
George Washington, and would have enabled him to have mastered a
different period if he had been born in it. In like manner,
having known Theodore Roosevelt, I do not believe that he would
have been dumb or passive or colorless or slothful or futile
under any other conceivable conditions. Just as it was not New
York City, nor Harvard, nor North Dakota, which made him
ROOSEVELT, so the ROOSEVELT in him would have persisted under
whatever sky.

The time offers the opportunities. The gift in the man, innate
and incalculable, determines how he will seize them and what he
will do with them. Now it is because I think that Roosevelt had a
clear vision of the world in which he dwelt, and saw the path by
which to lead and improve it, that his career has profound
significance to me. Picturesque he was, and picturesqueness made
whatever he did interesting. But far deeper qualities made him
significant. From ancient times, at least from the days of Greece
and Rome, Democracy as a political ideal had been dreamed of, and
had even been put into practice on a small scale here and there.
But its shortcomings and the frailty of human nature made it the
despair of practical men and the laughing stock of philosophers
and ironists. Nevertheless, the conviction that no man has a
right to enslave another would not die. And in modern times the
English sense of justice and the English belief that a man must
have a right to be heard on matters concerning himself and his
government, forced Democracy, as an actual system, to the front.
The demand for representation caused the American colonists to
break away from England and to govern themselves independently.