Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the
highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.

Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom
conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its
decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys
does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only
the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow
very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a
citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some
against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the
country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by
opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter
himself that his party really represents the State. The
Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work,
was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in
Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with
which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of
life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted
by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was
split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually
hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying
motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's
Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the
underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the
eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's
purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege
based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure,
compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as
possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes