CHAPTER II. BREAKING INTO POLITICS

Roosevelt was a few months less than twenty-two years old when he
graduated from Harvard. His career in college had wrought several
important changes in him. First of all, his strength was
confirmed. Although he still suffered occasionally from asthma,
he was no longer handicapped. In business, or in pleasure, he did
not need to consider his health. Next, he had come to some
definite decision as to what he would do. His earlier dream of
becoming a professor of natural history had faded away. With the
inpouring of vigor into his constitution the ideal of an academic
life, often sedentary in mind as well as in body, ceased to lure
him. He craved activity, and this craving was bound to grow more
urgent as he acquired more strength. Next, and this consideration
must not be neglected, he was free to choose. His father's death
left him the possessor of a sufficient fortune to live on
comfortably without need of working to earn his bread and
butter--the motive which determines most young men when they
start in life. Finally, his father's example, reinforced by
wholesome advice, quickened in Theodore his sense of obligation
to the community. Having money, he must use it, not for mere
personal gratification, but in ways which would benefit those who
were deprived, or outcast, or bereft. But Theodore was too young
and too energetic to be contented with the life of a
philanthropist, no matter how noble and necessary its objects
might be. He had already accepted Emerson's dictum:

"He who feeds men, serves a few;
He serves all who dares be true."