he allowed himself to be renominated. Naturally, his desire to
continue in and complete the task in which he had already
accomplished much was whetted. He would have been a fool if he
had not known, what every one else knew, that he had made a very
brilliant record during his first year. A false standard which
comes very near hypocrisy imposes a ridiculous mock modesty on
great men in modern times: as if Shakespeare alone should be
unaware that he was Shakespeare or that Napoleon or Darwin or
Lincoln or Cavour should each be ignorant of his worth. Better
vanity, if you will, than sham modesty. There was no harm done
that Roosevelt at twenty-three felt proud of being recognized as
a power in the Assembly. We must never forget also that he was a
fighter, and that his first contests in Albany had so roused his
blood that he longed to fight those battles to a finish, that is,
to victory. We must make a distinction also in his motives. He
did not strain every nerve to win a cause because it was his
cause; but having adopted a cause which his heart and mind told
him was good, he strove to make that cause triumph because he
believed it to be good.

So he allowed himself to be renominated and he was reelected by
2000 majority, although in that autumn of 1882 the Democratic
candidate for Governor, Grover Cleveland, swept New York State by
192,000 and carried into office by the momentum of his success
many of the minor candidates on the Democratic ticket.

The year 1883 opened with the cheer of dawn in New York politics.
Cleveland, the young Governor of forty-four, had proved himself
fearless, public-spirited, and conscientious. So had Roosevelt,
the young Assemblyman of twenty-three. One was a Democrat, one a