have shared them with him were dead.



CHAPTER III. AT THE FIRST CROSSROADS

The year 1884 was a Presidential year, and Roosevelt was one of
the four delegates-at-large* of New York State to the Republican
National Convention at Chicago. The day seemed to have come for a
new birth in American politics. The Republican Party was grown
fat with four and twenty years of power, and the fat had overlain
and smothered its noble aims. The party was arrogant, it was
corrupt, it was unashamed. After the War, immense projects
involving huge sums of money had to be managed, and the
Republicans spent like spendthrifts when they did not spend like
embezzlers. I do not imply that the Democrats would not have done
the same if they had been in command, or that there were not
among them many who saw where their profit lay, and took it. The
quadrupeds which feed at the Treasury trough are all of one
species, no matter whether their skins be black or white.

* The other delegates-at-large were President Andrew D. White of
Cornell University, J. T. Gilbert, and Edwin Packard.


But now a new generation was springing up, with its leaven of
hope and idealism and its intuitive faith in honesty.

More completely than any one else, Roosevelt embodied to the
country the glorious promise of this new generation. But the old