them.

I chronicle these examples of Roosevelt's courage among the
lawless gangs with whom he was thrown in North Dakota, because
they reveal several qualities which came to be regarded as
peculiarly Rooseveltian during the rest of his days. We are apt
to speak of "mere" physical courage as being inferior to moral
courage; and doubtless there are many heroes unknown to the world
who, under the torture of disease or the poignancy of social
injustice and wrongs, deserve the highest crown of heroism. Men
who would lead a charge in battle would shrink from denouncing an
accepted convention or even from slighting a popular fashion. But
after all, the instinct of the race is sound in revering those
who give their lives without hesitation or regret at the point of
deadly peril, or offer their own to save the lives of others.

Roosevelt's experience established in him that physical courage
which his soul had aspired to in boyhood, when the consciousness
of his bodily inferiority made him seem shy and almost timid. Now
he had a bodily frame which could back up any resolution he might
take. The emergencies in a ranchman's career also trained him to
be quick to will, instantaneous in his decisions, and equally
quick in the muscular activity by which he carried them out. In a
community whose members gave way to sudden explosions of passion,
you might be shot dead unless you got the drop on the other
fellow first. The anecdotes I have repeated, indicate that
Roosevelt must often have outsped his opponent in drawing.

We learn from them, too, that he was far from being the
pugnacious person whom many of his later critics insisted that he