are desperately engaged in fighting these, For this reason he
probably failed to absorb from Godkin's criticism some of the
benefit which it might have brought him. The pills were bitter,
but salutary. While he was Police Commissioner one of Joseph
Choate's epigrams passed current and is still worth recalling.
When some one remarked that New York was a very wicked city,
Choate replied, "How can you expect it to be otherwise, when Dana
makes Vice so attractive in the Sun every morning, and Godkin
makes Virtue so odious in the Post every afternoon?" Charles A.
Dana, the editor of the Sun, the stanch supporter of Tammany
Hall, and the apologist of almost every evil movement for nearly
thirty years, was a writer of diabolical cleverness whose
newspaper competed with Godkin's among the intellectual readers
in search of amusement. At one time, when Godkin had been
particularly caustic, and the Mugwumps at Harvard were unusually
critical, Roosevelt attended a committee meeting at the
University. After talking with President Eliot, he went and sat
by a professor, and remarked, play fully, "Eliot is really a good
fellow at heart. Do you suppose that, if he bit Godkin, it would
take?" So Roosevelt went back to Washington to be henceforth, as
it proved, a national figure whose career was to be forever
embedded in the structural growth of the United States.



CHAPTER VII. THE ROUGH RIDER

When Roosevelt returned to Washington in March, 1897, to take up
his duties as a subordinate officer in the National Government,
he was thirty-eight years old; a man in the prime of life, with