evident. That way lies Jesuitry; but each infringement must be
judged on its own merits, and as Roosevelt followed more and more
these short cuts to justice he needed to be more closely
scrutinized. Was his real object to attain justice or his own
desires?

The Roosevelts moved back to Washington in March, 1897, and
Theodore at once went to work in the office of the Assistant
Secretary of the Navy in that amazing building which John Hay
called "Mullett's masterpiece," where the Navy, War, and State
Departments found shelter under one roof. The Secretary of the
Navy was John D. Long, of Massachusetts, who had been a
Congressman and Governor, was a man of cultivation and geniality,
and a lawyer of high reputation. Although sixty years old, he was
believed never to have made an enemy either in politics or at the
Bar. Those who knew the two gentlemen wondered whether the
somewhat leisurely and conservative Secretary could leash in his
restless young First Assistant, with his Titanic energy and his
head full of projects. No one believed that even Roosevelt could
startle Governor Long out of his habitual urbanity, but every one
could foresee that they might so clash in policy that either the
head or the assistant would have to retire.

Nothing is waste that touches the man of genius. So the two years
which Roosevelt spent in writing, fifteen years before, the
"History of-the Naval War of 1812," now served him to good
purpose; for it gave him much information about the past of the
United States Navy and it quickened his interest in the problems
of the Navy as it should be at that time. The close of the Civil
War in 1865 left the United States with a formidable fleet, which