XV. THE FIGHTING EDGE
XVI. THE LAST FOUR YEARS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE



THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND HIS TIMES

CHAPTER I. THE YOUNG FIGHTER

There is a line of Browning's that should stand as epitaph for
Theodore Roosevelt: "I WAS EVER A FIGHTER." That was the essence
of the man, that the keynote of his career. He met everything in
life with a challenge. If it was righteous, he fought for it; if
it was evil, he hurled the full weight of his finality against
it. He never capitulated, never sidestepped, never fought foul.
He carried the fight to the enemy.

His first fight was for health and bodily vigor. It began, at the
age of nine. Physically he was a weakling, his thin and
ill-developed body racked with asthma. But it was only the
physical power that was wanting, never the intellectual or the
spiritual. He owed to his father, the first Theodore, the wise
counsel that launched him on his determined contest against ill
health. On the third floor of the house on East Twentieth Street
in New York where he was born, October 27, 1858, his father had
constructed an outdoor gymnasium, fitted with all the usual
paraphernalia. It was an impressive moment, Roosevelt used to say
in later years, when his father first led him into that gymnasium
and said to him, "Theodore, you have the brains, but brains are