say that there are no evils to be corrected. It seems to me that
our attitude should be one of correcting the evils and thereby
showing that whereas the Populists, Socialists, and others do not
correct the evils at all, or else do so at the expense of
producing others in aggravated form, on the contrary we
Republicans hold the just balance and set ourselves as resolutely
against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against
demagogy and mob rule on the other."*

*Roosevelt, Autobiography (Scribner), p. 300.


This was the fight that Roosevelt was waging in every hour of his
political career. It was a middle-of-the-road fight, not because
of any timidity or slack-fibered thinking which prevented a
committal to one extreme or the other, but because of a stern
conviction that in the golden middle course was to be found truth
and the right. It was an inevitable consequence that first one
side and then the other--and sometimes both at once--should
attack him as a champion of the other. It became a commonplace of
his experience to be inveighed against by reformers as a
reactionary and to be assailed by conservatives as a radical. But
this paradoxical experience did not disturb him at all. He was
concerned only to have the testimony of his own mind and
conscience that he was right.

The contests which he had as Governor were spectacular and
exhilarating; but they did not fill all the hours of his working
days. A tremendous amount of spade work was actually
accomplished. For example, he brought about the reenactment of