aim "to continue absolutely unbroken the policy of President
McKinley for the peace, prosperity, and honor of our beloved
country." He immediately asked every member of the late
President's Cabinet to continue in office. The Cabinet was an
excellent one, and Mr. Roosevelt found it necessary to make no
other changes than those that came in the ordinary course of
events. The policies were not altered in broad general outline,
for Roosevelt was as stalwart a Republican as McKinley himself,
and was as firmly convinced of the soundness of the fundamentals
of the Republican doctrine.

But the fears of some of his friends that Roosevelt would seem,
if he carried out his purpose of continuity, "a pale copy of
McKinley" were not justified in the event. They should have known
better. A copy of any one Roosevelt could neither be nor seem,
and "pale" was the last epithet to be applied to him with
justice. It could not be long before the difference in the two
Administrations would appear in unmistakable terms. The one which
had just passed was first of all a party Administration and
secondly a McKinley Administration. The one which followed was
first, last, and all the time a Roosevelt Administration. "Where
Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table." Not because
Roosevelt consciously willed it so, but because the force and
power and magnetism of his vigorous mind and personality
inevitably made it so. McKinley had been a great harmonizer. "He
oiled the machinery of government with loving and imperturbable
patience," said an observer of his time, "and the wheels ran with
an ease unknown since Washington's first term of office." It had
been a constant reproach of the critics of the former President
that "his ear was always to the ground." But he kept it there