because it was his sincere conviction that it belonged there,
ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will.
Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command.
He did not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed
a conviction of the sovereign right of the people to rule for
that. But he did not wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to
make itself up; he had too high a conception of the duty of
leadership for that. He esteemed it his peculiar function as the
man entrusted by a great people with the headship of their common
affairs--to lead the popular mind, to educate it, to inspire it,
sometimes to run before it in action, serene in the confidence
that tardy popular judgment would confirm the rightness of the
deed.

By the end of Roosevelt's first Administration two of the three
groups that had taken a hand in choosing him for the
Vice-Presidency were thoroughly sick of their bargain. The
machine politicians and the great corporations found that their
cunning plan to stifle with the wet blanket of that depressing
office the fires of his moral earnestness and pugnacious honesty
had overreached itself. Fate had freed him and, once freed, he
was neither to hold nor to bind. It was less than two years
before Wall Street was convinced that he was "unsafe," and sadly
shook its head over his "impetuosity." When Wall Street stamps a
man "unsafe," the last word in condemnation has been said. It was
an even shorter time before the politicians found him
unsatisfactory. "The breach between Mr. Roosevelt and the
politicians was, however, inevitable. His rigid insistence upon
the maintenance and the extension of the merit system alone
assured the discontent which precedes dislike," wrote another