If any decent man did go into politics, hoping to do some good,
these same critics lamented loudly, and presently announced their
belief that he, too, had become crooked. If it were said that he
had been seen with a politician they disliked, or that he ate a
meal in company with one, they were sure he had gone wrong. They
seemed to think that a reformer could go among other officeholders
and do great work, if he would only begin by cutting all his
associates dead, and refusing to speak to them.

It was a fortunate day for America when Theodore Roosevelt joined
the Twenty-first District Republican Club, and later when he ran
for the New York State Assembly from the same district. He was
elected in November, 1881. This was his beginning in politics.

In the Assembly at Albany, he presently made discoveries. He
learned something about the crooked politicians whom the stay-at-
home reformers had denounced from afar. He found that the Assembly
had in it many good men, a larger number who were neither good nor
bad, but went one way or another just as things happened to
influence them at the moment. Finally, there were some bad men
indeed. He found that the bad men were not always the poor, the
uneducated, the men who had been brought up in rough homes,
lacking in refinement. On the contrary, he found some extremely
honest and useful men who had had exactly such unfavorable
beginnings.

Also, he soon discovered that there were, in and out of politics,
some men of wealth, of education, men who boasted that they
belonged to the "best families," who were willing to be crooked,
or to profit from other men's crooked actions. He soon announced