life. He worked hard at his business, for the Sanitary Commission
during the Civil War, and for the poor and unfortunate of his own
city, so hard that he wore himself out and died at forty-six. The
President's mother was Martha Bulloch from Georgia. Two of her
brothers were in the Confederate Navy, so while the Civil War was
going on, and Theodore Roosevelt was a little boy, his family like
so many other American families, had in it those who wished well
for the South, and those who hoped for the success of the North.

Many American Presidents have been poor when they were boys. They
have had to work hard, to make a way for themselves, and the same
strength and courage with which they did this has later helped to
bring them into the White House. It has seemed as if there were
magic connected with being born in a log-cabin, or having to work
hard to get an education, so that only the boys who did this could
become famous. Of course it is what is in the boy himself,
together with the effect his life has had on him, that counts. The
boy whose family is rich, or even well-off, has something to
struggle against, too. For with these it is easy to slip into
comfortable and lazy ways, to do nothing because one does not have
to do anything. Some men never rise because their early life was
too hard; some, because it was too easy.

Roosevelt might have had the latter fate. His father would not
have allowed idleness; he did not care about money-making,
especially, but he did believe in work, for himself and his
children. When the father died, and his son was left with enough
money to have lived all his days without doing a stroke of work,
he already had too much grit to think of such a life. And he had
too much good sense to start out to become a millionaire and to