s, he dignified by a
careful examination. That he did this with any fixed design or policy in
mind does not seem to be the case. He admitted himself that when he
became President he did not have in hand any settled or far-reaching
plan of social betterment. He did have, however, serious convictions on
general principles. "I was bent upon making the government," he wrote,
"the most efficient possible instrument in helping the people of the
United States to better themselves in every way, politically, socially,
and industrially. I believed with all my heart in real and
thorough-going democracy and I wished to make the democracy industrial
as well as political, although I had only partially formulated the
method I believed we should follow." It is thus evident at least that he
had departed a long way from the old idea of the government as nothing
but a great policeman keeping order among the people in a struggle over
the distribution of the nation's wealth and resources.

=Roosevelt's View of the Constitution.=--Equally significant was
Roosevelt's attitude toward the Constitution and the office of
President. He utterly repudiated the narrow construction of our national
charter. He held that the Constitution "should be treated as the
greatest document ever devised by the wit of man to aid a people in
exercising every power necessary for its own betterment, not as a
strait-jacket cunningly fashioned to strangle growth." He viewed the
presidency as he did the Constitution. Strict constructionists of the
Jeffersonian school, of whom there were many on occasion even in the
Republican party, had taken a view that the President could do nothing
that he was not specifically authorized by the Constitution to do.
Roosevelt took exactly the opposite position. It was his opinion that it
was not only the President's right but his duty "to do anything that the
needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the
Constitution or the laws." He went on to say that he acted "for the
common well-being of all our people whenever and in whatever manner was
necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative
prohibition."

=The Trusts and Railways.=--To the trust question, Roosevelt devoted
especial attention. This was unavoidable. By far the larger part of the
business of the country was done by corporations as distinguished from
partnerships and individual owners. The growth of these gigantic
aggregations of