r will ever avail if the average
individual does not keep his or her sense of personal duty, initiative,
and responsibility. There is need to develop all the virtues that have
the state for their sphere of action; but these virtues are as dust in a
windy street unless back of them lie the strong and tender virtues of
a family life based on the love of the one man for the one woman and on
their joyous and fearless acceptance of their common obligation to the
children that are theirs. There must be the keenest sense of duty, and
with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of
shirking the hard work of the world, and at the same time delight in
the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of flame and temper of steel we
must act as our coolest judgment bids us. We must exercise the largest
charity towards the wrong-doer that is compatible with relentless war
against the wrong-doing. We must be just to others, generous to others,
and yet we must realize that it is a shameful and a wicked thing not to
withstand oppression with high heart and ready hand. With gentleness and
tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor
and hardship and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto;
but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain
himself as not to be a burden to others.

We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our
several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can
live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live
dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge
rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not
on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and
vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off
and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits
the man with whom life has gone hard.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last used
in the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while he was a
small boy.

About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New
Amsterdam as a "settler"--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in t