hem; and,
moreover, each of them, as he grew specially fit for his job, used to
suggest to me the right thought to have, and the right order to give,
concerning that job. It is of course hard for me to speak with cold and
dispassionate partiality of these men, who were as close to me as were
the men of my regiment. But the outside observers best fitted to pass
judgment about them felt as I did. At the end of my Administration Mr.
Bryce, the British Ambassador, told me that in a long life, during which
he had studied intimately the government of many different countries, he
had never in any country seen a more eager, high-minded, and efficient
set of public servants, men more useful and more creditable to their
country, than the men then doing the work of the American Government in
Washington and in the field. I repeat this statement with the permission
of Mr. Bryce.

At about the same time, or a little before, in the spring of 1908, there
appeared in the English _Fortnightly Review_ an article, evidently by
a competent eye witness, setting forth more in detail the same views to
which the British Ambassador thus privately gave expression. It was in
part as follows:

"Mr. Roosevelt has gathered around him a body of public servants who
are nowhere surpassed, I question whether they are anywhere equaled, for
efficiency, self-sacrifice, and an absolute devotion to their country's
interests. Many of them are poor men, without private means, who have
voluntarily abandoned high professional ambitions and turned their backs
on the rewards of business to serve their country on salaries that are
not merely inadequate, but indecently so. There is not one of them
who is not constantly assailed by offers of positions in the world
of commerce, finance, and the law that would satisfy every material
ambition with which he began life. There is not one of them who could
not, if he chose, earn outside Washington from ten to twenty times the
income on which he economizes as a State official. But these men are
as indifferent to money and to the power that money brings as to the
allurements of Newport and New York, or to merely personal distinctions,
or to the commercialized ideals which the great bulk of their
fellow-countrymen accept without question. They are content, and more
than content, to sink themselves in the National service without a
thought of private advancement, and often at a heavy sacrifice of
worldly honors, and to toil on