a naked moral issue. But he did not become an
independent. He created a new party.

CHAPTER III. THE CHAMPION OF CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

The four years after the Cleveland-Blaine campaign were divided into two
parts for Roosevelt by another political experience, which also
resulted in defeat. He was nominated by the Republicans and a group
of independents for Mayor of New York. His two opponents were Abram S.
Hewitt, a business man of standing who had been inveigled, no one knows
how, into lending respectability to the Tammany ticket in a critical
moment, and Henry George, the father of the Single Tax doctrine, who
had been nominated by a conference of some one hundred and seventy-five
labor organizations. Roosevelt fought his best on a personal platform of
"no class or caste" but "honest and economical government on behalf of
the general wellbeing." But the inevitable happened. Tammany slipped in
between its divided enemies and made off with the victory.

The rest of the four years he spent partly in ranch life out in the
Dakotas, partly in writing history and biography at home and in travel.
The life on the ranch and in the hunting camps finished the business,
so resolutely begun in the outdoor gymnasium on Twentieth Street, of
developing a physical equipment adequate for any call he could make upon
it. This sojourn on the plains gave him, too, an intimate knowledge of
the frontier type of American. Theodore Roosevelt loved his fellow men.
What is more, he was always interested in them, not abstractly and in
the mass, but concretely and in the individual. He believed in them.
He knew their strength and their virtues, and he rejoiced in them. He
realized their weaknesses and their softnesses and fought them hard. It
was all this that made him the thoroughgoing democrat that he was. "The
average American," I have heard him say a hundred times to all kinds
of audiences, "is a pretty good fellow, and his wife is a still better
fellow." He not only enjoyed those years in the West to the full, but he
profited by them as well. They broadened and deepened his knowledge
of what the American people were and meant. They made vivid to him
the value of the simple, robust virtues of self-reliance, courage,
self-denial, tolerance, and justice. The influence of those hard-riding
years was with him as a great asset to the end of his life.

In the Presidential campaign of 1888, Roosevelt was on the firing line
again, fighting for