e. It could not be long before the
difference in the two Administrations would appear in unmistakable
terms. The one which had just passed was first of all a party
Administration and secondly a McKinley Administration. The one which
followed was first, last, and all the time a Roosevelt Administration.
"Where Macgregor sits, there is the head of the table." Not because
Roosevelt consciously willed it so, but because the force and power and
magnetism of his vigorous mind and personality inevitably made it
so. McKinley had been a great harmonizer. "He oiled the machinery of
government with loving and imperturbable patience," said an observer of
his time, "and the wheels ran with an ease unknown since Washington's
first term of office." It had been a constant reproach of the critics
of the former President that "his ear was always to the ground." But
he kept it there because it was his sincere conviction that it belonged
there, ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will.
Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command. He did
not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed a conviction
of the sovereign right of the people to rule for that. But he did not
wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to make itself up; he had too
high a conception of the duty of leadership for that. He esteemed it
his peculiar function as the man entrusted by a great people with the
headship of their common affairs--to lead the popular mind, to educate
it, to inspire it, sometimes to run before it in action, serene in the
confidence that tardy popular judgment would confirm the rightness of
the deed.

By the end of Roosevelt's first Administration two of the three groups
that had taken a hand in choosing him for the Vice-Presidency were
thoroughly sick of their bargain. The machine politicians and the
great corporations found that their cunning plan to stifle with the wet
blanket of that depressing office the fires of his moral earnestness and
pugnacious honesty had overreached itself. Fate had freed him and, once
freed, he was neither to hold nor to bind. It was less than two years
before Wall Street was convinced that he was "unsafe," and sadly shook
its head over his "impetuosity." When Wall Street stamps a man "unsafe,"
the last word in condemnation has been said. It was an even shorter time
before the politicians found him unsatisfactory. "The breach between
Mr. Roosevelt and the politicians was,