Part 4 (2/2)
One of their shi+bboleths was that the office should seek the man and not the man the office This is entirely true of certain offices at certain times It is entirely untrue when the circumstances are different
It would have been unnecessary and undesirable for Washi+ngton to have sought the Presidency But if Abrahaht the Presidency he never would have been nominated The objection in such a case as this lies not to seeking the office, but to seeking it in any but an honorable and proper manner The effect of the shi+bboleth in question is usually merely to put a premium on hypocrisy, and therefore to favor the creature who is willing to rise by hypocrisy When I ran for Speaker, the whole body of ainstthe people in the different districts To do this I had to visit the districts, put the case fairly before the men who a fight and would stay in the fight to the end Yet there were reformers who shook their heads and deploredwhich corrupt machine politicians most desire is to have decent men frown on the activity, that is, on the efficiency, of the honest enuinely wishes to reform politics
If efficiency is left solely to bad men, and if virtue is confined solely to inefficient men, the result cannot be happy When I entered politics there were, as there always had been--and as there alill be--any nuhly efficient, and any nus in politics but ere thoroughly inefficient If I wished to acco for the country, my business was to cohly practical h ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice This was my ideal, and to the best ofand often entertaining There was always a struggle of soht and wrong Sometimes it was on a question of real constructive statesmanshi+p Moreover, there were all kinds of hu usually of the unconscious kind In one session of the Legislature the New York City Democratic representatives were split into two camps, and there were two rivals for leadershi+p One of these was a thoroughly good-hearted, happy-go-lucky person as afterwards for several years in Congress
He had been a local e Generally he and I were friendly, but occasionally I did so to vote for any other arded it as narrow-minded for any one to oppose one of his bills, especially if the opposition was upon the ground that it was unconstitutional--for his views of the Constitution were so excessively liberal as to ed to the straitest sect of strict constructionists On one occasion he had a bill to appropriate money, with obvious impropriety, for the relief of some miscreant whom he styled ”one of the honest yeomanry of the State” When I explained to him that it was clearly unconstitutional, he answered, ”Me friend, the Constitution don't touch little things like that,” and then added, with an ingratiating smile, ”Anyhow, I'd never allow the Constitution to co over the proofs of Mr
Bryce's ”American Commonwealth,” and I told him the incident He put it into the first edition of the ”Commonwealth”; whether it is in the last edition or not, I cannot say
On another occasion the saentleman came to an issue withthat I occupied what ”lawyers would call a quasi position on the bill” His rival was a nity, also born in Ireland He had served with gallantry in the Civil War After the close of the war he organized an expedition to conquer Canada The expedition, however, got so drunk before reaching Albany that it was there incarcerated in jail, whereupon its leader abandoned it and went into New York politics instead He was a man of influence, and later occupied in the Police Department the same position as Commissioner which I ained tooover with cere close beside me, he said to him: ”I would like you to know, Mr Cameron [Cameron, of course, was not the real name], that Mr Roosevelt knows more law in a wake than you do in a month; and,Latin on the floor of this House when you don't know the alpha and oislature, during the deadlock above an He looked like a serious elderly frog I never heard hianized, or had adopted any rules; and each day the only business was for the clerk to call the roll One day Brogan suddenly rose, and the following dialogue occurred:
Brogan Misther Clu-r-r-k!
The Clerk The gentlean I rise to a point of ordher under the rules!
The Clerk There are no rules
Brogan Thin I object to them!
The Clerk There are no rules to object to
Brogan Oh! [nonplussed; but i himself]
Thin I move that they be amended until there ar-r-re!
The deadlock was tedious; and we hailed with joy such enlivening incidents as the above
During islature I worked on a very siovernment It was that personal character and initiative are the prime requisites in political and social life It was not only a good but an absolutely indispensable theory as far as it went; but it was defective in that it did not sufficiently allow for the need of collective action I shall never forget the gles, not only islators, but soham; and then in addition the men in the various districts who helped us We had ht fire with fire, that on the contrary the way to win out was to equal our foes in practical efficiency and yet to stand at the opposite plane from them in applied morality
It was not always easy to keep the just middle, especially when it happened that on one side there were corrupt and unscrupulous deues, and on the other side corrupt and unscrupulous reactionaries Our effort was to hold the scales even between both We tried to stand with the cause of righteousness even though its advocates were anything but righteous We endeavored to cut out the abuses of property, even though goodthose abuses We refused to be frightened into sanctioning ih we knew that the chas that icked and corrupt We were as yet by no ht to have been to the need of controlling big business and to the da business In this matter I was not behind the rest of my friends; indeed, I was ahead of them, for no serious leader in political life then appreciated the pri with these questions One partial reason--not an excuse or a justification, but a partial reason--forthe importance of action in these matters was the corrupt and unattractive nature of so many of the men who championed popular reforms, their insincerity, and the folly of so many of the actions which they advocated Even at that date I had neither sympathy with nor ad, and I did not regard the ”money touch,” when divorced fro a man to either respect or consideration As recited above, we did on ht battles, in which we neither took nor gave quarter, against the most prominent and powerful financiers and financial interests of the day But ed were for pure honesty and decency, and they were ainst that forainst that fore Fundaainst the Powers that Prey; and we cared not a whit in what rank of life these poere found
To play the deainst the people in a democracy, exactly as to play the courtier for such purposes is a cardinal sin against the people under other for in our Aenerous desire to do effective service for great causes, inevitably grows to regard himself merely as one of many instruments, all of which it may be necessary to use, one at one ti the triumph of those causes; and whenever the usefulness of any one has been exhausted, it is to be thrown aside
If such athat is next, when the ti what the future holds for him Let the half-God play his part well and manfully, and then be content to draw aside when the God appears Nor should he feel vain regrets that to another it is given to render greater services and reap a greater reward Let it be enough for hi well he has prepared the way for the other man who can do better
CHAPTER IV
IN COWBOY LAND
Though I had previously made a trip into the then Territory of Dakota, beyond the Red River, it was not until 1883 that I went to the Little Missouri, and there took hold of two cattle ranches, the Chimney butte and the Elkhorn
It was still the Wild West in those days, the Far West, the West of Owen Wister's stories and Frederic Res, the West of the Indian and the buffalo-hunter, the soldier and the cow-puncher That land of the West has gone now, ”gone, gone with lost Atlantis,” gone to the isle of ghosts and of strange dead memories It was a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild ga horse-horned cattle, and of reckless riders who unmoved looked in the eyes of life or of death In that land we led a free and hardy life, with horse and with rifle We worked under the scorching midsummer sun, when the wide plains shi+ uard round the cattle in the late fall round-up In the soft springtiht before we fell asleep; and in the winter we rode through blinding blizzards, when the driven snow-dust burned our faces There were uided the trail cattle or the beef herds, hour after hour, at the slowest of walks; andwith excitement as we stopped stampedes or swam the herds across rivers treacherous with quicksands or brier and thirst; andthe horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another; but we felt the beat of hardy life in our veins, and ours was the glory of work and the joy of living
It was right and necessary that this life should pass, for the safety of our country lies in its being reat unfenced ranches, in the days of ”free grass,” necessarily represented a teratory flocks of sheep, each guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were the first enerass and destroyed all other vegetation, these roving sheep bands represented little of perood to the country But the homesteaders, the permanent settlers, the ht up his family, these represented from the National standpoint the most desirable of all possible users of, and dwellers on, the soil Their advent e was a National gain, although to some of us an individual loss
I first reached the Little Missouri on a Northern Pacific train about three in theof a cool Septe was a raedthither, and hammered at the door until the frowsy proprietor appeared, iven one of the fourteen beds in the room which by itself constituted the entire upper floor Next day I walked over to the abandoned ar shacks, a ranchreed to take me out to his ranch, the Chi with his brother and their partner
The ranch was a log structure with a dirt roof, a corral for the horses near by, and a chicken-house jabbed against the rear of the ranch house
Inside there was only one roo-stove, and three bunks The owners were Sylvane and Joe Ferris and William J Merrifield Later all three of them held my commissions while I was President Merrifield was Marshal of Montana, and as Presidential elector cast the vote of that State for me in 1904; Sylvane Ferris was Land Officer in North Dakota, and Joe Ferris Poste Meyer, who also worked for e round the table, and at one period the ga outside which told us that a bobcat had made a raid on the chicken-house