He emerged triumphant from the receiving-vault of the
Vice-Presidency, where his enemies supposed they had laid him
away for good. In ancient days, his midnight dash from Mount
Marcy, and his flight by train across New York State to Buffalo,
would have become a myth symbolizing the response of a hero to an
Olympian summons. If we ponder it well, was it indeed less than
this?
In 1899, Mr. James Bryce, the most penetrating of foreign
observers of American life had said, in words that now seem
prophetic: "Theodore Roosevelt is the hope of American politics."
CHAPTER X. THE WORLD WHICH ROOSEVELT CONFRONTED
To understand the work of a statesman we must know something of
the world in which he lived. That is his material, out of which
he tries to embody his ideals as the sculptor carves his out of
marble. We are constantly under the illusions of time. Some
critics say, for instance, that Washington fitted so perfectly
the environment of the American Colonies during the last half of
the eighteenth century, that he was the direct product of that
environment; I prefer to think, however, that he possessed
certain individual traits which, and not the time, made him
George Washington, and would have enabled him to have mastered a
different period if he had been born in it.
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