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Home  »  Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen  »  Page 184

Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.

Page 184

life that had yawned wider than it had any right to. More than all political arguments, more than all the preachments of well-meaning sociologists, did this brief summer’s campaign contribute to fill out the gap between East and West, between North and South, between “the classes and the masses,” unless I greatly mistake. It was not in the contract, but it came out so when once they got a fair look at each other and saw that in truth they were brothers.
  There were clergymen in the ranks. I am not referring now to Chaplain Brown, whose stout defense of his Western men,—he was from Prescott, Arizona,—when he thought I was attacking them, I remember with mingled amusement and pleasure. He was an Episcopalian of no special affiliation with high-church or low-church tendencies within his fold. “You see, I don’t go much on the fringes of religion,” he said simply. He was after the genuine article, and he found it in his cowboy friends—real reverence, and such singing! He was holding forth to me upon this theme as we lay in the long grass, when I ventured to remark that I had heard that his people were