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Home  »  Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen  »  Page 237

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

Page 237

wrote: “He was not nominated to satisfy or placate, but to succeed. The unspeakably cruel and cowardly assassin has anticipated the slow and orderly processes of law.”
  He himself, standing within the shadow of the great sorrow—though, light of heart, we knew it not—spoke these brave words to his people: “We gird up our loins as a nation with the stern purpose to play our part manfully in winning the ultimate triumph; and therefore we turn scornfully aside from the paths of mere ease and idleness, and with unfaltering steps tread the rough road of endeavor, smiting down the wrong and battling for the right, as Greatheart smote and battled in Bunyan’s immortal story.” 1
  The campaign of that year none of us has forgotten. An incident of it lives in my memory as typical of the spirit in which the people took his candidacy, and also with a sense of abiding satisfaction that one thing was done right, and at the right moment, in my sight. I was coming up from Chatham Square one night in the closing days of the canvass, when