For with these it is easy to slip into
comfortable and lazy ways, to do nothing because one does not have
to do anything. Some men never rise because their early life was
too hard; some, because it was too easy.
Roosevelt might have had the latter fate. His father would not
have allowed idleness; he did not care about money-making,
especially, but he did believe in work, for himself and his
children. When the father died, and his son was left with enough
money to have lived all his days without doing a stroke of work,
he already had too much grit to think of such a life. And he had
too much good sense to start out to become a millionaire and to
pile million upon useless million.
He had something else to fight against: bad health. He writes: "I
was a sickly, delicate boy, suffered much from asthma, and
frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I
could breathe. One of my memories is of my father walking up and
down the room with me in his arms at night, when I was a very
small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and
mother trying to help me. I went very little to school. I never
went to the public schools, as my own children later did."
[Footnote: "Autobiography."] For a few months he went to a private
school, his aunt taught him at home, and he had tutors there.
When he was ten his parents took him with his brother and sisters
for a trip to Europe, where he had a bad time indeed.
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