This was the doctrine of "the strenuous life" which he preached,--
and practiced. It was to perform the hard necessary work of the
world, not to sit back and criticize. It was to do disagreeable
work if it had to be done, not to pick out the soft jobs. It was
to be afraid neither of the man who fights with his fists or with
a rifle, nor of the man who fights with a sneering tongue or a
sarcastic pen.
To go into New York politics from 1880-1882 was, for a young man
of Roosevelt's place in life, just out of college, what most of
his friends and associates called "simply crazy." That young men
of good education no longer think it a crazy thing to do, but an
honorable and important one, is due to Theodore Roosevelt more
than to any other one man.
As he sat on the window-seat of his friend's room in Holworthy
Hall, that day, and said he was going to try to help the cause of
better government in New York, Mr. Thayer looked at him and
wondered if he were "the real thing." Thirty-nine years later Mr.
Thayer looked back over the career of his college mate, and knew
that he had talked that day with one of the great men of our
Republic, with one who, as another of his college friends says,
was never a "politician" in the bad sense, but was always trying
to advance the cause of better government
The reason why it seemed to many good people a crazy thing to go
into politics was that the work was hard and disagreeable much of
the time.
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