He knew that it could
not last, and said to his sister: "Soon they will be throwing
rotten apples at me."
He was right. A period was about to begin when he was to be
defeated in every campaign in which he engaged. All the enemies he
had made in his long fight for better government--and they were
many and bitter enemies--were to join hands with all the people
who opposed him just because they disliked him. He was to part
company from some of his nearest friends, and persistently to be
reviled, misunderstood and attacked. Yet he was to rally around
him a body of devoted friends, and make these the greatest years
of his life.
It is partly comic and partly sad, to look back and consider the
things for which Roosevelt had fought in his public life, and to
recall that a fight had to be made for things like these; that the
man advocating them had to stand unlimited abuse. He had been
abused for trying to stop the sale of liquor to children, and
opposed in his efforts to prevent the making of cigars in filthy
bed-rooms. He had been violently attacked for enforcing the liquor
laws of New York. Lawyers and public men had grown red with anger
as they denounced him as a tyrant, and an enemy to the
Constitution, because he wished to stop a dishonest system of
rebates by the railroads. A man looks back and wonders if he were
living among sane people, or in a mad-house, when he recalls that
Roosevelt was viciously attacked because he proposed that the
meat-packers of this country should not be allowed to sell to
their countrymen rotten and diseased products which foreign
countries refused even to admit.
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