Theodore Roosevelt | Page 4

to insist on the vital need of combining certain sets of
qualities, which separately are common enough, and, alas, useless
enough. Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism not
uncommon; it is the combination which is necessary, and the
combination is rare. Love of peace is common among weak, short-
sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found
among many men of evil temper and bad character. Neither quality
shall by itself avail. Justice among the nations of mankind, and the
uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and
daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness
more than peace. Facing the immense complexity of modern social and
industrial conditions, there is need to use freely and unhesitatingly the
collective power of all of us; and yet no exercise of collective power
will ever avail if the average individual does not keep his or her sense
of personal duty, initiative, and responsibility. There is need to develop
all the virtues that have the state for their sphere of action; but these
virtues are as dust in a windy street unless back of them lie the strong
and tender virtues of a family life based on the love of the one man for
the one woman and on their joyous and fearless acceptance of their
common obligation to the children that are theirs. There must be the

keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must
be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world, and at
the same time delight in the many-sided beauty of life. With soul of
flame and temper of steel we must act as our coolest judgment bids us.
We must exercise the largest charity towards the wrong-doer that is
compatible with relentless war against the wrong-doing. We must be
just to others, generous to others, and yet we must realize that it is a
shameful and a wicked thing not to withstand oppression with high
heart and ready hand. With gentleness and tenderness there must go
dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor and hardship and peril.
All for each, and each for all, is a good motto; but only on condition
that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as not to
be a burden to others.
We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make
our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can
live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live
dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge
rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and
not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the
mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because
he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down
on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last
used in the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while
he was a small boy.
About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New

Amsterdam as a "settler"--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century
instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century. From that
time for the next seven generations from father to son every one of us
was born on Manhattan Island.
My father's paternal ancestors were of Holland stock; except that there
was one named Waldron, a wheelwright, who was one of the Pilgrims
who remained in Holland when the others came over to found
Massachusetts, and who then accompanied the Dutch adventurers to
New Amsterdam. My father's mother was a Pennsylvanian. Her
forebears had come to Pennsylvania with William Penn, some in the
same ship with him; they were of the usual type of the immigration of
that particular place and time. They included Welsh and English
Quakers, an Irishman, --with a Celtic name, and apparently not a
Quaker,--and peace-loving Germans, who were among the founders of
Germantown, having been driven from their Rhineland homes when the
armies of Louis the Fourteenth ravaged the Palatinate; and, in addition,
representatives of a by-no- means altogether peaceful people, the
Scotch Irish, who came to Pennsylvania a little later, early in the
eighteenth century. My grandmother was a woman of singular
sweetness and strength, the keystone of the arch