no sentimental timidity in declaring his faith in their ideals.

For a time Mr. Roosevelt attempted the study of the law with his uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt, but with such a training as he had given himself it was impossible for him to remain long out of politics. In 1881 he attended his first primary a primary of the Republican party. To many bookish young men, acquainted with the greatest achievements of their countrymen, such a gathering might have seemed mean, sordid, unimportant; but to Mr. Roosevelt, who saw in it the foundation of a political system, it was as much an arena for political prowess as the legislative halls in Washington.

MEMBER OF THE LEGISLATURE.

of New York of the right to veto the mayor's appointments, the provision under which Tweed and his ringsters had wrought such perversions of the public will. This was the most important work he did in Albany, and, singularly enough, it made possible his own appointment years later as police commissioner.

He also organized a committee to investigate the work of county officials in New York, as a result of which the county clerk, who had been receiving $82,000 a year in fees; the sheriff, who had been taking $100,000; and the register, whose perquisites were also very large, all became salaried officials. At the same time Mr. Roosevelt urged a police investigation, and it would have been secured had he remained longer in the legislature. During his entire service he fought every blackmailing scheme of dishonest politicians with untiring earnestness, and he insisted on civil service reform and the endeavor to combine honesty and efficiency in the selection of all servants of the State.

He went into it with the earnest intention of being useful, and almost before he was aware the Twenty-first District had elected him to represent it in the Assembly at Albany. When he took the oath of office in 1882, he was the youngest member of the legislature. Some of the hard-shelled old political In speaking of the qualities necessary in "wheelers" from New York promptly a legislator to win such victories as these, dubbed him" silk-stocking," and passed him Mr. Roosevelt very well describes some of by as one of the freaks of a popular election. his own characteristics: But they curiously misjudged their man. Mr. Roosevelt has a faculty, wherever he is, of making himself a storm center.

He studied his colleagues until he knew whom he could trust and whom he must fight, and then, quite to the dismay of some of his fellow legislators, he went to work. Within two months he was the undisputed leader of the Republican minority of the house and quite the most astonishing feature of the legislature.

"Politics and war," he said recently, "are the two biggest games there are."

At Albany he played politics with the same cheery disregard for punishment, danger, or future preferment that he showed on the bloody slope before San Juan. He had determined that the city government of New York needed purifying, and without delay he set about to purify it. It was nothing to him that he had a bitter majority of corrupt politicians to fight, nor that many of the newspapers in New York lampooned him unmercifully. He made friends, and trusted them, wherein lies much of his success as a leader; and with the small, but tremendously energetic and devoted, band of workers which gathered under his standard, he succeeded in passing the famous Roosevelt aldermanic bill, which deprived the City Council

"To get through any such measures requires genuine hard work, a certain amount of parliamentary skill, a good deal of tact and courage, and, above all, a thorough knowledge of the men with whom one has to deal and of the motives which actuate them."

Prophets of the ordinary political stamp declared that Mr. Roosevelt never could be reëlected after he had served his first termhis politics were much too startling; but he was reelected twice, serving the three terms of 1882, 1883, and 1884. Moreover, his party grew so fond of him that it sent him to the Republican national convention at Chicago in 1884, where he was associated with such men as Andrew D. White and George William Curtis. He went uninstructed, but in favor of the nomination of Mr. Edmunds for the presidency in opposition to Mr. Blaine.

AS A PRACTICAL POLITICIAN.

During the convention Mr. Roosevelt stood out prominently as a militant Republican. Indeed, he has always gloried in the fact that he is a party politician and a practical politician; at the same time he once said, "I do not number party allegiance

man's work in the world. Mr. Roosevelt or with a single cowboy companion, for he went into the campaign with his character- despised the help of the professional guide. istic energy, fighting fair, but fighting without gloves; and while he was beaten, he had the honor of receiving the largest percentage of votes ever polled by a Republican candidate for mayor until Mayor Strong came in.

LIFE AS A COWBOY.

During all of these years of intense political activity, and long afterwards, Mr. Roosevelt found opportunity to make half a hundred expeditions into the wild heart of the West, to turn cowboy, ranchman, and hunter of big game, and to become more familiar, perhaps, with the "rugged and stalwart democracy" of the pioneer frontiersman than any other Eastern man. He built a log ranch on the banks of the Little Missouri, among the buttes and Bad Lands of northwestern Dakota, working on it with his own hands. It was a low, rough building, with a wide veranda, shaded by leafy cottonwoods, and so far from the bounds of civilization that Mr. Roosevelt tells of shooting a deer from the front door. Here, in a flannel shirt, and overalls tucked into alligator boots, he worked side by side with his cowboys during many an exciting round-up, coming home to sleep on bear-skins and buffalo-robes, trophies of his skill as a hunter.

"I myself am not and never will be more than an ordinary shot," he says, "for my eyes are bad and my hand not oversteady; yet I have killed every kind of game to be found on the Plains, partly because I have hunted very perseveringly, and partly because by practice I have learned to shoot about as well at a wild animal as at a target."

More than one grizzly bear has fallen to Mr. Roosevelt's rifle, and once, while he was hunting alone in Idaho, he was charged by a wounded grizzly. Nothing can exceed the graphic interest with which Mr. Roosevelt himself tells of this attack:

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"I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes, so that it was hard to aim. I waited until he came to a fallen tree, raking him, as he topped it, with a ball, which entered his chest and went through the cavity of his body; but he neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. He came steadily on, and in another second was almost upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw and going into the neck. I leaped to one side almost as I pulled the trigger; and through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw was his paw, as he made a vicious side blow at me. The rush of his charge carried him past. As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he recovered himself, and made two or three jumps onOne of Mr. Roosevelt's experiences in the wards, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of West gave the cowboys a very high opinion cartridges into the magazine, my rifle holdof his determination, and forever blotted out ing only four, all of which I had fired. Then the implication that he was a tenderfoot. he tried to pull up, but as he did so his Cattle had been stolen from his ranch. He muscles seemed suddenly to give way, his followed the thieves with unfaltering perti- head drooped, and he rolled over and over nacity for two weeks, and finally captured like a shot rabbit. Each of my first three three of them and had them sent to the bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.” penitentiary at Mandan for terms of three This Mr. Roosevelt calls his most thrilling moment. years.

Here, too, he kept the favorite books of a ranchman, the works of Fenimore Cooper who has touched the life of the pioneer more closely than any other writer, Mr. Roosevelt thinks many books on hunting, trapping, and natural history; and the works of Irving, Hawthorne, Lowell, Poe, and a few other American writers. In speaking of Poe, Mr. Roosevelt says: "When one is in the Bad Lands, he feels as if they somehow look just exactly as Poe's tales and poems sound."

He hunted and shot with all the keen zeal of a lover of the wilderness. He killed as a sportsman, not to make a record for killing, and usually only when his camp needed. food. Many of his trips were made alone litice'

HIS LITERARY WORK.

One would think that Mr. Roosevelt's pocombined with the stress of

his wild, vigorous, outdoor life in the West, would have burned out his energy and left him time for nothing else. But the addition of work seems only to add to his astonishing physical and mental vitality.

In the intervals of hunting, ranching, and politics, Mr. Roosevelt found opportunity to write voluminously on many different subjects. As might have been expected from his early reading, much of this work has had to do with American history. Beginning with the "Naval War of 1812," which was written when he was only twenty-three years old, he has produced: "The Winning of the West," a "Life of T. H. Benton," a "Life of Gouverneur Morris," a History of the City of New York," a series of hero tales from American history, and he is now engaged, in collaboration with Captain A. T. Mahan, on an extended "Imperial History of the British Navy." Of all of these works, by far the most important is the four-volume Winning of the West," a history treating of the acquisition by the American Union of the territory west of the Alleghanies. The amount of original research necessary to write such a work and to make it so complete and accurate that it has become a American history indicates, in some measure, Mr. Roosevelt's enormous capacity as a worker. On this subject Mr. Jacob I. Riis, author of "How the Other Half Lives," casts an interesting side-light. During the period in which Mr. Roosevelt lived in the maelstrom of the New York Police Department, Mr. Riis says that he often saw him turn, during a lull in the activities of the office, and write a paragraph or two in a book or article which he was then preparing; or, more frequently, seize the ready book at his elbow, and read swiftly and with the most profound concentration until he was interrupted.

of these have been collected, one of which, "American Ideals," contains Mr. Roosevelt's creed, as he himself says. It is a book full of inspiration for every countryloving American, a stalwart appreciation of homely goodness.

"Love of order," he says, in one of these essays, "ability to fight well and breed well, capacity to subordinate the interests. of the individual to the interests of the community-these and similar rather humdrum qualities go to make up the sum of social efficiency."

In passing, it may not be amiss to mention, as an example of Mr. Roosevelt's versatility, that the same man who was candidate for mayor of New York has also written a number of valuable papers for scientific journals on the discrimination of species and sub-species of the larger mammals of the West. Indeed, a species of elk is named after him, and he has the honor of having extended the known western range of a little insectivore called the shrew.

AGAIN IN PUBLIC LIFE.

After his experiences on the Western plains, Mr. Roosevelt returned with vigor to his public life. For six years, beginning in 1889-four years under President Harrison and two under President Clevelandhe was president of the United States Civil Service Commission. This gave him work quite to his liking, work for the correction of public abuses, work in which he met the keenest opposition. When he accepted the position, he was firmly convinced that the spoilsmonger was as bad as the bribe-giver, and he fought him publicly and privately, in Congress and out, so that before he left the Commission he had added more than 20,000 new places to the scope of the civil service Mr. Roosevelt has also written three law, at the same time enforcing the law as bulky volumes: "The Wilderness Hunter," it never had been enforced before. During "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman," "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail," which at Albany served him well, for he was com and all of his service in Washington his experience stand as the classics of big game hunting pelled to grapple with every strip in North America. He has a clear, en- tician. It has been said that Mr. Roosevelt livening style of narrative, and conveys his is devoid of tact and diplomacy; but any one impressions just as he talks, with straight- who studies his career as Civil Service Com forward truthfulness and earnestness. The missioner will appreciate the skill, amounting style is the man. These three books are of often to real genius, with which he handled the kind that makes an active boy thrill and obstreperous legislators and accomplished his thrill and long for the touch of a trigger. ends in spite of all opposition. As a matter of fact, Mr. Roosevelt is exceedingly cautious: and painstaking until he is sure of his ground

Besides his hunting and historical books, Mr. Roosevelt has been a voluminous writer of essays on practical subjects and of reviews for the best magazines. Two volumes

e of poli

then he strikes out like a catapult. He is impulsive, but it is a safe sort of impulsive