Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt had the good fortune to be born of a well-known, long-established family, with every facility for education and with an atmosphere of patriotism and disinterested service both to country and humanity all about him. In his father he had before him an example of lofty public spirit, from which it would have been difficult to depart. But if the work of his ancestors relieved him from the hard struggle which meets an unaided man at the outset, he also lacked the spur of necessity to prick the sides of his intent, in itself no small loss. As a balance to the opportunity which was his without labor, he had not only the later difficulties which come to him to whom fate has been kind at the start; he had also spread before him the temp-tations inseparable from such inherited advantages as fell to his lottemptations to a life of sports and pleasure, to lettered ease, to an amateur's career in one of the fine arts, perhaps to a money-making business, likewise an inheritance, none of them easily to be set aside in obedience to the stern rule that the larger and more facile the opportunity the greater and more insistent the responsibility. Mowry argues that: Henry Cabot Lodge was one of the best informed statesmen of his time, he was an excellent parliamentarian, and he brought to bear on foreign questions a mind that was at once razor sharp and devoid of much of the moral cant that was so typical of the age....[Yet] Lodge never made the contributions he should have made, largely because of Lodge the person. He was opportunistic, selfish, jealous, condescending, supercilious, and could never resist calling his opponent's spade a dirty shovel. Small wonder that except for Roosevelt and Root, most of his colleagues of both parties disliked him, and many distrusted him. * * *