McKinley also had purposed to do right, but he had hardly an occasion for displaying great courage since so incomparably discreet a politician as he was could avoid every conflict with his associates, and he was ever the leader on highways which the popular humour had indicated. Thus the masses never felt that he was at bottom lacking in courage or that he always put off responsibility on others. The masses did, however, instinctively feel that McKinley’s astute and kindly words were not always sincere; his words were often there to conceal something which was locked up behind his Napoleonic forehead. And now there succeeded him an enthusiast who brimmed over with plain expressions of what he felt, and whose words were so convincingly candid and so without reservation that every one had the feeling of being in the personal confidence of the President.
There was a good deal more besides his moral earnestness, his courage, and his frank honesty which contributed to Roosevelt’s entire success. His lack of prejudice won the lower classes, and his aristocratic breeding and education won the upper, while the middle classes were enthusiastic over his sportsmanship. No President had been more unprejudiced or more truly democratic. He met the poor miner on the same footing as he met the mine owner; he invited the negro to the White House; he sat down and broke bread with the cow-boys; and when he travelled he first shook the sooty hand of the locomotive engineer before he greeted the gentlemen who had gathered about in their silk hats. And, nevertheless, he was in many years the first real aristocrat to become President. The changes in the White House itself were typical. This venerable Presidential dwelling had been, up to Roosevelt’s time, in its inner arrangements a dreary combination of bare offices, somewhat crudely decorated private dwelling, and cheerless reception-halls. To-day it is a very proper palace, containing many fine works of art, and office-seekers no longer have access to the inner rooms. His predecessors, the Clevelands and Harrisons and McKinleys, had been, in fact, very respectable philistines. They had come from the middle classes of the country, which are in thought and feeling very different from that upper class which, up to a short time ago, had bothered itself less about practical politics than about general culture, literature, art, criticism, and broadly conceived industrial operations, combined with social high-life. This class, however, had begun at length to feel that it ought not to disdain to notice political abuses, to walk around the sea of troubles; but had begun to take up arms and by opposing end them. Aristocracy had too long believed in political mercenaries.