to be right and for the best interests of the country. . . . If our educated men as a whole become incapable of playing their full part in our life, if they cease doing their share of the rough, hard work which must be done, and grow to take a position of mere dilettanteism in our public affairs, they will speedily sink in relation to their fellows who really do the work of governing, until they stand toward them as a cultivated, ineffective man with a taste for bric-à-brac stands toward a great artist. When once a body of citizens becomes thoroughly out of touch and out of temper with the national life, its usefulness is gone, and its power of leaving its mark on the times is gone also.
I have italicized in this passage the characteristic three-fold appeal: the straightforward statement of duty, the craftily constructed contemptuous phrase for the dilettante, the quiet but significant reference to the rewards of virtue. In Roosevelt's heart there sang lifelong the refrain of Tennyson's ode on the Duke of Wellington. "The path of duty is the way to glory;" and he made it sing in the ears of his contemporaries until the blasé young man of the Yellow Nineties became unfashionable, yielding his place to the Man Who Does Things. This alteration of the national psychology was of profound importance. It marked the difference between a nation headed for decadence and a nation entering upon a renaissance; and Roosevelt's service in bringing it about can hardly be overvalued. Some appraisers of his merits say that his most notable
