achievement was building the Panama Canal. I should say that his most notable achievement was creating for the nation the atmosphere in which valor and high seriousness live, by clearing the air of the poisonous emanations of "superior" people:
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering contempt toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. . . . The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, fop, or voluptuary.
Preaching duty and meditating on glory, Roosevelt came up through the dull nineties as the apostle of "applied idealism;" and all good men spoke well of him. He seemed to be striking out a new and admirable type of public man: well bred but strenuous, ambitious but public-spirited, upright but practical and efficient—the idealist who gets things done which everyone agrees ought to be done. But few men guessed the height and depth of desire in this fighter of legislative crooks, this reformer of metropolitan police, this advocate of the merit system;
