Mr. Roosevelt has imparted a higher and more positive significance to reform, because throughout his career he has consistently stood for an idea, from which the idea of reform cannot be separated—­namely, the national idea.  He has, indeed, been even more of a nationalist than he has a reformer.  His most important literary work was a history of the beginning of American national expansion.  He has treated all public questions from a vigorous, even from an extreme, national standpoint.  No American politician was more eager to assert the national interest against an actual or a possible foreign enemy; and not even William R. Hearst was more resolute to involve his country in a war with Spain.  Fortunately, however, his aggressive nationalism did not, like that of so many other statesmen, faint from exhaustion as soon as there were no more foreign enemies to defy.  He was the first political leader of the American people to identify the national principle with an ideal of reform.  He was the first to realize that an American statesman could no longer really represent the national interest without becoming a reformer.  Mr. Grover Cleveland showed a glimmering of the necessity of this affiliation; but he could not carry it far, because, as a sincere traditional Democrat, he could not reach a clear understanding of the meaning either of reform or of nationality.  Mr. Roosevelt, however, divined that an American statesman who eschewed or evaded the work of reform came inevitably to represent either special and local interests or else a merely Bourbon political tradition, and in this way was disqualified for genuinely national service.  He divined that the national principle involved a continual process of internal reformation; and that the reforming idea implied the necessity of more efficient national organization.  Consequently, when he became President of the United States and the official representative of the national interest of the country, he attained finally his proper sphere of action.  He immediately began the salutary and indispensable work of nationalizing the reform movement.

The nationalization of reform endowed the movement with new vitality and meaning.  What Mr. Roosevelt really did was to revive the Hamiltonian ideal of constructive national legislation.  During the whole of the nineteenth century that ideal, while by no means dead, was disabled by associations and conditions from active and efficient service.  Not until the end of the Spanish War was a condition of public feeling created, which made it possible to revive Hamiltonianism.  That war and its resulting policy of extra-territorial expansion, so far from hindering the process of domestic amelioration, availed, from the sheer force of the national aspirations it aroused, to give a tremendous impulse to the work of national reform.  It made Americans more sensitive to a national idea and more conscious of their national responsibilities, and it indirectly helped to place in the Presidential chair the man who, as I have said, represented both the national idea and the spirit of reform.  The sincere and intelligent combination of those two ideas is bound to issue in the Hamiltonian practice of constructive national legislation.