Even the people who disagree with him or dislike him—­many of them would have to fall back on using the word roosevelt, or rather the verb to roosevelt.

It does not seem to be because his goodness in itself is extraordinary.  It is even, for that matter, in the sense that anybody could have it, or some more just like it, a little common.

What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about Mr. Roosevelt is the way he feels about his goodness, and the way he grips hold of it, and the way he makes it grip hold of other people—­practically anybody almost, who is standing by.  Even if they are merely going by in automobiles, sometimes they catch some.  I do not imagine that his worst enemies, however seriously they may question the general desirability or safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around, would fail to admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness anywhere he finds it indiscriminately, whether it is his own or other people’s.  He grips hold of it, and grips like a cable car—­instantly.

His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it.  The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else, something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness.  An entire stranger would not quite believe it.  It would be too original in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.

If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt’s face or his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some vice he is having.  He looks happy and as if it were some stolen secret.  There is always that manner of his when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say “Now, at last, I have got it!” He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time of his life.  It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the while.  The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara Falls, like the screws of the Mauritania, or any other huge, happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against small terrified goodness.

Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying it so himself that he has made almost an art form of public righteousness.  He has found his most complete, his most naive, instinctive self-expression in it, and while we have had goodness in public men before, we have had no man who has been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made such a big, comfortable “He-who-runs-may-read” bill-poster for doing right as Roosevelt.  Other men have done