There was one cartoon made while I was President, in which I appeared incidentally, that was always a great favorite of mine.  It pictured an old fellow with chin whiskers, a farmer, in his shirt-sleeves, with his boots off, sitting before the fire, reading the President’s Message.  On his feet were stockings of the kind I have seen hung up by the dozen in Joe Ferris’s store at Medora, in the days when I used to come in to town and sleep in one of the rooms over the store.  The title of the picture was “His Favorite Author.”  This was the old fellow whom I always used to keep in mind.  He had probably been in the Civil War in his youth; he had worked hard ever since he left the army; he had been a good husband and father; he had brought up his boys and girls to work; he did not wish to do injustice to any one else, but he wanted justice done to himself and to others like him; and I was bound to secure that justice for him if it lay in my power to do so.[*]

[*] I believe I realized fairly well this ambition.  I shall turn to my enemies to attest the truth of this statement.  The New York Sun, shortly before the National Convention of 1904, spoke of me as follows: 

“President Roosevelt holds that his nomination by the National Republican Convention of 1904 is an assured thing.  He makes no concealment of his conviction, and it is unreservedly shared by his friends.  We think President Roosevelt is right.

“There are strong and convincing reasons why the President should feel that success is within his grasp.  He has used the opportunities that he found or created, and he has used them with consummate skill and undeniable success.

“The President has disarmed all his enemies.  Every weapon they had, new or old, has been taken from them and added to the now unassailable Roosevelt arsenal.  Why should people wonder that Mr. Bryan clings to silver?  Has not Mr. Roosevelt absorbed and sequestered every vestige of the Kansas City platform that had a shred of practical value?  Suppose that Mr. Bryan had been elected President.  What could he have accomplished compared with what Mr. Roosevelt has accomplished?  Will his most passionate followers pretend for one moment that Mr. Bryan could have conceived, much less enforced, any such pursuit of the trusts as that which Mr. Roosevelt has just brought to a triumphant issue?  Will Mr. Bryan himself intimate that the Federal courts would have turned to his projects the friendly countenance which they have lent to those of Mr. Roosevelt?

“Where is ‘government by injunction’ gone to?  The very emptiness of that once potent phrase is beyond description!  A regiment of Bryans could not compete with Mr. Roosevelt in harrying the trusts, in bringing wealth to its knees, and in converting into the palpable actualities of action the wildest dreams of Bryan’s campaign orators.  He has outdone them all.