One of the leaders of the poisonous brood who had made this young man believe such villainous nonsense was a foreign woman named Emma Goldman, who for twenty or thirty years went up and down the land, trying to overthrow the law and government, yet always calling for the protection of both when she was in danger.  The American Government tolerated this mischiefmaker until 1919, when it properly sent her, and others of her stripe, back to their own country.

President McKinley, who was the gentlest and kindest of men, did not die immediately from the bullet wound, but lingered for about a week.  Vice-President Roosevelt joined him in Buffalo, and came to believe, from the reports of the doctors, that the President would get well.  So he returned to his family who were in the Adirondacks.  A few days later, while Mr. Roosevelt was mountain-climbing, a message came that the President was worse and that the Vice-President must come at once to Buffalo.  He drove fifty miles by night, in a buckboard down the mountain roads, took a special train, and arrived in Buffalo the next afternoon.

Mr. McKinley was dead, and Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as President.  He was under forty-three years of age, the youngest man who had ever become President.

It is important to note his first act.  It was to insist that all of Mr. McKinley’s Cabinet remain in office.  Thus he secured for the continued service of the Nation, some of its ablest men:  Mr. Hay, one of the most accomplished Secretaries of State we have ever had, and Mr. Root, Secretary of War, and afterwards Secretary of State, whose highly trained legal mind placed him at the head of his profession.

A test of a great man, as well as a test of a modest man, in the true sense, is whether he is willing to have other able and eminent men around him as his assistants and fellow-workers.  The most remarkable instances of this among our Presidents were Washington and Lincoln.  The latter appointed men not because they admired him, or were personally agreeable to him; indeed some of his strongest and bitterest antagonists were put in his Cabinet, because he knew that they could well serve the country.

Mr. McKinley had chosen excellent Cabinet officers, and these Mr. Roosevelt kept in office, promoting them and appointing other men of high ability to other offices as the need arose.  He did not care to shine as a great man among a group of second-rate persons; he preferred to be chief among his peers, the leader of the strongest and most sagacious of his time.

In saying this, I do not mean to compare Roosevelt with Washington or Lincoln or any of the noble figures of the past.  Such comparisons are made too often; every President for fifty years has been acclaimed by his admirers as “the greatest since Lincoln,” or “as great as Lincoln.”  This is both foolish and useless.  There has been no character in our land like Lincoln; he stands alone.  What