He was right.  A period was about to begin when he was to be defeated in every campaign in which he engaged.  All the enemies he had made in his long fight for better government—­and they were many and bitter enemies—­were to join hands with all the people who opposed him just because they disliked him.  He was to part company from some of his nearest friends, and persistently to be reviled, misunderstood and attacked.  Yet he was to rally around him a body of devoted friends, and make these the greatest years of his life.

It is partly comic and partly sad, to look back and consider the things for which Roosevelt had fought in his public life, and to recall that a fight had to be made for things like these; that the man advocating them had to stand unlimited abuse.  He had been abused for trying to stop the sale of liquor to children, and opposed in his efforts to prevent the making of cigars in filthy bed-rooms.  He had been violently attacked for enforcing the liquor laws of New York.  Lawyers and public men had grown red with anger as they denounced him as a tyrant, and an enemy to the Constitution, because he wished to stop a dishonest system of rebates by the railroads.  A man looks back and wonders if he were living among sane people, or in a mad-house, when he recalls that Roosevelt was viciously attacked because he proposed that the meat-packers of this country should not be allowed to sell to their countrymen rotten and diseased products which foreign countries refused even to admit.  Sneers greeted his attempts to prevent poisons being sold as medicine, and laudanum being peddled to little children as soothing-syrup.  His fight to prevent greedy folk from destroying the forests, wasting the minerals, and spoiling the water supplies of America had to be made in the face of every sort of legal trickery and the meanest of personal abuse.

The Republican Party had been founded during one of the greatest efforts for human freedom ever made in our history.  In its long years in power, and in the amazing increase in prosperity and wealth in America, if had become the defender of wealth.  Many of its highest and most powerful men could see no farther than the cash drawer.  Human rights and wrongs, human suffering, or any attempt to prevent such sufferings, simply did not interest them.  They were not cruel men personally, but they had heard repeated for so many years that this or the other thing could not be done “because it would hurt business,” that they had come to worship “business” as a savage bows his head before an idol.  Many of them could give money for an orphan asylum or a children’s hospital, and yet on the same day, vote to kill a bill aimed to prevent child-labor.  To pass such a bill as that would “hurt business.”

The Democratic Party was no better.  It was simply weaker, and usually less intelligent.  Wherever it was powerful, it, too, was apt to be the servant of corruption.  The politicians of both parties loved to keep up a continual fight about the tariff, to distract public attention from other important subjects.