Chapter 15

against the capitalists and have goaded them to such a pitch of hatred that they would have looked to violence, bloodshed, and injustice, as the remedy they must apply.

But Roosevelt was farthest removed from the Revolutionists of the vulgar, red-handed class. He consecrated his life to prevent Revolution. All his action in the conflict between Labor and Capital aimed at conciliation. He told the plutocrats their defects with brutal frankness, and if he promoted laws to curb them, it was because he realized, as they did not, that, unless they mended their ways, they would bring down upon themselves a Socialist avalanche which they could not withstand. What set the seal of consecration on his work was his treatment of Labor with equal justice. Unlike the demagogue, he did not flatter the "horny-handed sons of toil" or obsequiously do the bidding of railroad brotherhoods, or pretend that the capitalist had no rights, and that all workingmen were good merely because they worked. On the contrary, he told them that no class was above the law; he warned them that if Labor attempted to get its demands by violence, he would put it down. He ridiculed the idea that honest citizenship depends on the more or less money a man has in his pocket. "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country," Roosevelt said in a Fourth-of-July speech at Springfield, Illinois, in 1903, "is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have."

That phrase, "a square deal," stuck in the hearts of the American people. It summed up what they regarded as Roosevelt's most characteristic trait. He was the man of the square deal, who instinctively resented injustice done to those who could not protect themselves; the friend of the underdog, the companion of the self-reliant and the self-respecting. It is under this aspect that Roosevelt seems most likely to live in popular history.

So, from the time he became President, the public was divided into believing that there were two Roosevelts. His enemies made almost a monster of him, denouncing and fearing him as violent, rash, pugnacious, egotistical, ogreish in his mad, hatred of Capital, and Capitalists condemned him as hypocritical, cruel, lying, and vindictive. The other side, however, insisted on his courage; he was a fighter, but he always fought to defend the weak and to uphold the right; he was equally unmoved by Bosses and by demagogues; in his human relations he regarded only what a man was, not his class or condition; he had a great hearted, jovial simplicity; a far-seeing and steadfast patriotism; he preached the Square Deal and he practiced it; even more than Lincoln he was accessible to every one.