From "A Review of President Roosevelt's Administration," Outlook. 91 (February 27, 1909). 430, 433-434.

      Half a dozen of us were with the President in his library. He was sitting at his desk reading to us his forthcoming Message. He had just finished a paragraph of distinctly ethical character, when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said: "I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit!" Then he turned back to his reading again. The episode is interpretative of the man. He has been ranchman, administrator, soldier, politician, statesman--but always and everywhere a moral reformer. I think there are two reasons for his enjoyment of his Presidential office: one, that it has enabled him to do things; the other, that it has given him a National platform from which to say things. . . .

      I make no concealment of my affection for Mr. Roosevelt as a personal friend and my admiration for him as a public man. The faults of great men always seem great because they are the defects of great qualities. . . .

      I admire him for his combination of qualities: his intensity of conviction and his poise of judgement, his high ideals and his practical realization of them, his inexhaustible energy and his untiring industry, his alertness of mind and his sobriety of judgement, his grasp of great principles and his mastery of details, his chivalrous friendship and transparent candor, his leonine courage and his gentle courtesy. If he is the most widely loved he is also the most intensely hated man in America. To him can never be applied the words of Jesus, "Woe unto you when all men speak well of you." He is looked upon with degrees of hostility varying from a passionate enmity to a mild aversion, by the various classes whom he has antagonized: by the corruptionists whose schemes he has foiled and whose characters he has exposed; by the Philistines who think that successful crime should be condoned because it has succeeded; by the political doctrinaires whose dreams of reform he has disturbed by applying to their theories the test of actual life; by those peacelovers who are more desirous of peace than of purity or who think the traders should not have been scourged out but only coaxed out of the temple; by that peculiar type of conservatives who believe that whatever is must continue to be, and who are constitutionally averse to all reform because it involves change and readjustment, which are inconvenient; and finally, by those who approve both is principles and his achievements but criticize some of his methods and phrases. But he has also aroused a passionate devotion to himself among a great and, I believe, increasing number of his fellow citizens, who admire him as a statesman and love him as a preacher of righteousness. He has inspired in his countrymen a fervor of patriotism, and wisely directed it in practical channels to the public service. His astuteness as a politician will be forgotten; his policies will be incorporated in the growing Constitution of the Nation, and presently the world will think they were always there; but his influence as a moral reformer will ever remain in the higher civic ideals and the quickened patriotic life of a great people.