the Stream of Thought, and with one chapter after the other, with each as the crisis came up, though I scarcely know how, I have managed to keep him out.  And now, oh, Gentle Reader, here he is!  I know very well that he is in everything, and right in the middle of everything, and that in a kind of splendid mixed happy uproarious way, there somehow has to be a great to-do the moment he appears.  The beautiful clear water, the lucid depth of Thought—­will all become (ah, I know it too well, Gentle Reader) all thunder and spray and underneath the mighty grinding of the wheels—­the wheels of the Nation and the Mowing Machine of Time, and in the background—­in the red background of the Dawn, there will be the face of Theodore—­just the face of Theodore in this book shining at us—­readers and writer and all—­out of a huge rosy mist!

But I have been driven to it.  The fact seems to be that I must find at just this point in the book, if I can, a word.  And the word will have to be a word, too, that everybody knows, and that conveys a lively sense to everybody the moment it is used—­of a certain tone or quality, or hum or murmur of being.  No one regrets this more than I, because it is so unwieldy and inconvenient and always bulges out in a sentence or a book or a nation more than it was meant to, but the word ROOSEVELT, R O O S E V E L T, happens to be the word that people in this country, and very largely in other nations, and in all languages have chosen and are using every day to express to one another a certain American quality or tone now abroad in our world—­a certain hum, as one might say, or whirr of goodness.

This particular hum, or whirr of goodness, which is instantly associated with the word Roosevelt, expresses, except that of course it over-expresses, a part of the news to-day about America which we want our President to read.

One cannot help wondering why it is that if one wanted to express to the largest number of people in the world a certain quality of goodness, the word Roosevelt would do it best.

I am not dealing for the purpose of this book in what Mr. Roosevelt’s goodness is or whether it is what he thinks it is.  We might all disagree about that.  I am dealing quite strictly in this connection with what even his enemies would say is his almost egregious success in advertising goodness.  While we might all disagree as to his goodness being the kind that he or any one ought to love, we would not fail to agree that it is his love of his own goodness, such as it is, and his holding on to it, and his love of other people’s and his love of getting his goodness and their goodness together, that has made him the most unconcealed person in modern life.  These qualities have established him, with his ability raised to the n-th power of attracting attention to anything he likes, as the world’s greatest News Man—­the world’s greatest living energy to-day in advertising what is good and what is had in our American temperament.