He believed in and quoted from one of the noblest poems ever written by any man,—­Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”  And in this poem are lines which formed the text for Roosevelt’s life: 

    How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
    To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! 
    As tho’ to breathe were life.

This was the doctrine of “the strenuous life” which he preached,—­ and practiced.  It was to perform the hard necessary work of the world, not to sit back and criticize.  It was to do disagreeable work if it had to be done, not to pick out the soft jobs.  It was to be afraid neither of the man who fights with his fists or with a rifle, nor of the man who fights with a sneering tongue or a sarcastic pen.

To go into New York politics from 1880-1882 was, for a young man of Roosevelt’s place in life, just out of college, what most of his friends and associates called “simply crazy.”  That young men of good education no longer think it a crazy thing to do, but an honorable and important one, is due to Theodore Roosevelt more than to any other one man.

As he sat on the window-seat of his friend’s room in Holworthy Hall, that day, and said he was going to try to help the cause of better government in New York, Mr. Thayer looked at him and wondered if he were “the real thing.”  Thirty-nine years later Mr. Thayer looked back over the career of his college mate, and knew that he had talked that day with one of the great men of our Republic, with one who, as another of his college friends says, was never a “politician” in the bad sense, but was always trying to advance the cause of better government

The reason why it seemed to many good people a crazy thing to go into politics was that the work was hard and disagreeable much of the time.  Politics were in the hands of saloon-keepers, toughs, drivers of street cars and other “low” people, as they put it.  The nice folk liked to sit at home, sigh, and say:  “Politics are rotten.”  Then they wondered why politics did not instantly become pure.  They demanded “reform” in politics, as Roosevelt said, as if reform were something which could be handed round like slices of cake.  Their way of getting reform, if they tried any way at all, was to write letters to the newspapers, complaining about the “crooked politicians,” and they always chose the newspapers which those politicians never read and cared nothing about.

If any decent man did go into politics, hoping to do some good, these same critics lamented loudly, and presently announced their belief that he, too, had become crooked.  If it were said that he had been seen with a politician they disliked, or that he ate a meal in company with one, they were sure he had gone wrong.  They seemed to think that a reformer could go among other officeholders and do great work, if he would only begin by cutting all his associates dead, and refusing to speak to them.

It was a fortunate day for America when Theodore Roosevelt joined the Twenty-first District Republican Club, and later when he ran for the New York State Assembly from the same district.  He was elected in November, 1881.  This was his beginning in politics.