_And yet, we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste. And we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off, and on the brutal and selfish arrogance, which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard._ THEODORE ROOSEVELT COLONEL THEODORE ROOSEVELT was born in New York City, October 27, 1858 Was appointed Police Commissioner of New York City, 1895 Aided in establishing the Independence of Cuba, 1898 Was elected Governor of the State of New York, 1898 Served as President of the United States, 1901-1909 He died, January 6, 1919. THE BOY WHO GREW STRONG _Not in a Log Cabin_ Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Abraham Lincoln, was not born in a log cabin. On the contrary, he was born to wealth and position in the City of New York. He was reared in an elegant home and educated in one of the famous universities of the Country. He read law, but he had no need to practise a profession. His father had retired from business, and there was no occasion for the son to take up a business career. But Theodore Roosevelt preferred for himself a life of toil--the strenuous life. Ill-health was the first and greatest of all his disadvantages. “When a boy,” said he, “I was pig-chested and asthmatic.” From earliest infancy he was called to battle with asthma. It lowered his vitality and threatened his growth. His body was frail, but within was the conquering spirit. He determined to be strong like other boys. In this, he had the loving help of gentle parents. On the wide back porch of their home in the City of New York, they fitted up a gymnasium, where he strove for bodily vigour with all his might. Although at the start, his pole climbing was very poor, he kept trying until he got to the top. He would carry his gymnastic exercises to the perilous verge of the window ledge, more to the alarm of the neighbours than of his own family. _In the Wide Out-of-Doors_ Summer was the season of Roosevelt’s delight. Then he ceased to be a city boy. At his father’s country place on Long Island, he learned to run and ride, row, and swim. And when the long sleepless nights came, the father would take his invalid boy in his arms, wrap him up warmly, and drive with him in the free open air through fifteen or twenty miles of darkness. The boy had his father’s love of the woods and the fields. He studied and classified the birds of the neighbourhood, until he knew their songs and plumage and nests. He and his young friends could be relied on to find the spot where the violets bloomed the earliest, and the trees on which the walnuts were most plentiful, as well as the pools where the minnows swarmed, and the favourite refuge of the coon. He was taken to Europe, in the hope that it would benefit his health, “a tall thin lad with bright eyes and legs like pipestems.”