“Now friends, what I have said to you is pretty elementary,--so elementary that it comes mighty near being commonplace, but I will tell you that the truths that really count are the elementary truths. The individual whom we respect is not merely the brilliant individual. The man whom we wish our sons to resemble is the man who has the ordinary virtues developed to more than the ordinary degree.” He himself believed that he was not a man of genius but only a man with average talents, talents which by sheer determination and will-power he had developed to a more than ordinary degree. Shortly after the ovation in Oregon, he writes on September 15 from San Francisco: “Of course this trip is inconceivably wearing, but what a fine fight it is, anyhow!” To him it was a great crusade for the right, and his soul was at white heat in the cause of righteousness. Later came the dramatic moment in Milwaukee when he received in his breast the bullet of a would-be assassin. He protected the man, believing him to be insane, from the angry crowd who would have gladly torn him limb from limb; and then proceeded, though bleeding from an open wound, to make what he fully believed would probably be the last speech that he would ever make in this world. The doctors could not influence him to give up the speech, for he said that should it prove to be his last, it was all the more important that he should make it. But, thank Heaven, it was not his last! During his convalescence in the hospital in Chicago, he sent me one of his sympathetic letters about another recently published poem, and also replied to a letter from Sir George Trevelyan as follows: “I must say I have never understood public men who got nervous about assassination. For the last eleven years I have, of course, thoroughly understood that I might at any time be shot, and probably _would_ be shot sometime. I think I have come off uncommonly well. What I cannot understand is any serious-minded public man not being so absorbed in the great, vital questions with which he has to deal, as to exclude thoughts of assassination. I don’t think this is a matter of courage at all. I think it a question of the major interest driving out the minor interest. Exactly as with the army,--a private may have qualms,--hot so a General. He is responsible for more than his personal safety. It is not a question of courage, it is a question of perspective, of proper proportion.” Nothing has ever been more in keeping with the actions of Theodore Roosevelt than the above sentence: “it is a question of the major interest driving out the minor interest.” With him, all through his life, the sense of proportion was a prominent part of his make-up. The “major interest” always drove out the “minor interest,” and so strong was his sense of responsibility, so absorbed was he in the great affairs of his country, that the thought of possible assassination never entered his valiant breast.