Besides being the author of several books, such as “The Battle with the Slum,” “How the Other Half Lives,” and “The Children of the Poor,” dealing with the life of the people of New York’s East Side, he was an active and practical reformer. In the course of his struggles to ameliorate the condition of the poor, he met Theodore Roosevelt and formed the friendship which inspired the volume represented in the following selection. Riis and Roosevelt had much in common. There was in both a great deal of the old Anglo-Saxon fighting spirit, ennobled by modern influences and employed in defense of right and justice. Their mutual and steadfast devotion to each other resembled that of ancient liegeman and lord. This hero-worship is, after all, not unique in our history. It should be a cause for great pride that so many of our leaders, of whom, of course, Lincoln is the most striking example, by embodying the noblest and the best in American life, have been the living ideal of countless immigrants. A YOUNG MAN’S HERO: AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO ROOSEVELT There was never a day that called so loudly for such as he, as does this of ours. Not that it is worse than other days; I know it is better. I find proof of it in the very fact that it is as if the age-long fight between good and evil had suddenly come to a head, as if all the questions of right, of justice, of the brotherhood, which we had seen in glimpses before, and dimly, had all at once come out in the open, craving solution one and all. A battle royal, truly! A battle for the man of clean hands and clean mind, who can think straight and act square; the man who will stand for the right “because it is right”; who can say, and mean it, that “it is hard to fail, but worse never to have tried to succeed.” A battle for him who strives for “that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to him who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” I am but quoting his own words, and never, I think, did I hear finer than those he spoke of Governor Taft when he had put by his own preferences and gone to his hard and toilsome task in the Philippines; for the whole royal, fighting soul of the man was in them. “But he undertook it gladly,” he said, “and he is to be considered thrice fortunate; for in this world the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity coupled with the capacity to do well and worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind.” There is his measure. Let now the understrappers sputter. With that for our young men to grow up to, we need have no fear for the morrow. Let it ask what questions it will of the Republic, it shall answer them, for we shall have men at the oars.