The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)Roosevelt, Theodore
General
The Strenuous Life: The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Volume 12 (of 14)
Roosevelt, Theodore
United States -- Colonial question; United States -- Politics and government
school, originally attended by the children of Irish parents. Gradually
the Irish had moved uptown, and had been supplanted by the Italians. It
was his life-work to lift these little Italians over the first painful
steps on the road toward American citizenship.
Again, let me call to mind an institution, not in New York, but in
Albany, where the sisters of a religious organization devote their
entire lives to helping girls who either have slipped, and would go
down to be trampled under foot in the blackest mire if they were not
helped, or who, by force of their surroundings, would surely slip if
the hand were not held out to them in time. It is the kind of work
the doing of which is of infinite importance both from the standpoint
of the state and from the standpoint of the individual; yet it is a
work which, to be successful, must emphatically be a labor of love.
Most men and women, even among those who appreciate the need of the
work and who are not wholly insensible to the demands made upon them
by the spirit of brotherly love for mankind, lack either the time,
the opportunity, or the moral and mental qualities to succeed in such
work; and to very many the sheer distaste of it would prevent their
doing it well. There is nothing attractive in it save for those who are
entirely earnest and disinterested. There is no reputation, there is
not even any notoriety, to be gained from it. Surely people who realize
that such work ought to be done, and who realize also how exceedingly
distasteful it would be for them to do it, ought to feel a sense of the
most profound gratitude to those who with whole-hearted sincerity have
undertaken it, and should support them in every way. This particular
institution is under the management of a creed not my own, but few
things gave me greater pleasure than to sign a bill increasing its
power and usefulness. Compared with the vital necessity of reclaiming
these poor hunted creatures to paths of womanliness and wholesome
living, it is of infinitesimal importance along the lines of which
creed these paths lead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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