Within the narrow limits of an address it is impossible to give an account of an administration of seven years which will occupy hundreds of pages when the history of the United States during that period is written. It was a memorable administration, memorable in itself and not by the accident of events, and large in its accomplishment It began with a surprise. There were persons in the United States who had carefully cultivated and many people who had accepted without thought, the idea that Roosevelt was in some way a dangerous man. They gloomily predicted that there would be a violent change in the policies and in the officers of the McKinley administration. But Roosevelt had not studied the history of his country in vain. He knew that in three of the four cases where Vice Presidents had succeeded to the Presidency through the death of the elected President their coming had resulted in a violent shifting of policies and men, and, as a consequence, in most injurious dissensions, which in two cases at least proved fatal to the party in power. In all four instances the final obliteration of the Vice President who had come into power through the death of his chief was complete. President Roosevelt did not intend to permit any of these results. As soon as he came into office he announced that he intended to retain President McKinley's Cabinet and to carry out his policies, which had been sustained at the polls. To those overzealous friends who suggested that he could not trust the appointees of President McKinley and that he would be but a pallid imitation of his predecessor he replied that he thought, in any event, the administration would be his, and that if new occasions required new policies he felt that he could meet them, and that no one would suspect him of being a pallid imitation of anybody. His decision, however, gratified and satisfied the country and it was not apparent that Roosevelt was hampered in any way in carrying out his own policies by this wise refusal to make sudden and violent changes.