Theodore Roosevelt's power, however, and the main source of all his achievement, was not in the offices which he held, for those offices were to him only opportunities, but in the extraordinary hold which he established and retained over great bodies of men. He had the largest personal following ever attained by any man in our history. I do not mean by this the following which comes from great political office or from party candidacy. There have been many men who have held the highest offices in our history by the votes of their fellow countrymen who have never had anything more than a very small personal following. By personal following is meant here that which supports and sustains and goes with a man simply because he is himself; a following which does not care whether their leader and chief is in office or out of office, which is with him and behind him because they, one and all, believe in him and love him and are ready to stand by him for the sole and simple reason that they have perfect faith that he will lead them where they wish and where they ought to go. This following Theodore Roosevelt had, as I have said, in a larger degree than anyone in our history, and the fact that he had it and what he did with it for the welfare of his fellow men have given him his great place and his lasting fame. This is not mere assertion; it was demonstrated, as I have already pointed out, by the vote of 1912, and at all times, from the day of his accession to the Presidency onward, there were millions of people in this country ready to follow Theodore Roosevelt and vote for him, or do anything else that he wanted, whenever he demanded their support or raised his standard. It was this great mass of support among the people, and which probably was never larger than in these last years, that gave him his immense influence upon public opinion, and public opinion was the weapon which he used to carry out all the policies which he wished to bring to fulfillment and to consolidate all the achievement upon which he had set his heart. This extraordinary popular strength was not given to him solely because the people knew him to be honest and brave, because they were certain that physical fear was an emotion unknown to him, and that his moral courage equaled the physical. It was not merely because they thoroughly believed him to be sincere. All this knowledge and belief, of course, went to making his popular leadership secure; but there was much more in it than that, something that went deeper, basic elements which were not upon the surface which were due to qualities of temperament interwoven with his very being, inseparable from him and yet subtle rather than obvious in their effects.