This was a good deal of sound work for a boy's first year out of college. But it did not content Roosevelt. Inherited influences and inborn desires made him earnest and eager to render some public service. In pursuit of this aspiration he joined the Twenty-first Assembly District Republican Association of the city of New York, for by such machinery all politics were carried on in those days. It was not an association composed of his normal friends; in fact, the members were not only eminently practical persons but they were inclined to be rough in their methods. They were not dreamers, nor were they laboring under many illusions. Roosevelt went among them a complete stranger. He differed from them with entire frankness, concealed nothing, and by his strong and simple democratic ways, his intense Americanism, and the magical personal attraction which went with him to the end, made some devoted friends. One of the younger leaders, "Joe" Murray, believed in him, became especially attached to him, and so continued until death separated them. Through Murray's efforts he was elected to the New York Assembly in 1881, and thus only one year after leaving college his public career began. He was just twenty-three. Very few men make an effective State reputation in their first year in the lower branch of the State legislature. I never happened to hear of one who made a national reputation in such a body. Roosevelt did both. When he left the assembly after three years' service he was a national figure, well known, and of real importance, and also a delegate at large from the great State of New York to the Republican national convention of 1884, where he played a leading part. Energy, ability, and the most entire courage were the secret of his extraordinary success. It was a time of flagrant corporate influence in the New York Legislature, of the "Black Horse Cavalry," of a group of members who made money by sustaining corporation measures or by levying on corporations and capital through the familiar artifice of "strike bills." Roosevelt attacked them all openly and aggressively and never silently or quietly. He fought for the impeachment of a judge solely because he believed the judge corrupt, which surprised some of his political associates of both parties, there being, as one practical thinker observed, "no politics in politics." He failed to secure the impeachment, but the fight did not fail, nor did the people forget it; and despite--perhaps because of--the enemies he made, he was twice reelected. He became at the same time a distinct, well-defined figure to the American people. He had touched the popular imagination. In this way he performed the unexampled feat of leaving the New York Assembly, which he had entered three years before an unknown boy, with a national reputation and with his name at least known throughout the United States. He was twenty-six years old.