CHAPTER XII. THE GREAT CRUSADE AT HOME These early diplomatic settlements in Roosevelt's Administration showed the world that the United States now had a President who did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never bluffed, because--unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney with their Venezuela Message in 1895--he never made a threat which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending thorns. These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation before it is universally understood. Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull, unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.