Although I have purposely brought out what I believe to be the most significant parts of Roosevelt's character and public life, I have not wished to be uncritical. I have suppressed nothing. Fortunately for his friends, the two libel suits which he went through in his later years, subjected him to a microscopic scrutiny, both as to his personal and his political life. All the efforts of very able lawyers, and of clever and unscrupulous enemies to undermine him, failed; and henceforth his advocates may rest on the verdicts given by two separate courts. As for the great political acts of his official career, Time has forestalled eulogy. Does any one now defend selling liquor to children and converting them into precocious drunkards? Does any one defend sweat-shops, or the manufacture of cigars under worse than unsanitary conditions? Which of the packers, who protested against the Meat Inspection Bill, would care to have his name made public; and which of the lawyers and of the accomplices in the lobby and in Congress would care to have it known that he used every means, fair and foul, to prevent depriving the packers of the privilege of canning bad meat for Americans, although foreigners insisted that the canned meat which they bought should be whole some and inspected? Does any American now doubt the wisdom and justice of conserving the natural re sources, of saving our forests and our mineral sup plies, and of controlling the watershed from which flows the water-supply of entire States? These things are no longer in the field of debate. They are accepted just as the railroad and the telegraph are accepted. But each in its time was a novelty, a reform, and to secure its acceptance by the American people and its sanction in the statute book, required the zeal, the energy, the courage of one man- -Theodore Roosevelt. He had many helpers, but he was the indispensable backer and accomplisher. When, therefore, I have commended him for these great achievements, I have but echoed what is now common opinion. A contemporary can never judge as the historian a hundred years after the fact judges, but the contemporary view has also its place, and it may be really nearer to the living truth than is the conclusion formed when the past is cold and remote and the actors are dead long ago. So a friend's outlined portrait, though obviously not impartial, must be nearer the truth than an enemy's can be--for the enemy is not impartial either. We have fallen too much into the habit of imagining that only hostile critics tell the truth.