Roosevelt came, quite naturally, to set the doer above the critic, who, he thought, quickly degenerated into a fault finder and from that into a common scold. When a man plunges into a river to save somebody from drowning, if you do not plunge in yourself, at least do not jeer at him for his method of swimming. So Roosevelt, who shrank from no bodily or moral risk himself, held in scorn the "timid good," the " acidly cantankerous," the peace-at-any-price people, and the entire tribe of those who, instead of attacking iniquities and abuses, attacked those who are desperately engaged in fighting these, For this reason he probably failed to absorb from Godkin's criticism some of the benefit which it might have brought him. The pills were bitter, but salutary. While he was Police Commissioner one of Joseph Choate's epigrams passed current and is still worth recalling. When some one remarked that New York was a very wicked city, Choate replied, "How can you expect it to be otherwise, when Dana makes Vice so attractive in the Sun every morning, and Godkin makes Virtue so odious in the Post every afternoon?" Charles A. Dana, the editor of the Sun, the stanch supporter of Tammany Hall, and the apologist of almost every evil movement for nearly thirty years, was a writer of diabolical cleverness whose newspaper competed with Godkin's among the intellectual readers in search of amusement. At one time, when Godkin had been particularly caustic, and the Mugwumps at Harvard were unusually critical, Roosevelt attended a committee meeting at the University. After talking with President Eliot, he went and sat by a professor, and remarked, play fully, "Eliot is really a good fellow at heart. Do you suppose that, if he bit Godkin, it would take?" So Roosevelt went back to Washington to be henceforth, as it proved, a national figure whose career was to be forever embedded in the structural growth of the United States. CHAPTER VII. THE ROUGH RIDER