One other example is too good to omit. The Superintendent of Insurance was really one of Platt's men, and a person most grateful to the insurance companies. Governor Roosevelt, regarding him as unfit, not only declined to reappoint him, but actually appointed in his stead a superintendent whom Platt and the insurance companies could not manage, and so hated. Platt remonstrated. Finding his arguments futile, he broke out in threats that if his man was not reappointed, he would fight. He would forbid the Assembly to confirm Roosevelt's candidate. Roosevelt replied that as soon as the Assembly adjourned, he should appoint his candidate temporarily. Platt declared that when it reconvened, the Assembly would throw him out. This did not, however, frighten Roosevelt, who remarked that, although he foresaw he should have an uncomfortable time himself, he would "guarantee to make his opponents more uncomfortable still." Later that day Platt sent one of his henchmen to deliver an ultimatum to the Governor. He repeated Platt's threats, but was unable to make an impression. Roosevelt got up to go. "You know it means your ruin?" said the henchman solemnly. "Well, we will see about that," Roosevelt replied, and had nearly reached the door when the henchman, anxious to give the prospective victim a last chance, warned him that the Senator would open the fight on the next day, and keep it up to the bitter end. "Yes," replied the Governor; "good-night." And he was just going out, when the henchman rushed after him, calling, "Hold on! We accept. Send in your nomination. The Senator is very sorry, but will make no further opposition."* Roosevelt adds that the bluff was carried through to the limit, but that after it failed, Platt did not renew his attempt to interfere with him. * Autobiography, 317. Nevertheless, Roosevelt made no war on Platt or anybody else, merely for the fun of it. "We must use the tools we have," said Lincoln to John Hay; and Lincoln also had many tools which he did not choose, but which he had to work with. Roosevelt differed from the doctrinaire reformer, who would sit still and do nothing unless he had perfectly clean tools and pure conditions to work with. To do nothing until the millennium came would mean, of course, that the Machine would pursue its methods undisturbed. Roosevelt, on the contrary, knew that by cooperating with the Machine, as far as his conscience permitted, he could reach results much better than it aimed at. Here are three of his letters to Platt, written at a time when the young journalist and the reformers of his stripe shed tears at the thought that Theodore Roosevelt was the obsequious servant of Boss Platt. The first letter refers to Roosevelt's nomination to the Vice Presidency, a possibility which the public was already discussing. The last two letters, written after he had been nominated by the Republicans, relate to the person whom he wished to see succeed himself as Governor of New York.