In this manner, "Teddy's luck" brought him into the White House, as the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Early in the summer, his old college friend and steadfast admirer, Charles Washburn, remarked: "I would not like to be in McKinley's shoes. He has a man of destiny behind him." Destiny is the one artificer who can use all tools and who finds a short cut to his goal through ways mysterious and most devious. As I have before remarked, nothing commonplace could happen to Theodore Roosevelt. He emerged triumphant from the receiving-vault of the Vice-Presidency, where his enemies supposed they had laid him away for good. In ancient days, his midnight dash from Mount Marcy, and his flight by train across New York State to Buffalo, would have become a myth symbolizing the response of a hero to an Olympian summons. If we ponder it well, was it indeed less than this? In 1899, Mr. James Bryce, the most penetrating of foreign observers of American life had said, in words that now seem prophetic: "Theodore Roosevelt is the hope of American politics." CHAPTER X. THE WORLD WHICH ROOSEVELT CONFRONTED To understand the work of a statesman we must know something of the world in which he lived. That is his material, out of which he tries to embody his ideals as the sculptor carves his out of marble. We are constantly under the illusions of time. Some critics say, for instance, that Washington fitted so perfectly the environment of the American Colonies during the last half of the eighteenth century, that he was the direct product of that environment; I prefer to think, however, that he possessed certain individual traits which, and not the time, made him George Washington, and would have enabled him to have mastered a different period if he had been born in it. In like manner, having known Theodore Roosevelt, I do not believe that he would have been dumb or passive or colorless or slothful or futile under any other conceivable conditions. Just as it was not New York City, nor Harvard, nor North Dakota, which made him ROOSEVELT, so the ROOSEVELT in him would have persisted under whatever sky.