MB. ROOSEVELT'S OPPORTUNITY 67 



body is needed to make cultivation seem " worth while." Somebody is 

 needed to " lead the cheering " for study^, for work. Somebody is 

 needed to offset the snobbish instructor who says (and whose own 

 sympathies are affected by the opinion) : " Debating contests are not 

 a thing that the best class in the university takes any interest in." 

 Somebody is needed to make the prizeman just the least bit of a hero 

 amongst his fellows. Somebody is needed to make the keen intellectual 

 blade or wide reader, whether he take academic rank or not, feel his 

 accomplisliment to be something more than an overshadowed and un- 

 fashionable brilliancy. Somebody is needed to fan the lurking sparks 

 of ardor in the mind. Somebody is needed to make visible to the young 

 eye that invisible war with powers of the air in which the scholar is a 

 man-at-arms and a campaigner. And if this leader is also an athlete 

 and a sportsman, if this leader of work is also a leader of play, the 

 blend can hardly, as things now stand, be over-prized. 



For it brings us, in a rough but ready form, in sight of that round 

 and whole education which is the sane ideal. It might even make the 

 sanguine hope to see in an American university ideas current amongst 

 the healthy studentiy as one often sees them in Europe. Such a 

 leader would not stop contented with those excellent athletic contests 

 in which, however, a horde of undergraduates sit as spectators while 

 a few harrassed braves perform. He would be likely to remember 

 that the most successful systems of education, in antiquity for example, 

 cared for the bodily training of every individual. One can not imagine 

 his advent failing to make a difference even to " the unexercised and 

 the unwashed." 



But the difference made by his advent as regards moral ideal is the 

 least to be forgotten. I will not repeat what is so often truly said about 

 the state of the moral atmosphere in the nation with regard to money. 

 Which are the personalities that really glitter to average young eyes? 

 When a brilliant man of business and of fashion accumulates a vast 

 fortune in his last years by methods believed to be dishonorable and 

 dazzles a city by his social charm, the tasteful splendor of his sur- 

 roundings, and his business power, when it is commonly said in com- 

 ment on the tales of his private life that " those men do absolutely 

 anything they like," it is noticeable that even the rumors touching 

 the manner of his death do not entirely check the awe of the young 

 listener. 



It is something to give collegians an embodiment of what they feel 

 to be dashing success and national power, wholly untainted in point of 

 honesty and private life; something to have brilliancy and probity 

 undivided. 



Of course there may be those who feel that Mr. Roosevelt would 

 come whooping into the still air of study and, being used to mightier 



