ROOSEVELT’S BIRTH AND EDUCATION. 
57 
was written soon after leaving college. He was not yet twenty-four 
when it was completed. In view of the position which the author 
afterward held, next to the head of the American Navy, the preface, 
written before the beginning of our present iiav}^, is of striking 
interest. He says : ‘^At present people are beginning to realize 
that it is dolly for the great Bnglish-speaking republic to rely for 
defense upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks and 
partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old.” 
IDEAS OF PUBLIC LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP. 
Mr. Roosevelt’s ideas of college education, and the results 
thereof in the making of good citizens, are well defined in his 
admirable essay on “College and Public Life,” written for the 
Atlantic Monthly, in which he says: “The first great question 
which the college graduate should learn, is the lesson of work 
rather than of criticism. College men must learn to be as practi¬ 
cal in politics as they would be in business or in law. A college 
man is peculiarly bound to keep a high ideal and to be true to it; 
but he must work in practical ways to try to realize this ideal, and 
must not refuse to do anything because he cannot get anything. 
No man ever learned from books how to manage a governmental 
system.” Yet he never disparaged book knowledge. 
He says further: 
“ This obligation (of being good, active citizens) possibly rests 
even more heavily upon men of means ; of this it is not necessary 
now to speak. The men of mere wealth never can have, and never 
should have, the capacity for doing good work that is possessed 
by the men of exceptional mental training ; but that they may 
become both a laughing stock and a menace to the community is 
made unpleasantly apparent by that portion of the New York 
business and social world which is most in evidence in the papers. 
“Wrongs should ;be strenuously and fearlessly denounced ; 
evil principles and evil men should be condemned. The politician 
who cheats or swindles, or the newspaper man who lies in any 
form, should be made to feel that he is an object of scorn for all 
honest men,” 
