When the critical biographer arrives he will re-examine this total estimate. Perhaps he will be challenged to re-examination by a certain passage towards the end of Mr. Lewis's book: "In the year 1918, a friend referred to the year 1921 as the year when he (Roosevelt) would again enter the White House. He had been in one of his jocular moods, but he immediately became very serious. 'No,' he said, 'not I. I don't want it, and I don't think I am the man to be nominated. I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy'." Mr. Roosevelt knew "the people." When he said, "I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy," he admitted what none of the biographers concedes, the waning of his star, his perception that he could no longer, as in 1904, say "We believe" with strong confidence that he was uttering the convictions of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. Both he and "the people" had changed, but the people had changed more profoundly than he in ways which I shall attempt to indicate by sketching an answer to three questions: First, what were the dominant aspects of the national character at about the time of Mr. Roosevelt's advent in public life? Second, what significant alterations in the national psychology did he produce in the period during which his personality was most heartily accepted as an incarnation of the national character? Third, how and to what extent has his national representativeness diminished? Mr. Roosevelt did not emerge conspicuously on the national horizon till late in the nineties. The preceding decade appears to have contained extraordinarily little to kindle the imaginations of spirited and public-minded young men. There had been no war since the youth of their fathers. The Government pursued a policy of sombre rather than "splendid" isolation. The country offered its imposing attractions chiefly to the big business men. Captains of industry flourished like the green bay tree. For diversion there was riotous striking in the Carnegie Steel Works at Homestead; but the State militia put it down. In 1893 there was a financial panic; but it blew over. In 1894 Coxey led an army of the unemployed to Washington; but it dispersed like the chorus of a musical comedy amid general laughter. The Columbian Exposition, at the opening of which Chauncey Depew assisted, was on the whole a symbol of a period of unexampled material prosperity in commerce, agriculture, and manufactures. In 1896 William McKinley, son of an iron manufacturer and author of a tariff bill designed to protect the farmers from the plain people as the manufacturers had already been protected, was elected President under the skilful management of Mark Hanna, wholesale grocer, coal and iron merchant, later United States Senator. Mr. Roscoe Thayer remarks in his life of Hay that the most representative American in the third quarter of the century was P. T. Barnum; and the methods and ideals of Mark Hanna as political manager he compares to the methods and ideals of Barnum. From the popular magazines, reflecting current standards of success, the aspiring youth learned that by frugality and industry he might become as rich as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller or as noble and distinguished as Chauncey Depew. The Plutocratic era lacked—outside the field of business—ideas, imagination, animating purpose.