Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/145

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 109 next day, and has remained on the whole as con fused, weak and sentimental as it was before: the American people seldom remembers anything over night, and this shortness of memory is a hindrance to any enlightened public opinion almost as grave as if our ninety million citizens were born half witted. From time to time the insolences, the de structions and the murders inspired by "labor," called forth from Mr. Roosevelt words of the plainest import as plain as those which he used about the tyrannies of "capital": as when, for instance, the book-binders union undertook to order the United States to dismiss from its em ployment a man named Miller; as when upon an other occasion he uttered the sharp homely phrase that "the door of the White House swings open for the poor just as easily as for the rich, and not a bit easier"; as when in April, 1907, he coupled the miscreants of "capital" and "labor" together, de nouncing a certain railroad magnate, with Moyer, Haywood, Pettibone and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, as "undesirable citizens"; or as when, some time after his presi dency, in an editorial entitled "Murder is Murder," he gave its true character to the assassination of some twenty men at work in the Times building at Los Angeles. But for the unexpected confession of the "laboring" men responsible for this crime, Justice would undoubtedly have been cheated as