Administration - Civil Service

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HOW NOT TO HELP OUR POORER BROTHER1 AFTER the publication of my article in the September Review of Reviews on the vice-presidential candidates, I received the following very manly, and very courteous, letter from the Honorable Thomas Watson, then the candidate with Mr. Bryan on the Populist ticket for Vice- President. I publish it with his permission: Hon. Theodore Roosevelt: It pains me to be misunderstood by those whose good opinion I respect, and upon reading your trenchant article in the September number of the Review of Reviews the impulse was strong to write to you. 1 Review of Reviews, January, 1897. When you take your stand for honester government and for juster laws in New York, as you have so courageously done, your motives must be the same as mine? for you do not need the money your office gives you. I can understand, instinctively, what you feel?what your motives are. You merely obey a law of your nature which puts you into mortal combat with what you think is wrong. You fight because your own sense of self-respect and self-loyalty compels you to fight. Is not this so? If in Georgia and throughout the South we have conditions as intolerable as those that surround you in New York, can you not realize why I make war upon them? Tammany itself has grown great because mistaken leaders of the southern Democracy catered to its Kellys and Crokers and feared to defy them. The first roast I ever got from the Democratic press of this State followed a speech I had made denouncing Tammany, and denouncing the craven leaders who obeyed Tammany. It is astonishing how one honest man may honestly misjudge another. My creed does not lead me to dislike the men who run a bank, a factory, a railroad or a foundry. I do not hate a man for owning a bond, a...