One day, when Roosevelt was Police Commissioner, a policeman was ordered before him on charges. Roosevelt reviewed his past offences and resolved to dismiss him. The stage was set for the dismissal; only the formalities remained. But someone had told the culprit the Commissioner’s weak side. In the morning as Roosevelt came from a romp with his babies, the doomed policeman stood before him surrounded by eleven weeping youngsters.
Roosevelt’s stern expression relaxed to one of instant sympathy.
Dead! And this man, left alone with all these children! Clearly it would be inhuman to discharge him. He must be given one more chance.
Out went the patrolman with his new lease of life. And his first duty was to return to his neighbors in the tenement the nine children he had borrowed to accompany his own two in his task of melting the heart of the Comissioner.
Some years ago, a man Roosevelt had met out West wrote this letter to him:
“Dear Colonel: I write you because I am in trouble. I have shot a lady in the eye. But, Colonel, I was not shooting at the lady. I was shooting at my wife.”
Roosevelt replied to his friend in need that while he appreciated marksmanship in almost every form, he drew the line at shooting at ladies, whether or not they were related to the man who held the gun.
Roosevelt, much as he understood the character of the Western man, was even more interested in and sympathetic to the Western woman. It was on the prairie that Roosevelt learned the doctrine which he afterward preached, that “the prime work for the average woman must be keeping the home and rearing her children.” When with his men on the ranch he listened by hours to their accounts of the charms and virtues of their sweethearts, while from his own close observation he acquired a knowledge of the homely virtues of the women pioneers of the plains that led him to show small sympathy in later years with the idle, luxury-loving women of the big cities.
In his description of frontier types Roosevelt pictured how the grinding work of the wilderness drives the beauty and bloom from a woman’s face long before her youth leaves her. She lives in a log hut chinked with moss, or in a sod adobe hovel; or in a temporary camp.