Laudator Temporis Acti

Theodore Roosevelt, letter to Anna Cabot Mills Lodge (September 10, 1907):

[T]he last few years have convinced me more than ever that it is to the ordinary plain people that we must look for the future welfare of the Republic, and not either to the overeducated parlor doctrinaires, nor to the people of the plutocracy, the people who amass great wealth or who spend it, and who lose their souls alike in one process and the other.

Theodore Roosevelt, letter to William Henry Moody (September 21, 1907):

I am continually brought in contact with very wealthy people. They are socially the friends of my family, and if not friends, at least acquaintances of mine, and they were friends of my father's. I think they mean well on the whole, but the more I see of them the more profoundly convinced I am of their entire unfitness to govern the country, and of the lasting damage they do by much of what they are inclined to think are the legitimate big business operations of the day. They are blind to some of the tendencies of the time, as the French noblesse was before the French Revolution; and they possess the same curious mixture of impotency to deal with movements that should be put down and of rancorous stupidity in declining to abandon the kind of reaction and policy which can do nothing but harm. Moreover, usually entirely without meaning it, they are singularly callous to the needs, sufferings, and feelings of the great mass of the people who work with their hands.