Claims......................................

     His speech there on 7 September was so utopian that Jules Jusserand accused him of parroting Sir Thomas More.  Actually Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues— as he mused at length on the vulnerability of republics that failed to preserve their social equipoise.  Whichever class arose to dominate others—whether high, low, or bourgeois—always made disproportionate claims on the government:

          Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in
          those of medieval Italy, and medieval Flanders, this 
          tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became
          habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the
          state. . . . There resulted violent alternations between
          tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty
          to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the
          class which had for the moment been victorious as
          well as that which had momentarily been defeated.
          The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as
          active power became lodged in the hands of those
          who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and
          poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for
          its interests as opposed to the interests of others.


Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex