On the value of earned respect..............

     Roosevelt the modern statesman clearly owed much to his youthful cultivation of, and acceptance by, frontiersmen of the hardest and most violent sort.  A man who could earn the respect of such "desperadoes," and write about them with such unsentimental empathy, was unlikely to be fazed by the eruptions of the primitive in the behavior of senators, or for that matter, of plenipotentiaries.  His youth in the Badlands had been an education in essentials:

       He was able to observe there, in its absolute nakedness,
       the perpetual phenomenon of existence on this planet:
       human life consisting of the rhythm and friction of two
       parallel dynamics, inextricably interlaced, twin 
      instincts eternally directing its course, the struggle for 
      existence and the acceptance of existence.  Both of them 
      are positive forces, fertilizing and appropriate, the 
      complete and final fusion of which will probably coincide 
      with the ruin of humanity and the reign of silence around 
      the world.

-Edmund Morris,  Theodore Rex, quoting Leon Bazalgette