QUOTE : The real things of life were getting a grip on him more and more,” Jacob Riis observed. In an essay on “fellow-feeling,” written a decade and a half later, Roosevelt maintained that empathy, like courage, could be acquired over time. “A man who conscientiously endeavors to throw in his lot with those about him, to make his interest theirs, to put himself in a position where he and they have a common object, will at first feel a little self-conscious, will realize too plainly his aims. But with exercise this will pass off. He will speedily find that the fellow-feeling which at first he had to stimulate was really existent, though latent, and is capable of a very healthy growth.” Indeed, he argued that a “very large part of the rancor of political and social strife” springs from the fact that different classes or sections “are so cut off from each other that neither appreciates the other’s passions, prejudices, and, indeed, point of view.