to secure recognition for decent colored men by giving them appointments in their own northern communities."

To Mr. George F. Spinney, of New York City, on January 22, 1907:

"I have had a perfectly comic time with the Senate. They have been hopping about, insisting that they could not desert Foraker, because it would 'split the party'; and I finally told the most active of the compromisers that if they split off Foraker they split off a splinter; but if they split off me they would split the party nearly in two; and that I should state most unhesitatingly, and whenever it became necessary in public, that the opposition to me on Brownsville was simply a cloak to cover antagonism to my actions about trusts, swollen fortunes and the like. I added that this opposition would be shown by voting against the Blackburn amendment. Once this declaration was made, Foraker was left so completely without support that he actually came into line himself, and agreed to support an amendment a little stronger than the Blackburn amendment. That is, the Blackburn amendment merely said that they did not question the legality of my action; whereas the proposed amendment stated that they questioned neither the legality nor the justice of my action. I was sorry that Foraker was allowed the chance to offer the amendment, and it was against my earnest advice that the senators who were on my side permitted him to do so. But when he ate crow' and took the very amendment upon which I insisted, I did not see how I could make any open protest against it. There never has been a more complete case of backdown and humiliation than this of Foraker's."

I was stationed in Washington at the time and when talking with the President one morning I made a reference to the Brownsville debate in the Senate. "Oh," he said, "that is merely the latest log going down the stream." When in January following there appeared in the Century magazine, an article by him on "The Ancient Irish Sagas,'

which excited high praise from all persons most competent to judge of its merits, I asked him how he could find time for such research as the article showed. "I have always been interested in the subject," he replied, "and when this Brownsville row started in the Senate I knew it would be a long and possibly irritating business if I followed it; so I shut myself up, paid no heed to the row and wrote the article."

For William Jennings Bryan personally, Roosevelt always had a kindly feeling while abhorring his political opinions. When Mr. Bryan returned from his tour of the world in 1906 and made what was predicted would be the "greatest speech of his life" in Madison Square Garden, New York, the President wrote to Whitelaw Reid in London, on September 25, a brief and accurate account of the fiasco which occurred:

"Poor Bryan! I do not know whether I feel more irritated or sympathetic with him, I never saw a bubble pricked so quickly. No private citizen in my time, neither General Grant nor Mr. Blaine, for instance, has been received with such wild enthusiasm on his return from a foreign trip; and in twenty-four hours he made his speech and became an object of indignation and laughter. He has retained his good nature and kindliness; but he has still further lost credit since he made his speech and found out that his panacea of government ownership was unpopular, by attempting to craw-fish on it, and thereby has added an appearance of insincerity to an appearance of folly and recklessness."

The President's own views on government ownership were set forth in a speech which he made at the dedication of the new State Capitol Building at Harrisburg, Pa., on October 4, 1906: "To exercise a constantly increasing and constantly more efficient supervision and control over the great common carriers of the country prevents all necessity for seriously considering such a project as the govern

ment ownership of railroads-a policy which would be evil in its results from every standpoint. .. The Government ought not to conduct the business of the country; but it ought to regulate it so that it shall be conducted in the interest of the public."

He was deeply interested in the Republican candidacy of Charles E. Hughes for Governor of New York in the election of 1906, when the opposing Democratic candidate was W. R. Hearst. While he refused all efforts, and there were many and urgent ones, to induce him to exert influence openly in behalf of Mr. Hughes, he kept close watch upon the developments of the campaign and was in constant touch with the Republican managers. Writing to Senator Lodge, on October 8, 1906, he made these somewhat startling revelations :

"I have been more shocked than I can say by the attitude of some of the corporation men within the last two or three weeks. Last week Sherman called upon E. H. Harriman to ask for a contribution. Harriman declined flatly to give anything. He said he had no interest in the Republican party and that in view of my action toward the corporations he preferred the other side to win. Sherman told him that the other side was infinitely more hostile to corporations than we were; that all we were doing was to be perfectly honest with them, decline to give them improper favors, and so on, and that Harriman would have to fear, as other capitalists would have to fear, the other side more than us. To this Harriman answered that he was not in the least afraid, that whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of Senators and Congressmen or State Legislators to protect his interests, and when necessary he could buy the Judiciary. These were his own words. He did not say this under any injunction of secrecy to Sherman, and showed a perfectly cynical spirit of defiance throughout, his tone being that he greatly preferred to have in office demagogues rather than honest men who treated him fairly, because when he needed he could purchase favors from the former. At the same time the

Standard Oil people informed Penrose that they intend to support the Democratic party unless I call a halt in the suits begun against the Standard Oil people, notably, a suit which Moody is inclined to recommend; and they gave the same reason as Harriman, namely, that rather than have an administration such as the present they would prefer to have an administration of Bryans and Hearsts, because they could make arrangements with them they did not use the naked brutality of language which Harriman used, but they did state in substance that they could bring about favors they needed."

A valiant but unsuccessful effort was made by the President in 1906 to advance the cause of simplified spelling by committing the Government to the adoption of the system. On August 27, he sent an order to the Public Printer to use the system in all public documents thenceforward. The order was obeyed, and among the documents thus printed was the President's special message describing the results of his visit to the Isthmus of Panama and the canal in November, 1906, as noted in a previous chapter. The reform was not acceptable to Congress, however, and so much hostility was manifested that the President said that if the House would go on record against it he would rescind his order to the Public Printer. The House passed a resolution to that effect, and on December 13, the President rescinded the order. Brander Matthews, of New York, one of the chief advocates of the reform, wrote to the President remonstrating with him for abandoning the effort, and to him the President replied on December 16: "I could not by fighting have kept the new spelling in, and it was evidently worse than useless to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten. Do you know that the one word as to which I thought the new spelling was wrongthru-was more responsible than anything else for our discomfiture? But I am mighty glad I did the thing anyhow. my own correspondence I shall continue using the new spelling."

In

A "Dooley" article that Roosevelt had enjoyed especially was one on his campaign entitled "Alone in Cubia." Writing to the author on June 18, 1906, the President thus alludes to it: "Three cheers, Mr. Dooley! Do come on and let me see you soon. I am by no means as much alone as in Cubia, because I have an ample surrounding of Senators and Congressmen, not to speak of railroad men, Standard Oil men, beef packers, and venders of patent medicines, the depth of whose feelings for me cannot be expressed in words!''

Again, on January 9, 1907, he wrote: "Let me repeat that Dooley, especially when he writes about Teddy Rosenfelt, has no more interested and amused reader than said Rosenfelt himself. I have known that a few people have recently thought quite otherwise, as they have also told you that they thought; but this is not a feeling that I have shared in the least. On the contrary, I feel that what you have written about me, with exception too trivial to mention, has been written in just the nicest possible style—that what Dooley says shows 'the good-natured affection that the boys in the army felt for old Grant and the people in Illinois for Lincoln.' I hate to compare myself with two great men, even when I am only quoting you, and I do it of course merely to show how thoroughly I understand and appreciate our friend Mr. Dooley's attitude."