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to me by Moody, and it was gone over most carefully by Arthur Hill, who thoroughly approved it and made certain suggestions which I accepted verbatim-his approval was not an off-hand approval, for he wrote me later approving it and giving me the exact text of what I was to put in. Now of course I need not tell you that the responsibility is in no shape Moody's or Hill's. It is purely mine. when the utterance is spoken of as revolutionary, as incendiary, as an attack on the courts, it is curious to think it was suggested to me by a Chief Justice who comes from Massachusetts, and approved by an ex-District Attorney of Boston. My point was to show by the use of these two decisions, which decisions were given me by Moody when he called my attention to the point as one which he would like me to make, that the courts not only sometimes erred in deciding against the National Government, but sometimes erred against States' rights, and thereby created a neutral ground in which no governmental body had power. Arthur Hill's word to me in his letter was stronger than I have used, for he said that in the Bake Shop decision, it amounted to turning the Supreme Court into an irresponsible House of Lords, a position which the people would never stand.”

In the same letter, Roosevelt said:

"About my use of the word 'property': I only used it, so far as I now remember, as a quotation when I quoted Lincoln's remarks or commented on them. It is rather a curious thing that what people think is most revolutionary in my speech should be nearly a quotation from Lincoln. All my other statements have already been made, or at least have in effect been made, in my messages to Congress. I may have here and there strengthened them, or made them a little clearer, but substantially what I said at Ossawatomie consisted of assembling those points made in my messages to Congress which I regarded as of most importance at the moment.'

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Writing again to Senator Lodge, on September 20, 1910, he said with characteristic frankness:

"I am perfectly straight on my position, but it is also perfectly true that I had no business to take that position in the fashion I did. A public man is to be condemned if he states a proper position in such fashion that he fails to make his point clear, and permits good men to go wrong from misunderstanding. I ought to have made my original speech in such fashion that it would have included what I have since said at Syracuse and in the Outlook, and it was a blunder of some gravity not to do it."

Roosevelt returned from his western trip early in September and found himself unpleasantly involved in the bitter political wrangle into which his promise to Governor. Hughes had precipitated him. That he entered the contest reluctantly and with little or no hope of success, his letters written at this time show conclusively. He had been requested by the Hughes leaders to be their candidate for temporary chairman of the Republican State Convention which was to meet on September 26, 1910, and had consented. The anti-Hughes faction, led by the recognized boss of the party, had selected Vice-President Sherman as its candidate for the same position. Writing to Senator Lodge on September 12, 1910, Roosevelt said: "It may well be that I shall be beaten at the Convention, and if not at the Convention, we shall in all probability be beaten at the polls. But that does not alter the fact, that, to quote the words once used by that worthy non-Mugwump, the Black Douglas: 'We have come to the ring and now we must hop.'"

Writing again to Senator Lodge on September 21, 1910, he said:

"Hughes made a fight on an issue upon which the people were not really aroused. He aroused a considerable fraction of people to support him, but left a much larger fraction lukewarm and even hostile. As a result he has put

us in such shape that if we did not support him we were certain to be defeated, and if we did support him we were likely to be defeated. He had created a situation, and had put me in a situation, where the least of two evils was to stand by him. The fight is very disagreeable. Twenty years ago I should not have minded it in the least; it would have been entirely suitable for my age and my standing. But it is not the kind of fight into which an exPresident should be required to go. I could not help myself; I could not desert the decent people. But this whole political business now is bitterly distasteful to me. There is no way out of it that I can see."

When the Convention met on September 26, 1910, it was soon made apparent that Roosevelt was in comparatively easy control of it. He was chosen temporary chairman by a considerable majority, and the candidate of his selection, Henry L. Stimson, who, as United States District Attorney of New York, had conducted successfully the sugar fraud cases in 1909, was nominated for Governor. From first to last, Roosevelt dominated the Convention and by his forceful and uncompromising assaults upon the leaders of the opposition, he carried all points. In his speech to the Convention he did not mince matters at all in defining his political creed, saying in the opening part of it:

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"Democracy means nothing unless the people rule. The rule of the boss is the negation of democracy. It is absolutely essential that the people should exercise self-control and self-mastery, and he is a foe to popular government who in any way causes them to lose such self-control and self-mastery whether from without or within."

That he had returned from his foreign trip grievously dissatisfied with President Taft's conduct of affairs, he did not conceal. Writing to Elihu Root on October 21, 1910, he said:

"I have been cordially helping the election of a Repub

lican Congress, having split definitely with the Insurgents, on this point; for though I am bitterly disappointed with Taft, and consider much of his course absolutely inexplicable, I have felt that, as in so many other cases, I had to make the best of conditions as they actually were and do the best I possibly could to carry Congress and to carry the State of New York, with the entire understanding on my part that victory in either means the immense strengthening of Taft. In New York State I deliberately went in to put the close supporters of Taft in control of the Republican machinery, and have done and am now doing my best to elect a man whom, I assume, is a Taft man; because I felt that the one clear duty of a decent citizen was to try to put the Republican Party on a straight basis, and now to try to put that party in power in the State instead of turning the State over to Murphy of Tammany Hall, acting as the agent, ally and master of crooked finance.

"I have never had a more unpleasant summer. The sordid baseness of much or most of the so-called Regulars, who now regard themselves as especially the Taft men, and the wild irresponsible folly of the ultra-Insurgents, make a situation which is very unpleasant. From a variety of causes, the men who are both sane and progressive, the men who make up the strength of the party, have been left so at sea during these months that they have themselves tended to become either sordid on the one hand, or wild on the other. I do not see how I could as a decent citizen have avoided taking the stand I have taken this year, and striving to re-unite the party and to help the Republicans retain control of Congress and of the State of New York, while at the same time endeavoring to see that this control within the party was in the hands of sensible and honorable men who were progressives and not of a bourbon reactionary type. But as far as my personal inclinations were concerned, my personal pleasure and comfort, I should infinitely have preferred to keep wholly out of politics. I need hardly say that I never made a speech or took an action save in response to the earnest and repeated requests

of men many of whom I well knew, in spite of their anxiety to use me at the moment, were exceedingly anxious to limit that use before elections with the understanding that I should have no say afterwards.

"I have on every occasion this year praised everything I conscientiously could of both Taft and the Congress, and I have never said a word in condemnation of either, strongly though I have felt. Very possibly circumstances will be such that I shall support Taft for the Presidency next time; but this is not a point now necessary for decision, and if I do support him it will be under no illusion and simply as being the best thing that the conditions permit."

At the elections in November, 1910, the Democrats were victorious in all parts of the country, carrying New York State by a majority of 67,000, thus confirming Roosevelt's prediction in his letter to Senator Lodge, on September 12, 1910, quoted above. In the Outlook of November 19, 1910, Roosevelt published this announcement:

"On every hand, personally and by correspondence, I have been asked to make a statement regarding the election. So far as I am concerned, I have nothing whatever to add to or to take away from the declaration of principles which I have made in the Ossawatomie speech and elsewhere, East and West, during the past three months. The fight for progressive popular government has merely begun, and will certainly go on to a triumphant conclusion in spite of initial checks and irrespective of the personal success or failure of individual leaders."

Writing to me, at Panama, on November 21, 1910, he outlined freely the elements which had entered into the election, giving his reasons for the course he had pursued and his views of the effect that the result would have upon his political future:

"I faced a situation where there was no 'best course'; it was merely a choice between courses, all of them unsatisfactory. I think I took the only course that was right, and

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