chusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin-preferential primary laws had been enacted and were to go into effect for the first time. Under these laws the rank and file of the party had the right to express their preference for Presidential nominees when they voted for delegates to the convention. In all, these States chose 382 delegates, and the result in their primaries justified the claim that Roosevelt was the choice of a large majority of the voters of the Republican party, for of the 382 delegates chosen 278 were instructed specifically to vote for him as the nominee for President and 68 for Taft, 28 of whom were from Georgia, a hopelessly Democratic State. There were 36 for Senator La Follette of Wisconsin. Early in the primary contests eight delegates-at-large in Massachusetts, avowedly Roosevelt men, had been chosen but under a confusing provision of the law a preference for Taft had been adopted by a small majority, about 3,000. Colonel Roosevelt at once announced that he should demand that this preference be obeyed by the eight delegates, though they had been chosen as Roosevelt supporters, giving as his reason that he intended to have the honest expression of the rank and file obeyed. The primaries in the 36 Congressional districts of the State had resulted in the election of 18 delegates for Roosevelt and 18 for Taft. Later, on the eve of the primaries in the Ohio districts, Mr. Taft announced that the result in them would settle the contest between him and Roosevelt, Ohio being Taft's home State. They resulted in the election of Roosevelt delegates in all the districts, 34 in number, by a majority of 47,000 votes, but neither Mr. Taft nor his managers accepted the verdict as final. On the contrary, they were able through their control of the party machinery to elect four Taft men as delegates-atlarge when the State Convention met a short time later, thereby refusing to accept the 47,000 majority among the Republican votes of the State as indicating the will of the party. Their course was precisely opposite to that which Roosevelt had followed in the Massachusetts case.

As a matter of fact, so far as the primaries indicated the wishes of a majority of the Republican voters, they showed undeniably that Roosevelt was the favorite candidate. The total number of delegates in the National Convention was 1,078, and 540 were necessary for a nomination. The great majority of the delegates had been chosen in the old style of primary and their exact attitude toward candidates was, in many instances, not known. At the time the convention met, on June 18, 1912, the leaders of both Roosevelt and Taft forces claimed a majority. In a canvass of the delegates, published by the New York Tribune, a strong Taft advocate, a few days earlier, the number of delegates who had expressed their preference for Roosevelt was placed at 4692 and those similarly committed to Taft at 4542. This was frank admission that Roosevelt, on the face of the primary and convention results, had a clear majority of the convention. In describing the proceedings both in the convention and in the National Committee anterior to the meeting of the convention, I shall quote from an account which was submitted to Roosevelt after the election in 1912 and received his approval. I am, therefore, giving his own version of the proceedings which, in his judgment, deprived him of a nomination which was rightfully his.

The seats of more than 200 delegates were contested, and in accordance with established procedure in the party all contests were referred to the National Republican Committee for investigation and report to the convention.

The committee assembled at Chicago ten days in advance of the meeting of the convention. Several of its most influential members had been defeated in the election of delegates and were not to be members of the convention. These were known to be bitterly opposed to Mr. Roosevelt, and it was quite generally asserted in the press that they would use their power to prevent his nomination by so deciding the contests as to secure a majority of the convention against him. It was claimed, also, that in accordance with precedent, the committee had authority to make up the tem

porary roll of the convention, and thus secure control of its organization.

The composition of the committee was peculiar. It had been the practise for many years for each State delegation to nominate and for the national convention, at the close of its work, to ratify the choice of members of its National Committee to serve for the ensuing four years. In this way each National Committee, through its control over contests, had it in its power to make up the roll of the next succeeding convention, although many or even a majority of its members might not be delegates in that body. In 1912 fifteen members of the committee had failed in their efforts to be chosen delegates; many of them had been thus repudiated by their own party by very large majorities. The total membership of the committee was 53. Of this number 10 were from the Southern States, not one of which would give the nominee of the convention an electoral vote, and four others were from territorial possessions-District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Philippines, and Porto Ricowhich took no part in presidential elections. These three sets of members, 29 in all, actually represented nobody in the convention, yet they were its controlling and dominating force. The members of the committee who had been most signally repudiated by their own people were the leaders in all acts of the committee, and with them stood unswervingly on all questions the Southern and territorial members.

The first act of the committee was to elect Victor Rosewater, of Nebraska, who had failed to be elected a delegate, chairman, he, as vice-chairman of the committee, having been acting chairman because of the death of the occupant of that position. The moving spirits in the committee were Senator Penrose, of Pennsylvania, and Senator Crane, of Massachusetts, both defeated as delegates, and both, like Mr. Rosewater, not eligible for reelection as members of the National Committee. The unconcealed prominence of these repudiated leaders in the business of making up the temporary roll of the convention, and thereby securing con

trol of it, very naturally aroused earnest protest, and impaired confidence in the strict impartiality of the committee's decisions.

But party precedent authorized it, and protest and appeal were vain. The leaders of the committee had the courage of their kind. They went about their task openly and with slight regard for either the rights or the merits of their opponents. They adopted a set of rules, the chief of which was that there should be no roll-call save on the request of twenty members, refusing to cut it down to ten, though under the Constitution of the United States one-fifth of members present is a sufficient number for a roll-call in the Senate or House of Representatives. Having a solid and unshakable majority of thirty-seven in the committee, the leaders knew that twenty members could not be collected in opposition, and that embarrassing roll-calls could thus be avoided. Although President Taft sent a personal request that the hearings of the committee on contests be thrown open to members of the press, the committee voted to hold them behind closed doors, admitting only representatives of the three or four press associations.

It was after the committee had refused to reduce the number of names required for a roll-call from twenty to ten that the brand of "Steam Roller" was applied to the committee's course. It was applied subsequently to the course of the convention, and adopted into general use both by the press in reporting its proceedings and by delegates on the floor.

Although the doors were closed to reporters generally, an occasional bit of illuminating information escaped from the committee room. One such was published in the Chicago Tribune on June 8, 1912, a few days after the committee began its work, as follows:

"While the ninth Alabama contest was under consideration, Senator W. Murray Crane suggested to several members of the committee that it would be wise tactics to seat the Roosevelt delegates.

"Big Steve' Stephenson, of Colorado, who holds a

proxy from former Senator Nathan B. Scott, of West Virginia, is reported to have replied:

"We can't afford to let them have it. We might be able to spare two votes now, but we must look ahead to the time when we will have to give them something. We can't do it now.”

When the ninth district contest was settled by a vote of 38 to 15 in favor of the Taft forces, National Committeeman Mulvane, an ardent Taft man of Kansas, said to a man friendly to Colonel Roosevelt:

"Now you fellows have got an inkling of what you are going to get. Are you going to waste our time going over all these contests?"

"What do you fellows intend to do?" Mulvane was asked. “You know you surely can't elect Taft?",

To which Mulvane is said to have responded:

"We can't elect Taft, but we are going to hold on to this organization, and when we get back four years from now we will have it and not those d insurgents.

At the conclusion of the committee's work, it was announced officially that 92 contests had been investigated and decided; there had been no roll-calls in 74 decisions; roll-calls in 16; unanimous vote in 4, and 2 contests had been abandoned. The net result was that 233 of the contested delegates were given to Taft and 6 to Roosevelt. The daily records of the proceedings of the committee were published in the newspapers of the country under such headlines as the "Steam Roller Continues Its Work." "The Steam Roller Goes on Crushing Out Roosevelt. Hopes." "The Steam Roller Gives Forty-Two More Votes to TaftNone to Roosevelt."

When the convention came together it was predicted almost or quite universally by the newspaper correspondents in attendance that Taft's nomination had been assured by the action of the National Committee, since the "Steam Roller" would pursue its course as inflexibly in the conven