When the campaign was at its height in October its progress was arrested and the whole country was shocked by the attempted assassination of Roosevelt while he was on a speaking tour in the West. As he was leaving his hotel in Milwaukee, on the evening of October 14, a halfcrazed fanatic shot him as he stood in an automobile bowing to a cheering crowd. His assailant was only a few feet away when he fired the shot which under ordinary conditions would have been fatal. One of Roosevelt's secretaries, Elbert E. Martin, who had been a football player, immediately sprang upon the assailant and forced him to the ground. The crowd, thoroughly incensed, was crying out, "Lynch him, lynch him," but Roosevelt, who had not been thrown down by the shot, calmed the crowd by saying: "Don't hurt him! Bring him here. I want to look at him." When one of his secretaries suggested that Roosevelt be taken at once to a hospital, he said: "You get me to that speech; it may be the last I shall deliver, but I am going to deliver this one."

He rode at once to the hall where he was to speak, and on arriving there one of his companions exclaimed as soon as they came into a lighted room: "Look, Colonel, there's a hole in your overcoat!" Roosevelt looked down, saw the hole, and putting his hand inside his coat, withdrew it with blood upon it. Not at all dismayed, he said: "It looks as though I had been hit, but I don't think it is anything serious." Three physicians who were found in the audience examined the wound, said the bullet had penetrated his breast, that they could not tell how serious the injury was, but that in their opinion he should be taken at once to a hospital. He refused absolutely to permit this, saying: "I will make this speech, or die; one or the other," and strode to the platform. The great audience, in ignorance of the shooting, broke into prolonged cheering at his appearance, and when quiet was restored the presiding officer said: "I have something to tell you and I hope you will receive the news with calmness. Colonel Roosevelt has been

shot. He is wounded." A cry of astonishment and horror ran over the audience and great confusion followed. Roosevelt stepped to the front of the platform and produced instant calm by raising his hand and saying: "I am going to ask you to be very quiet and please to excuse me from making you a very long speech. I'll do the best I can, but you see there is a bullet in my body. But it is nothing. I'm not hurt badly."

He began at once upon his speech. On taking from the breast-pocket of his coat the folded manuscript of his speech he saw that it had a bullet hole completely through it, having first passed through a metal spectacle case which was also in his pocket, but this did not check him for a moment, though he said afterwards it did startle him a little. Showing it to the audience, he said: "It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!" Several times during his speech he seemed to be growing weak but when persons on the platform rose to help him, he said: "Let me alone. I'm all right." In the course of his speech he said that certain newspaper utterances were to blame for the attempt to assassinate him-that a weak-minded man had been influenced by them. He finished his speech and later in the evening was taken by special train to Chicago, arriving there at half past three the next morning. Looking from the car window and seeing an ambulance standing by the station, he said: "I'll not go to a hospital lying in that thing. I'll walk to it and I'll walk from it to the hospital. I'm no weakling to be crippled by a flesh wound.”

On arriving at the hospital a thorough examination of his wound, with X-rays, was made and it was discovered that the bullet had entered his chest at the right of and below the right nipple and was embedded in a rib; it had touched no vital part. One of the examining surgeons said: "Colonel Roosevelt has a phenomenal development of the chest. It is largely due to the fact that he is a physical marvel that he was not dangerously wounded. He is one of the most powerful men I have ever seen laid on an

operating table. The bullet lodged in the massive muscles of the chest instead of penetrating the lung."

Mrs. Roosevelt, who was in New York at the time, received news of the shooting while at a theater and, accompanied by her two daughters, went at once to Chicago, where she took personal charge of the patient. Dr. Alexander Lambert, Roosevelt's family physician, also hastened to Chicago and after examining him said: "The folded manuscript and heavy steel spectacle case checked and deflected the bullet so that it passed up at such an angle that it went outside the ribs and in the muscles. If this deflection had not occurred and the bullet gone through the arch of the aorta or auricles of the heart, Colonel Roosevelt would not have lived 60 seconds.'

In the official bulletin of October 15, the attending surgeons said: "We find him in a magnificent physical condition, due to his regular physical exercise, his habitual abstinence from tobacco and liquor.

Senator Beveridge, of Indiana, visited him in the hospital on the day of his arrival, October 15, and to him Roosevelt dictated the following message to his followers, which the Senator delivered to a large audience at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1912:

"It matters little about me, but it matters all about the cause we fight for. If one soldier who happens to carry the flag is stricken, another will take it from his hands and carry it on. One after another the standard bearers may be laid low, but the standard itself can never fail.

"You know that personally. I did not want ever to be a candidate for office again. And you know that only the call that came to the men of the 60's made me answer it in our day as they did more nobly in their day. And now, as then, it is not important whether one leader lives or dies; it is important only that the cause shall live and win. Tell the people not to worry about me, for if I go down another will take my place. Always the cause is there, and it is the cause for which the people care, for it is the people's cause.'

Describing his sensations at the time of the shooting, a few days later, Roosevelt said: "It was nothing, nothing. I felt a little pain, but it was not serious. When I stretched out my arms or reached for my manuscript it made me gasp a bit, but that was all. It was quite amusing when I reached for my manuscript to see that it had a hole in it from the bullet and there was a hole in my spectacle case too."

"Amusing, did you say, Colonel?" some one asked.

"Well, it was quite interesting," he replied. "It was difficult to keep my temper," he added, "when at the close of my speech a half dozen men scrambled upon the platform to shake hands with me. Didn't they know that it is impossible for a man who has just been shot to shake hands with genuine cordiality?"

The shooting had completely arrested the progress of the campaign, both Taft and Wilson sending messages of sympathy and refraining from public utterances while the ultimate effect of the attack was in doubt. Two days after reaching the hospital Roosevelt made a statement for publication in which he urged that the campaign be resumed without regard to his condition. In this he said:

"I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact upon which we Progressives insist, that the welfare of any one man in the fight wholly is immaterial compared to the great and fundamental issues involved in the triumph of the principles. for which our cause stands. If I had been killed the fight would have gone on exactly the same. . . So far as my opponents are concerned, whatever could with truth and propriety have been said against me and my cause before I was shot can with equal truth and equal propriety be said against me now, and it should be so said; and the things that cannot be said now are merely the things that ought not to have been said before. This is not a contest about any man; it is a contest concerning principles."

He remained in the hospital till October 21, when he went to his home in Oyster Bay. The man who shot him was a

fanatic, named John Schrank, who was shown by papers found on his person to be of unbalanced mind, and to have been following Roosevelt about the country for some time seeking a favorable opportunity to shoot him. In a sort of diary, among these papers, were entries in which Schrank said McKinley had appeared to him and told him that Roosevelt was his murderer. Another entry showed that some of the campaign talk against Roosevelt as a candidate for a third term had affected his crazy brain, for it read: "Any man looking for a third term ought to be shot." When he was arraigned in court in Milwaukee, on November 12, 1912, he showed very clearly that this was the case, for when asked how he would plead he replied: "Why, guilty. I did not mean to kill a citizen, Judge; I shot Theodore Roosevelt because he was a menace to the country. He should not have a third term. I did not want him to have one. I shot him as a warning that men must not try to have more than two terms as President." Could there be furnished stronger evidence than this that violent denunciation of public men, in the press and on the stump, incites assassination by inducing persons of unbalanced minds to attempt it in the crazy belief that they are thereby doing a public service? The assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley were directly traceable to this source.

The court appointed a commission of five alienists to examine Schrank and report on his mental condition. They reported on November 22 that he was insane and he was committed to an asylum for the insane for an indefinite period.

Several letters that Roosevelt wrote at the time and subsequently contain exceedingly interesting observations upon the natural conduct of men in like situations:

November 15, 1912.

To the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Office, London: "I am a little amused, my dear fellow, at your saying that the account of the shooting stirred you with a curiosity to know whether, if the experience had been yours, you would