would clear up the ambiguities of the situation, he always credited Mr. Hanna with acting in perfect good faith, and he always advised Mr. Roosevelt to that effect. Mr. Theodore E. Burton also contributed effectively to the maintenance of good relations by advising Mr. Roosevelt about Ohio appointments in a sense which may have prevented the President from offending Mr. Hanna.

It is, of course, easy to understand the President's predicament. He wanted the nomination and had good grounds for wanting it. Mr. Hanna was the only man who could have prevented him from getting it. What Mr. Roosevelt desired, consequently, above all things was that Mr. Hanna should declare himself explicitly, not merely about his own personal candidacy, but in reference to other candidates for the office. A man of the President's disposition, to whom suspense which cannot be exorcised by vigorous and decisive action is intolerable, almost preferred an open fight to a prolonged condition of tantalizing doubt. He tried in every way to induce Mr. Hanna either to indorse his candidacy or explicitly to disapprove of it. His telegram on the occasion of the Ohio Convention of 1903 was his first attempt to force the issue. Later in the fall of the year with the same end in view he repeatedly urged Mr. Hanna to accept a reappointment as Chairman of the National Committee. But all to no purpose. For reasons which will be discussed later, Mr. Hanna would not commit himself in public either in favor of the President or against him.

Yet without the shadow of a doubt, Mr. Hanna neither intended to be a candidate himself nor did he intend to oppose Mr. Roosevelt's nomination. There are a number of letters in existence, written to correspondents with whom he was on terms of the utmost intimacy. Not one of them wavers a hair's-breadth from the assertion that he was not and would not be a candidate. Not one affords the slightest intimation that he intended to oppose Mr. Roosevelt's selection. Statements about Mr. Hanna's attitude have been taken from all of his confidential friends. None of them ever heard him suggest anything favorable to his own or necessarily inimical to Mr. Roosevelt's candidacy. Mr. Cornelius N. Bliss, than

whom no friend was more affectionately intimate with the Senator, asserts that the burden of all of Mr. Hanna's conversation with him about the matter was: "Roosevelt is to be nominated. There is no question about it. I have never had any desire or ambition for the nomination, and under no circumstances would I accept." One day when the two were sitting together in the Waldorf, a "very influential man" turned to Mr. Bliss and said, "You know, we are going to nominate Mr. Hanna for President." "You are not," replied Mr. Hanna. "I am not going to have anything to do with it." Mr. Charles F. Dick's testimony absolutely coincides with that of Mr. Bliss.

One of the closest friends of Mr. Hanna in the Senate was N. B. Scott of West Virginia. His public attitude in respect to the nomination gave the joint friends of Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hanna a good deal of trouble, because of statements which in their opinion might mean that Mr. Hanna was a candidate under cover. On Dec. 23, 1903, he wrote to Mr. Hanna a letter, of which the following are the essential sentences:

(Personal and Confidential)

"MY DEAR MR. HANNA: "No man on earth has any better opinion of your good judgment and hard sense than I have, but I do believe you are making a mistake. To my mind it is a foregone conclusion that if we renominate Roosevelt it means defeat. Are you going to accept the responsibility of allowing the Republican party to go to defeat?... Or if this man is reëlected, what kind of an administration shall we have? Shall we not have the Republican party, at the end of four years, in the same condition that President Cleveland had the Democratic party?

"I want you to sit down and pray with yourself for an hour and a half, as we used to do in the Quaker meetings, and then ask yourself whether you are doing your duty to the country and to your party by refusing either to allow yourself to be a candidate or to name some other man. I believe that if you will suggest the name of Cornelius N. Bliss, Senator Fairbanks or a number of other good men, one of them can be nominated and elected. . . . Let me hear from you in confidence. You have no idea of the amount of pressure that is brought to bear on me to have you say something.

"Your old friend, as ever,

"N. B. SCOTT."

To this letter Mr. Hanna replied on December 30:

"MY DEAR SENATOR:

"I have just received your personal and confidential letter of the 23d inst., and it is needless for me to say to you how much I appreciate this latest expression of your personal regard. My recent illness has merely been one more admonition and warning to take care of myself and emphasizes the fact that my own interest forbids the course you advise. I do not see how I can be held responsible for the situation you describe. Neither can I see my way clear to being the instrument to create dissension, discord and confusion in the party. I have decided that the best thing for me to do is to say nothing more whatever on the subject. I believe that you will agree with me that this is the wisest

course.

"Truly yours,

"M. A. HANNA.”

Two days after the letter to Mr. Scott was written, Colonel Oliver H. Payne arrived in Cleveland on a secret mission to Mr. Hanna. He was a member of the committee which had been formed in New York to promote Mr. Hanna's nomination. He wanted an interview, in order to place before their candidate the results of their work up to date. He had a long conference with Mr. Hanna, who, after hearing what he had to say, repeated that he could not and would not be a candidate. He said that he wanted to remain in the Senate and that many questions in which he was deeply interested required his personal attention in that body. His whole life and all his interest were wrapped up in the work of the Civic Federation. He would rather succeed in bringing capital and labor into cordial relations with each other and open the way to permanent industrial peace and consequently to indefinite future prosperity than to be President of the United States. He feared that in case he became a candidate he would be misrepresented and that he would be accused of using the Civic Federation to promote his political fortunes. He would not put himself in a position which might cause any reasonable man to misconstrue his work on behalf of labor. He wound up by declaring that the state of his health would not permit him to enter the contest and that the work of the campaign would kill him. When Colonel Payne urged in response that he would not be compelled to make a campaign, that his name would sweep the Convention, that his friends would relieve him of all labor, and that all they

wanted was an assurance that they could go ahead without his disapproval, he refused to budge an inch from his former assertions. Colonel Payne returned to New York very much disappointed, but not discouraged to the point of abandoning the fight.

Only one more item need be added to the foregoing exhibit. Mr. Elmer Dover, Mr. Hanna's private secretary, states that probably Mr. Hanna's closest associate in the Senate was Orville Platt of Connecticut. Now Mr. Platt, unlike some other friends of Mr. Hanna, believed not only that the President should be nominated, but that he was the only man who could be elected. Late in November, 1903, after Mr. Hanna had returned to Washington, Senator Platt wrote to a friend in Connecticut, who did not like the talk about Mr. Hanna's candidacy:

"If I understand the situation, Mr. Hanna is not a candidate for the Presidency, will not be, and deplores all this talk; but how can he stop it? That there is an opposition to the nomination of President Roosevelt is undoubtedly true. It is not very extensive or very influential, but it is noisy, and in my judgment will utterly fail when the Convention is held - indeed, I doubt if it manifests itself then. It comes from both ends of the party - from the moneyed influences in Wall Street and the agitators in the labor movement one as much as the other. Each of these elements wishes to force the President to make terms with them, but he will not do it. I think I know that Senator Hanna does not sympathize with this in the least. I have a higher regard and more genuine respect for him than you seem to have. He is a straightforward, earnest, truthful man, who acts from conviction, fears no one, and makes no effort improperly to conciliate people who disagree with him. He is very much like President Roosevelt in this respect." (P. 515, "An Old-fashioned Senator.")

Towards the end the relation between the President and Senator Hanna improved, but they never again became entirely satisfactory. They could not become so until the question of the nomination was settled. The enemies of both men persisted in trying to create ill-feeling. The New York Sun, for instance, printed a story about some reported utterance of the President that he would soon make the Senator either fish or cut bait; and the story was told so circumstantially

that Mr. Roosevelt wrote to Mr. Hanna a denial of its truth. In case the Senator had not been taken seriously ill, there is no telling how the business would have ended.

Inasmuch as Senator Hanna had decided absolutely never to accept the nomination-except, perhaps, in the impossible contingency of its being offered to him by acclamation - what is the explanation of his refusal to publish his private opinion that the President was bound to be nominated? The reasons he usually gives are not quite convincing. In the spring of 1903 they had a good deal of force. His position and influence in the party were unique. He was still its leader. As its leader and as Chairman of the National Committee, a declaration in favor of any one candidate a year in advance of the National Convention might have been unfair to other possible candidates. It was his business to represent the whole party. But in November, 1903, the only candidates in sight were the President and Mr. Hanna himself. An indorsement of Mr. Roosevelt could injure no candidacy but his own, and he did not want and would not take the nomination. Why not accept the situation and come out frankly in favor of the man whom he believed would have to be nominated? Prudence and a regard for the interests of the party might have counselled such a course, because the crisis was creating a dangerous tension of private and public feeling which might almost any day cause something to snap.

Just what Mr. Hanna's several motives were and what was their comparative force must always be doubtful; but statements made to close friends seem to justify the following general description of their effect. In the first place, his supporters in New York may have induced him to promise that, even if he would not consent to be a candidate, he would not, by declaring in favor of Mr. Roosevelt's nomination, extinguish all hope of preventing it. He might have made this promise, not only as a concession to a group of friends who were working hard in what they believed to be his interest, but because of his own personal attitude towards the President. While he liked Mr. Roosevelt much more than formerly, and while there was respect and admiration mixed with his liking, he shared to some extent the feelings of his supporters. He realized that the President represented a theory of the public