replied that every one of them had; that he had hesitated for a
long time,- been very uncertain; but that he felt he could not
refuse the call of those who had applied to him (meaning the
eight Governors); that to do so would be cowardice, a case of
"il gran rifiuto". (He emphasized this quotation from Dante,
which
refers, as you will recall, to the refusal of the monk Pietro
Morone to accept the papacy after he had been chosen as
Celestine
V. and his return to his cell. He repeated the same quotation at
least once more during the day). "But you will agree that
Taft
has made a good President this last year"? He acquiesced without
enthusiasm, but added that Mr. Taft
had put the Republican party
in the same position as the Bell and
Everett Whigs just before the
Civil War,- that of respectable inactivity. That if he were to
wait for four years the Republican party would be in a hopelessly
moribund condition and that this was the crucial moment to do it.
I suggested that the public would say he was disloyal to the
Presi-
dent. He protested that he owed nothing to
Mr. Taft, but that
the President owed everything to him; that Mr. Taft had in all
the States immediately after becoming President affiliated him-
self with the factions hostile to his (Roosevelt’s) friends,- the
people whose support had made him (Taft) President. I returned to
this several times in the course of his visit, the last time just
before we parted at the Overseer meeting, for I had an instinctive
feeling that it was not treating Mr.
Taft quite fairly. But it
was perfectly evident from his point of view that this did not
disturb him. Indeed, he asserted that he was interested in
carrying out his ideas, and that the plea of disloyalty did not