Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

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Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this representative public Althing, and felt his exasperating torpor so much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street, and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the northern and southern disputants.

The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of William McKinley, who was assassinated in November, 1901, and with whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor, the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes on his part, and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted, endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers, and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a conflict of classes.