When the Republican convention assembled in Chicago, 252 of the 1078 seats were contested; 238 of these were held by Mr. Taft's delegates and 14 by Mr. Roosevelt's supporters. The national committee, after the usual hearings, decided the contests in such a manner as to give Mr. Taft a safe majority. No little ingenuity was expended on both sides to show the legality or the illegality of the several decisions. Mr. Taft's friends pointed out that they had been made in a constitutional manner by the proper authority, the national committee "chosen in 1908 when Roosevelt was the leader of the party, at a time when his influence dominated the convention." Mr. Roosevelt's champions replied by cries of "fraud." Independent newspapers remarked that there was no more "regularity" about one set of southern delegates than another; that the national committee had followed the example set by Mr. Roosevelt when he forced Mr. Taft's nomination in 1908 by using southern delegations against the real Republican states which had instructed for other candidates; and that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. Whatever may be the merits of the technical claims made on both sides, it seems fair to say that Mr. Roosevelt, according to all available signs, particularly the vote in the primaries in the strategic states, was the real choice of the Republican party. The struggle over the contested seats was carried into the convention, and after a hot fight, Mr. Taft's forces were victorious. When at length, as Mr. Bryan put it, "the credentials committee made its last report and the committee-made majority had voted itself the convention," Mr. Roosevelt's supporters on Saturday, June 22, after a week's desperate maneuvering, broke with the Republican assembly. A statement prepared by Mr. Roosevelt was read as a parting shot. "The convention," he said, "has now declined to purge the roll of the fraudulent delegates placed thereon by the defunct national committee, and the majority which has thus indorsed the fraud was made a majority only because it included the fraudulent delegates themselves who all sat as judges on one another's cases.... The convention as now composed has no claim to represent the voters of the Republican party.... Any man nominated by the convention as now constituted would merely be the beneficiary of this successful fraud; it would be deeply discreditable to any man to accept the convention's nomination under these circumstances; and any man thus accepting it would have no claim to the support of any Republican on party grounds and would have forfeited the right to ask the support of any honest man of any party on moral grounds."