Of the 238 contests finally filed on behalf of ex-President Roosevelt, 164 were abandoned. The contests which were not abandoned were decided on their merits. After studying the facts, I am convinced that the Taft delegates were legally and morally entitled to their seats. Unfortunately, the record is voluminous, and few will take the time or trouble to read the evidence. The cry of fraud is misleading many. But surely when such men as Senator Root and the presidents of Columbia and Cornell universities declare their conviction of the integrity of the procedure and of the decisions, we may well rest satisfied. In his speech notifying President Taft of his renomination, Senator Root said that neither in the facts nor in the arguments produced before the national committee, the committee on credentials, the convention itself, or otherwise, did there appear to be any just ground for impeaching the honesty and good faith of the decisions of the national committee. He further declared to President Taft that his title to the nomination was "as clear and unimpeachable as the title of any candidate of any party since political conventions began." Senator Root's high character, his great services to the nation and to the party, and his lofty sense of personal honor and responsibility, entitle him to have his word and his opinion under such circumstances unqualifiedly accepted by the people of the state of New York. The preference of the majority of the national convention being clearly for President Taft, should this majority nevertheless have cast him aside and nominated Mr. Roosevelt because of threats of disruption of the party similar to those of 1896, or because in a few states ex-President Roosevelt had secured a larger primary vote than President Taft in hasty contests in which misrepresentation undoubtedly had led many astray? What course did patriotism dictate to the majority of the delegates? Ought they to have surrendered, and, because of clamor and threats of disruption of the party, put aside their own preferences and instructions for President Taft and nominated Mr. Roosevelt? There were reasons why this course would have been an act of folly as well as of injustice. In the first place, the nomination of an ex-President of the United States for a third term would have been in violation of an unwritten rule established by Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, and followed ever since. The Republican party which, as a matter of sound principle and political ethics, had refused in 1880 to nominate ex-President Grant for a third term, notwithstanding his transcendent claims to the gratitude of the nation, could not stultify itself in 1912 by nominating ex-President Roosevelt for a third term.