During the eighteen months previous he had been contributing editor of _The Outlook_, and my letters from him in 1911 were few and far between, as we were frequently together. They were, as usual, full of deep interest in and affection for me and mine, and as at that time I began to publish verse, first anonymously and then under my own name, he gives me generous praise in a note dated August 21, 1911: “I saw B. the other day. He told me about the acceptance of your second poem, and spoke most strongly about it, and he, just like everyone else who has talked to me about the poem, dwelt upon its power and purpose. [The poem in question was “The Call of Brotherhood.”] It is not merely pretty, pleasant, trivial, the kind of thing a boy or girl of twenty could have written; it is written about and for those who have toiled and suffered and worked, and who have known defeat and triumph; and it is written by one of them.” In his busy life, called upon endlessly in every direction, he never failed to encourage any effort of mine worthy of encouragement, nor indeed to discourage any effort of mine of which he did not approve. “If convenient,” he adds, “I will come in about five next Friday for an hour’s talk with you and to see the other verses. I am sending you a zebra skin which I hope you will like.” On October 5, 1911, he writes, referring to a political situation in Herkimer County, where my son had run for state assemblyman, and where certain unsavory methods had been used to defeat him (later, through legal procedure, he was given his seat): “Teddy has been defrauded by as outrageous a piece of political scoundrelism as I have ever known. Of course, this scoundrelism could succeed, only because last year, the big business men, the great ‘Conservatives,’ and professional ‘Intellectuals’ and the like, joined in securing the victory of Tammany at the polls, and the consequent enthronement of the Barnes-Sherman crowd in our party. If only we could have elected Harry Stimson for governor, there would not have been an effort made to handle Teddy as he has been handled.” Already his indignation was beginning to wax hot against certain methods much in vogue in the Republican party at that time. He had had no intention of running for the presidential nomination in 1912, and, indeed, in the autumn of 1911 told many of his most faithful supporters that he was very much averse to doing so; but already a swelling tide of disapproval of the Taft administration had increased in volume to such an extent that it swept over a large part of the country. The Insurgents pleaded for a definite leadership, and to them, and to many who did not call themselves by that name, there was but one leader whom they were willing to follow, and that was Theodore Roosevelt.