It was about this same time that in response to a letter from Mr. Guy Emerson, Mr. Thomas A. Edison wrote of Colonel Roosevelt as follows: “My dear Sir:--Answering your question as to my views of Colonel Roosevelt for our next President, I would say that I believe he is absolutely the only man that should be considered at this crucial period. He has more real statesmanship, a better grasp of the most important needs of this country and greater executive ability to handle the big, international problems that will arise at the close of the war than all the other proposed candidates put together. His energy, capacity, and vast experience in large affairs of state and nation for many years, together with his great patriotism, and his intense Americanism, and his great knowledge in all lines of human endeavor, make him decidedly the most striking figure in American life.” Mr. Edison voiced the sentiment of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens, and as the time approached for the Republican Convention of 1916, feelings of all kinds waxed almost as hot as in those thrilling days of 1912. In fact, in many ways, there was even a greater excitement in the hearts of the more valiant Americans, who believed that the time was already ripe to make the world safe for democracy. These more valiant Americans also believed that the man most fitted to aid in making the world thus safe was Theodore Roosevelt. On the other hand, the stand-pat Republicans were still smarting from what they considered, I think unjustly, his betrayal of them, and they were not ready to enroll themselves under his banner. The Progressives, on the other hand, were equally opposed to any compromise, and when the great convention met in Chicago, peace between the contending factions seemed an illusive and unattainable ideal, and so it proved. Those were days of tragic excitement in the great auditorium, where sat, tied hand and foot, what seemed to be a mercenary army, so little did true patriotism appear to actuate the delegates to that important congregation of individuals. On the other hand, near by, in a smaller hall, the almost fanatic enthusiasm for the much higher ideal was also to make itself a party to the defeat of its own object, although at that moment of honest and high-minded enthusiasm it could hardly be blamed for any attitude born of that enthusiasm.