He was not able to visit us in our country home on the Mohawk Hills, as we had hoped he might possibly do, during that summer, but on October 5 he writes to me: “I fear I shall be West on the 25th, otherwise I should jump at the chance to lunch with you and Fanny at the Colony Club. Can I accept for the first subsequent day when I find that you and she are available? I am now being worked to the limit by the Hughes people who are the very people who four months ago were explaining that I had ‘no strength.’... I most earnestly desire to win; I, above all things, do not wish to sulk, and therefore, from now on my time is to be at the disposal of the National Committee. Of course, Teddy’s nomination meant far more to me personally than anything else in this campaign. I look forward eagerly to seeing you. Do look at my _Metropolitan Magazine_ article which is just out. I think you will like the literary style!” The “literary style” was combined with a certain amount of plain talk in this particular instance! On October 12 Colonel Roosevelt, taking the exploits of the German submarine U-boat 53 off the shores of America as a text, launched an urgent protest. Colonel Roosevelt declared that the conduct of the war had led to a “complete breakdown of the code of international rights.” The man who as long ago as in his inauguration speech in March, 1905, inveighed against the “peace of the coward,” was stirred to red-blooded indignation at the Democratic slogan of that campaign of 1916, which laid all the stress on “He kept us out of war,” a sentence which Colonel Roosevelt described as “utterly misleading.” He said: “Now that the war has been carried to our very shores, there is not an American who does not realize the awful tragedy of our indifference and our inaction. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. By taking the right step at the right time, America’s influence and leadership might have been made a stabilizing force. “In actual reality, war has been creeping nearer and nearer until it stares at us from just beyond our three-mile limit, and we face it without policy, plan, purpose, or preparation. No sane man can to-day be so blind as to believe President Wilson’s original statement that the war was no concern of ours. Every thinking man must realize the utter futility of a statesmanship without plan or policy until such facts as these now stare us in the face.”