But all this has not been sufficient for our ambitious educator. He has craved political honors; seeking them tirelessly, begging for them with abject insistence. He has been candidate for vice-president with Taft, and has been several times candidate for the Presidential nomination. All these things he has taken with the most desperate seriousness, utterly unable to understand why the politicians tell him he cannot be elected. He would go down to Washington to plead, and Jim Wadsworth, young aristocrat who runs the up-state political machine of New York, would “kick him about.” He would travel over the country addressing banquets of the “best people,” telling them how the country should be saved, and how he was the man to save it; at the same time he would go down to the common people, and pose as one of them. If you want to succeed in America, you must be what is called a “joiner”; so Butler joined the Elks, and a man who was present at this adventure told me about it. The Elks gathered, a vast herd; they had come to hear a great educator, and it was to be a highbrow affair for once in their lives, and they were solemn about it, expecting to be uplifted from their primitive Elkhood. Instead of which, the great educator flopped to their level, or below it. He tried to “jolly” them, telling them that he was “a regular fellow,” “one of the boys,” and that it was “all right for a man to have a good time now and then.” Of course, the Elks were disgusted. In one of President Butler’s published speeches I find him sneering at the progressives as “declaimers and sandlot orators and perpetual candidates for office.” What this refers to is men like Roosevelt and LaFollette, who go out to the people and seek election. It does not apply to those who go in secret to the homes and offices of political corruptionists and wire-pullers, there to plead, almost on their knees, for nominations and favors. A prominent Republican politician of New York said to me: “He begged in my office for two hours. He told me he had the support of this man and that, and then I inquired and found it was not so.”