To Senator Kern the most disheartening feature of the disposition to keep the best campaigners out of Indiana was his inability to secure the services of the more notable former leaders of the Progressive party, who were supporting the Democracy elsewhere. Late in the summer he had made an effort to impress upon Vance McCormick, the national chairman, the vital necessity of thus making an appeal on the strength of the progressive record of President Wilson to the erstwhile progressives. He had shown him that the Democratic vote in Indiana in 1912, when the state was carried by Wilson, was almost 100,000 short of the vote cast for Bryan in 1908, thus indicating that the majority of these had gone into the Progressive party. And he made it clear that the only hope of winning was to get these back and that it could only be done by fighting for them. At that time he exacted the promise that Francis J. Heney, Bainbridge Colby and other progressive orators would be sent into the progressive districts of the state, but the promise was not kept. To make it worse they were dated, advertised, and then withdrawn at the eleventh hour. Whatever may have been the reason the plain truth is that had the national organization deliberately designed to turn Indiana over to the Republicans, it could not have proceeded with more effectiveness than it did. To make matters all the worse the session of congress had been prolonged into early September and the close found Senator Kern in a state of physical exhaustion and under the necessity of taking a brief rest before entering the campaign. He returned to Indiana after a short time at Kerncliffe on the day that Charles E. Hughes spoke in Indianapolis. At the hour the Republican presidential nominee was speaking in Tomlinson Hall, Senator Kern sat before an open grate at his home and discussed the possibilities of his last battle with the realization that it would require his utmost exertions. He was not unmindful of the fact that the opposition to his re-election was not to be confined to those enlisted under the Republican banner, but that he was to face a special fight upon himself. Among a certain class of politicians he had never been popular, and some of these were openly going about abusing him and talking combinations against him. The activities of these men were regularly reported to him, but owing to their insignificance he attached but little importance to their work. But there was another element of opposition the strength of which he recognized. This was composed of the so-called “respectable” men of the business world who distrusted him because of his progressive, humanitarian views of social justice, and hated him because of the fights he had made repeatedly for the working classes. The organization exposed in its perfidy by the Mulhall disclosures had its ramifications into Indianapolis especially, but throughout the state as well. These men were bitter in their opposition.