We have just witnessed the spectacle of a great republic, which confides the broadest powers to its chief executive, strangely limited in its choice of candidates for the presidency to a handful of men. No new commanding figure had sprung forward from the ranks of either party in the most trying period the country has known in fifty years. If Mr. Wilson’s renomination had not been inevitable, it would be very difficult to name another Democrat who, by virtue of demonstrated strength and public confidence, would have been able to enter the lists against him. Our only Democratic Presidents since the Civil War stepped from a governor’s seat to the higher office; but I know of no Democratic governor who, in 1916, could have entered the national convention supported by any appreciable public demand for his nomination. And no Democratic senator could have debated Mr. Wilson’s claims to further recognition. Speaker Clark, with the prestige of his maximum five hundred and fifty-six votes on the tenth ballot of the Baltimore Convention, might have been able to reappear at St. Louis with a similar showing; but the Democratic range of possibilities certainly had not widened. To be sure, Mr. Bryan would have remained to reckon with; but, deeply as the party and the country is indebted to him for his courageous stand against the bosses at Baltimore, he could hardly have received a fourth nomination. The Republicans were in no better case when their convention met at Chicago. The Old Guard was stubbornly resolved, not only that Mr. Roosevelt should not be nominated, but that he should not dictate the choice of a Republican candidate. A short distance from the scene of their deliberations, the Progressives, having failed to establish themselves as a permanent contestant of the older parties, tenaciously clung to their leader. Mr. Roosevelt’s effort to interest the Republicans in Senator Lodge as a compromise candidate fell upon deaf ears. Mr. Hughes’s high qualifications may not be seriously questioned. He is a first-rate man, and the lack of enthusiasm with which his nomination was received by the perfectly ordered and controlled body of delegates is not to his discredit. Sore beset, the Old Guard put forth a candidate little to their taste, one who, if elected, would, we must assume, prove quite impatient of the harness fashioned for Presidents by the skilled armorers of the good old days of backward-looking Republicanism.