Roosevelt is prompt and energetic, but he takes infinite pains to get at the facts before he acts. In all the crises in which he has been accused of undue haste, his action has been the result of long meditation and well-reasoned conviction. If he thinks rapidly, that is no fault; he thinks thoroughly, and that is the essential. He was never a humbug. He did not deny that he enjoyed being President. He never let his friends point to him, while he was in the White House, as a martyr. He had a good time wherever he was. As he wrote: I remember once sitting at a table with six or eight other public officials, and each was explaining how he regarded being in public life--how only the sternest sense of duty prevented him from resigning his office, and how the strain of working for a thankless constituency was telling upon him--and that nothing but the fact that he felt that he ought to sacrifice his comfort to the welfare of his country kept him in the arduous life of statesmanship. It went round the table until it came to my turn. This was during my first term of office as President of the United States. I said: "Now, gentlemen, I do not wish there to be any misunderstanding. I like my job, and I want to keep it for four years more."[22] [22] Abbott, p. 100. As for the question whether he acted from personal ambition, or from devotion to the cause he represented, the following incident is as strong a piece of evidence as we have about any of our public men. It is related by Mr. Travers Carman, of the _Outlook_, who accompanied Colonel Roosevelt to the Republican convention in 1912. Roosevelt, on the evening of this conference in the Congress Hotel, lacked only twenty-eight votes to secure the nomination for President. Mr. Carman was in the room, when a delegate entered, in suppressed excitement, announcing that he represented thirty-two Southern delegates who would pledge themselves to vote for the Colonel, if they could be permitted to vote with the "regular" Republicans on all matters of party organization, upon the platform, and so on. Here were thirty-two votes,--four more than were needed to give him the nomination.