Now Roosevelt had been, of course, the negation of Bourbonism. He had led the Republican Party into new fields and set it to do new work, and far off, shining clearly, its goal beckoned it on. His followers were mostly young men; they saw that the world had changed, and would change still further, and they went forward valiantly to meet it and, if possible, to shape its changes. For ten years past, these Radicals, as the Regulars named them some what reproachfully, and who were better defined as "Insurgents," had played an increasingly important part in Congress. They would not submit to the Bosses and the Machine, but voted independently, and, although they were not all of them avowed Rooseveltians, they all were going in his direction. In the second year of Mr. Taft's Administration, they rebelled against the rigid dictatorship of Joseph G. Cannon, the Speaker of the House. "Uncle Joe," as the public nicknamed him, dated from before the Civil War, and entered Congress in 1863, forty-seven years before 1910. It was as if a rigid Bourbon, who had served under Louis XV in France in 1763, had been chief law-maker under Napoleon I in 1810. Mr. Cannon, however, had never learned that the Civil War was over, whereas every Frenchman who survived the Revolution knew that it had taken place. So the Insurgents rose up against him, in his old age, deprived him of his dictatorial power, and, at the next election, Democrats and Republicans combined to sweep him out of office altogether.