Especially in his war on the Interests was he angered at finding corporate abuses, and even criminal methods, comfortably protected by an upholstery of favoring laws. With that tact and willingness to compromise on non-essentials in order to gain his essential object, which mark him as a statesman, he used the Republican Party, naturally the party of the plutocrats who controlled the Interests, just as long as he could. Then, when the Republican Machine rose against him, he quitted it and founded the Progressive Party, to be the instrument for carrying on and completing the great reforms he had at heart. Here was no desertion, no betrayal; here was, first of all, common sense; if the road no longer leads towards your goal, you leave it and take an other. No one believed more sincerely than Roosevelt did, in fealty to party. In 1884 he would not bolt, because he hoped that the good which the Republican principles would accomplish would more than offset the harm which the nomination of Blaine would inflict. But in 1912, the Republicans cynically rejected his cause which he had tried to make the Republican cause, and then, as in 1884, he held that the cause was more important than the individual, and he followed this idea loyally, lead where it might. In trying thus to state Roosevelt's position fairly, I do not mean to imply that I should agree with his conclusions in regard to the Recall of the Judicial Decisions; and the experiments which have already been made with the Referendum and Initiative and Direct Primaries are so unsatisfactory that Roosevelt himself would probably have recognized that the doubts, which many of us felt when he first proposed those measures, have been justified. But I wish to emphasize my admiration for the large consistency of his career, and my conviction that, with out his crowning action in 1912, he would have failed to be the moral force which he was. If ambition, if envy, if a selfish desire to rule, had been the motives which guided him, he would have lain low in 1912; for all his friends and the managers of the Republican Party assured him that if he would stand aside then, he would be unanimously nominated by the Republicans in 1916. But he could not be tempted. CHAPTER XXIII. THE BRAZILIAN ORDEAL