"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.... The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.... First of all, I want to say this about myself; I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I cannot speak insincerely to you within five minutes of being shot. I am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many other things. It is not in the least for my own life. I want you to understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way. I have been able to do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and I am interested in doing other things. I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not. It was just as when I was colonel of my regiment. I always felt that a private was to be excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety about his personal safety, but I cannot understand a man fit to be a colonel who can pay any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be occupied with the absorbing desire to do his duty." There was a great deal of self-revelation in these words. Even the critic accustomed to ascribe to Roosevelt egotism and love of gallery applause must concede the courage, will-power, and self-forgetfulness disclosed by the incident. The election was a debacle for reaction, a victory for Democracy, a triumph in defeat for the Progressive party. Taft carried two States, Utah and Vermont, with eight electoral votes; Woodrow Wilson carried forty States, with 435 electoral votes; and Roosevelt carried five States, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington, and eleven out of the thirteen votes of California, giving him 88 electoral votes. Taft's popular vote was 3,484,956; Wilson's was 6,293,019; while Roosevelt's was 4,119,507. The fact that Wilson was elected by a minority popular vote is not the significant thing, for it is far beyond the capability of any political observer to declare what would have been the result if there had been but two parties in the field. The triumph for the Progressive party lay in the certainty that its emergence had compelled the election of a President whose face was toward the future. If the Roosevelt delegates at Chicago in June had acquiesced in the result of the steam-roller Convention, it is highly probable that Woodrow Wilson would not have been the choice of the Democratic Convention that met later at Baltimore.