For three days the Republican National Convention proceeded steadily and stolidly upon its appointed course. Everything had been done in the stereotyped way on the stereotyped time-table in the stereotyped language. No impropriety or infelicity had been permitted to mar the smooth texture of its surface. The temporary chairman in his keynote speech had been as mildly oratorical, as diffusely patriotic, and as nobly sentimental as any Fourth of July orator of a bygone day. The whole tone of the Convention had been subdued and decorous with the decorum of incertitude and timidity. That Convention did not know what it wanted. It only knew that there was one thing that it did not want and that it was afraid of, and another thing it would rather not have and was afraid it would have to take. It wanted neither Theodore Roosevelt nor Charles E. Hughes, and its members were distinctly uncomfortable at the thought that they might have to take one or the other. It was an old-fashioned convention of the hand-picked variety. It smacked of the former days when the direct primary had not yet introduced the disturbing thought that the voters and not the office-holders and party leaders ought to select their candidates. It was a docile, submissive convention, not because it was ruled by a strong group of men who knew what they wanted and proposed to compel their followers to give it to them, but because it was composed of politicians great and small to whom party regularity was the breath of their nostrils. They were ready to do the regular thing; but the only two things in sight were confoundedly irregular. Two drafts were ready for their drinking and they dreaded both. They could nominate one of two men, and to nominate either of them was to fling open the gates of the citadel of party regularity and conformity and let the enemy in. Was it to be Roosevelt or Hughes? Roosevelt they would not have. Hughes they would give their eye teeth not to take. No wonder they were subdued and inarticulate. No wonder they suffered and were unhappy. So they droned along through their stereotyped routine, hoping dully against fate.