This business pitchforked the Governor-elect prematurely into the rough- and-tumble of "politics as she is," not always a dainty game. As I review in retrospect this famous chapter of state history, which, because of the subsequent supreme distinction of one of the parties to the contest, became a chapter in national history, I realize the almost pathetic situation of Mr. Wilson. He had called himself an amateur in politics, and such he was in the practical details and involutions of the great American game, though in his campaign he had shown himself a master of political debate. In the ordinary course of events he would have been allowed two months between his election and inauguration to begin an orderly adjustment to the new life, to make a gradual transition from the comely proprieties of an academic chair to the catch-as-catch-can methods of the political wrestling mat, to get acquainted with the men and problems of the new career. But the Smith-Martine affair gave birth prematurely to an immediate occasion for a fight. As president of Princeton, Doctor Wilson had proved that he was not averse to a fight when a fight was necessary and when it was distinctly his affair, but he may well have paused to consider whether the Smith-Martine business was his affair. One of his favourite stories in later years was of the Irishman who entered a saloon and seeing two men in a tangle of fists and writhing legs and bloody heads on the floor at the rear of the saloon, turned to the barkeeper and asked: "Is this a private fight, or can anybody git into it?" A more politic man than Woodrow Wilson and one less sensitive to moral duty, might well have argued that this contest was the business of the Legislature, not of the Governor. Many a governor- elect would have avoided the issue on this unquestionably sound legal principle, and friends in Princeton were in fact advising Mr. Wilson to precisely this course, the course of neutrality. It would not be strange if neutrality, aloofness, had presented a rather attractive picture at times to Mr. Wilson's mind. Why should he gratuitously take a partisan position between the factions which would inevitably win for him the enmity of a strong element within the party? Which would also win for him the unpleasant reputation of ingratitude? For though he had at the first overtures from Senator Smith and his friends made it as clear as language can make anything that he could accept the nomination only with the explicit understanding that acceptance should establish no obligations of political favours to anybody, it would be impossible to make it appear that opposition to Smith's darling desire to become senator was not an ungracious return to the man who had led the forces which had nominated Wilson at Trenton.