FOUGHT LORIMER IN ILLINOIS.
Now, just one more moment about Mr. Lorimer.
I know his record well. Mr. Taft was originally, a year and a quarter ago, against Mr. Lorimer, and at that time he requested me not to assault Mr. Lorimer in public for fear it would help Mr. Lorimer. [Laughter.]
And accordingly I kept quiet for several months, until I became convinced that the assault against Mr. Lorimer was going on with such excessive secrecy [laughter] that neither Mr. Lorimer nor any of his friends knew that there was an assault at all. [Laughter.] And then I took up the cudgels that I had dropped and I attacked Mr. Lorimer again. [Applause.] And I didn’t attack him in Massachusetts after the Illinois primary; I attacked him in Illinois before the Illinois primary. [Applause.] I was informed before I went there that I ought not to attack Mr. Lorimer because he had many friends, some of whom “intended to vote for me,” and that I would alienate their support. And I answered to them that I would rather lose every delegate in Illinois than by silence connive at the wickedness of which Mr. Lorimer had been guilty.
And I fought it out fair and square on that issue from one end of Illinois to the other. [A voice: “You did.”] And I won. [Applause.]
And I got every delegate in Illinois excepting two, the two from the district which Mr. Lorimer carries in his waistcoat pocket, and those two are for Mr. Taft. And, friends, it would not have been possible for me to have supported Mr. Lorimer at all—to have acquiesced in his support of me; but if it had been, and I had been going to repudiate him, I would have repudiated him before the Illinois primary and not afterwards. [Applause.]