It represented dissatisfied Republicans, an alienable remnant of Democrats, and had drawn into it a few sporadic political elements that barely sufficed to give it numerical significance. W. J. Bryan, who would have been otherwise a candidate himself, had endorsed Roosevelt, furnishing thereby an example of political abnegation which had enormously increased his popularity, and assured him the nomination of Nationalists, as the new fusionists were called, in 1913. This was also deemed a wise forethought, as a provision against the possible success of the rampant Hearstites. Hearst would have been the socialist candidate in the last campaign, had not the principal himself, on hearing of Roosevelt’s nomination, sapiently withdrawn, fearing defeat, which would have too seriously discredited him in the next national struggle.
The Prohibitionists had, by an act of virtual self-repudiation, thrown their not inconsiderable vote to Roosevelt. The Socialists were the only important opponents of his election, and their surprising record made the prophetic warnings, which had convinced Roosevelt of the necessity of his candidacy, appear like a veritable intervention of Providence, at least this was the language commonly used with reference to it.
Roosevelt had displayed remarkable self-control and consistent gravity, and had even, in a very extraordinary address at his inauguration, deprecated the unanimity of his election. He deplored the precarious dilemma of a country which found itself forced to do violence to its traditions in order to escape an imagined danger.
Almost synchronous with his re-election, the announcement had been made that the Panama Canal, upon which the President in his former term, had exerted the utmost pressure of his inexhaustible enthusiasm, energy and exhortation, was advancing very rapidly, engineering difficulties unexpectedly had vanished, a system of extreme precision in the control of the work, itself largely the device of the President, had facilitated the entire operation, and a promise of still more rapid progress was made.
This promise had produced a storm of southern enthusiasm. The south, completely restored in its financial autonomy, had been growing richer and richer, and their public men had not hesitated to paint, in the brightest colors, the further expansion of their prosperity with the opening of this avenue of commerce between the oceans, assuring its people the markets of Asia, and their rapid promotion to the political, social and financial primacy in the United States.
Northern capitalists had not been incredulous to these predictions, and in a group of railroad magnates, whose interests seemed now seriously threatened, a sullen resentment was maintained against Roosevelt, in which the unmistakable notes of designs almost criminal had been detected. Mr. Tompkins, whose altercation with the southerner had led Leacraft into this voyage of interpellation and discovery, was a paid agent, in the employ of this cabal.
Alexander Leacraft was an Englishman, inheriting an English temperament without English prejudices; he was fortunately free from the worst faults of that insular hesitancy which imparts the curious impression of timidity, and had advanced far enough in cosmopolitan observation to get rid of the queerness of provincial ignorance. He was indeed a sane and attractive man, and provided by nature with a forcible physique, a good face, and a really fascinating proclivity to make the best of things, admire his companions, and bend unremittingly to the pressure of his environment.
He had not escaped the dangers incident to youth, and his heart had become attached to a lady of Baltimore—one of the undeviatingly arch and winning American girls—to whom he had been introduced by her brother, a commercial correspondent.
The nature of his affairs—he was the secretary of an English company which operated some copper mines in Arizona and Canada—had made him a frequent visitor to the shores of the New World, and he had not been unwilling to express his hope that the United States would become his final home. These sentiments were quite honest, though it might have elicited the cynical observation that the capture of his affections by Miss Garrett had done more to weaken his loyalty to the crown than any dispassionate admiration of a Republican form of government. But the imputation would have been malicious. Leacraft did feel an earnest admiration for the American people, and yielded a genial acquiescence to the claims of popular suffrage. His connexion with America had been fortunate, and he had come in contact with men and women whose natures by endowment, and whose manners and habits, conversation and tastes, by inheritance and cultivation, were elevating and engaging—men and women whose nobility of sympathy with all things human was reflected in an art of living not only always decorous and refined, but guided, too, by the principles of urbanity and justice.
The Garretts of Baltimore were a widely connected, and in numbers an imposing social element, and none of the various daughters of light and loveliness who bore that name more merited consideration in the eyes of manly youth than the capricious, captivating and elusive Sally. Her graces of manner were not less delightful than her conversation was spirited and roguish, and her assumption of a demure simplicity had often driven Alexander Leacraft to the limits of his English matter-of-fact credulity in explaining to her the relations of the King to Parliament, or the municipal acreage of the old City of London. All of which information this very well read and much travelled young woman, as might be expected, was possessed of, but just for the purposes of her feminine and cruel fancy, not too well disposed towards her patient suitor, disingenuously concealed. Sally really enjoyed the painstaking gravity with which the young Englishman explained the eternal principles of English rule, and the never-to-be-forgotten superiorities of London.