And why?
They have a distinct presentiment that if they should vote for a man like Roosevelt they would never dare to go to sleep again lest they wake up next morning and find niggers sitting at the breakfast-table on the level of social equality.
Consequently, Roosevelt didn’t cut any ice in the schoolhouse debate.
Parker and I—we had it all to ourselves. Good-natured people will not begrudge this honor to Parker and me, I am sure, for we are clearly entitled to something, and Teddy has just about carried off everything else. He can afford to be generous, and to let two of his late competitors wear the laurels in a college debate away down in Georgia.
Whether Parker coached the boys on his side I am not informed.
If he didn’t, they must have had a tough job getting up “points.” It is a task at which the average boy would need prompt and patient assistance.
Perhaps, W. J. B. was appealed to. At all events, he should have been. The Nebraska Talk-Factory turns out quite a variety of finished product, and the kind of garment it wove for the adornment of Parker, late in the last campaign, was a marvel in its way—especially when one considers how suddenly the machinery had to be readjusted to fill that particular order.
As to myself, I frankly confess that I “suspended the rules” and gave my champion some “points.” This was wrong, but human.
Had I known that the judges presiding over the debate were two Democrats and a Republican, I would have furnished points to the Parker side, also. Then my champions would have come out ahead.
My private opinion is that I could have coached the Parker champions in such a way that even a pied-piper tribunal, composed of two Georgia Democrats and a New York Republican, would have had to call in a fourth man to know how to decide.