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MAY 4, 1912

HAMILTON W. MABIE, Associate Editor

THEODORE ROOSEVELT Contributing Editor

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In the political campaign last week President Taft added to his list ten delegates from Rhode Island, eight from New Hampshire, and the four delegates at large from Iowa. The final result in Iowa gives Mr. Taft sixteen delegates, and Senator Cummins, the State's favorite son,' ten delegates. The Cummins delegates are of course Progressives, and will probably be found at the Convention on the Roosevelt side. New Hampshire is the first State with a Presidential preference primary in which Mr. Taft has not been overwhelmingly defeated. The Roosevelt forces in Missouri, after an exciting contest, succeeded in controlling the State convention and in having the delegates at large instructed for Mr. Roosevelt. As a concession to the Taft forces, eight delegates at large, four from each side, were selected, each to have half a vote at the National Convention, but all of them are bound by explicit instructions to vote for Mr. Roosevelt. In Kansas a sufficient number of delegates to the State convention have already been elected to give the Roosevelt forces control of that body. They will therefore be enabled to name four delegates at large, and will probably have eighteen out of the twenty delegates throughout the State.

replied that it was not compatible with the public interest to transmit them. On Wednesday of last week a resolution was introduced by a Democratic Senator calling once more for the papers. The resolution was adopted by the Senate at two o'clock, and at four o'clock the documents were transmitted to the Senate by the Department of Justice. The documents included photographic copies of various letters, which obviously there had been no time to prepare after the passage of the resolution. The action of the Administration in replying to the resolution of the Senate at this moment, when the Massachusetts primaries were only six days away and when the Taft cause had suffered seriously from the result of the primaries in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Oregon, was, to say the least, nimble. The papers sent to the Senate included a letter from the Commissioner of Corporations, Mr. Herbert Knox Smith, to Mr. Roosevelt in 1907, and a letter from President Roosevelt to his Attorney-General, Mr. Bonaparte, written a little earlier. President Roosevelt's letter informed the Attorney-General that, according to the statements of Mr. George W. Perkins, the Harvester Company had repeatedly, of its own initiative, asked that its business be investigated by the Commissioner of Corporations; that the Company had promised to rectify certain practices complained of by the Inter-State Commerce Commission, and to see that nothing contrary to the rulings of the Commission was again done; that the Company declared itself ready to rectify any illegal action which should be pointed out to it; and that it requested, therefore, that no suit should be instituted against it until the investigation, then being made at the direction of the Senate by the Commissioner of Corporations, should be carried to completion. President Roosevelt's letter closed as follows: "Will you see Mr. Perkins and Commissioner Smith,

The incident of the week in the campaign, aside from the speeches of President Taft and Mr. Roosevelt in Massachusetts, which are reviewed fully elsewhere in this issue, was the airing in the Senate of sundry papers concerning the relations of the previous Administration with the Harvester Trust, and Mr. Roosevelt's comment upon them. Once before during the past few months has the Senate by resolution asked the Administration for the papers in relation to the Harvester Trust, but the President then

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