resident can be
effectively used to secure a renomination, especially if the President
has the support of certain great political and financial interests. It
is for this reason, and this reason alone, that the wholesome principle
of continuing in office, so long as he is willing to serve, an incumbent
who has proved capable, is not applicable to the Presidency. Therefore,
the American people have wisely established a custom against allowing
any man to hold that office for more than two consecutive terms.
But every shred of power which a President exercises while in office
vanishes absolutely when he has once left office. An ex-President stands
precisely in the position of any other private citizen, and has not one
particle more power to secure a nomination or election than if he had
never held the office at all--indeed, he probably has less because of
the very fact that he has held the office. Therefore the reasoning on
which the anti-third term custom is based has no application whatever
to an ex-President, and no application whatever to anything except
consecutive terms. As a barrier of precaution against more than two
consecutive terms the custom embodies a valuable principle. Applied
in any other way it becomes a mere formula, and like all formulas
a potential source of mischievous confusion. Having this in mind, I
regarded the custom as applying practically, if not just as much, to a
President who had been seven and a half years in office as to one
who had been eight years in office, and therefore, in the teeth of a
practically unanimous demand from my own party that I accept another
nomination, and the reasonable certainty that the nomination would be
ratified at the polls, I felt that the substance of the custom applied
to me in 1908. On the other hand, it had no application whatever to any
human being save where it was invoked in the case of a man desiring a
third consecutive term. Having given such substantial proof of my own
regard for the custom, I deem it a duty to add this comment on it. I
believe that it is well to have a custom of this kind, to be generally
observed, but that it would be very unwise to have it definitely
hardened into a Constitutional prohibition. It is not desirable
ordinarily that a man should stay in office twelve consecutive years as
President; but most certainly the American people are fit to take care
of themselves, and stand in no need of an irrevocable self-denying
ordinance. They