ll, I want to say this about myself: I have altogether too
many important things to think of to pay any heed or feel any concern
over my own death.

"Now I would not speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being
shot. I am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is
for many other things. It is not in the least for my own life.

"I want you to understand that I am ahead of the game anyway. No man
has had a happier life than I have had--a happier life in every way.

"I have been able to do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and
I am interested in doing other things.

"I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am very much
uninterested in whether I am shot or not.

"It was just as when I was colonel of my regiment. I always felt that a
private was to be excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety
about his personal safety, but I cannot understand a man fit to be a
colonel who can pay any heed to his personal safety when he is
occupied, as he ought to be occupied, with the absorbing desire to do
his duty.

"I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul; I believe in the
Progressive movement--a movement for the betterment of mankind, a
movement for making life a little easier for all our people, a movement
to try to take the burdens off the man and especially the woman in this
country who is most oppressed.

"I am absorbed in the success of that movement. I feel uncommonly proud
in belonging to that movement.

"Friends, I ask you now this evening to accept what I am saying as
absolute truth when I tell you I am not thinking of my own success, I
am not thinking of my own life or of anything connected with me
personally."

The disabling of Col. Roosevelt at this tragic moment was a great
strategic loss in his campaign. The mind of the country was in a
pronounced state of indecision. He had started at Detroit, Mich., one
week before and had planned to make a great series of sledge hammer
speeches upon every vital issue in the campaign, which plan took him to
the very close of the fight. He had planned to put his strongest
opponent in a defensive position, the effect of which, now that all is
over, no man can measure. Stricken down, an immeasurable loss was
sustained. In the years that lie before, when misjudgment and
misstatements, which are the petty things born of prejudice, and which
die with the breath that gives them life, shall have passed away, this
incident a