igorous telegram to the Republican legislators at Albany urging them to
support Governor Hughes and to vote for the primary bill. But the appeal
went in vain: the Legislature was too thoroughly boss-ridden. This
telegram, however, sounded a warning to the usurpers in the house of the
Republican Penelope that the fingers of the returned Odysseus had not
lost their prowess with the heroic bow.

During the summer of 1910, Roosevelt made a trip to the West and in a
speech at Ossawattomie, Kansas, set forth what came to be described as
the New Nationalism. It was his draft of a platform, not for himself,
but for the nation. A few fragments from that speech will suggest what
Roosevelt was thinking about in those days when the Progressive party
was stirring in the womb. "At many stages in the advance of humanity,
this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and
the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition
of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of free men to gain
and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests,
who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating
the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the
essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege,
and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest
possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.

"Every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled
to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in
any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property,
and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of
suffrage to any corporation.

"The absence of effective state and, especially, national restraint upon
unfair money getting has tended to create a small class of enormously
wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and
increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which
enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general
welfare that they should hold or exercise.

"We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property
to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of
property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too
far.

"The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the
people of the