icts seriously
distressed many of Roosevelt's friends and associates. They felt that he
was too big to fritter himself away on small matters from which he--and
the cause whose great champion he was--had so little to gain and so much
to lose. They wanted him to wait patiently for the moment of destiny
which they felt sure would come. But it was never easy for Roosevelt
to wait. It was the hardest thing in the world for him to decline an
invitation to enter a fight--when the cause was a righteous one.

So the year 1911 passed by, with the Taft Administration steadily losing
prestige, and the revolt of the Progressives within the Republican party
continually gathering momentum. Then came 1912, the year of the Glorious
Failure.

CHAPTER XIII. THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY

The Progressive party and the Progressive movement were two things.
The one was born on a day, lived a stirring, strenuous span of life,
suffered its fatal wound, lingered on for a few more years, and received
its coup de grace. The other sprang like a great river system from
a multitude of sources, flowed onward by a hundred channels, always
converging and uniting, until a single mighty stream emerged to water
and enrich and serve a broad country and a great people. The one was
ephemeral, abortive--a failure. The other was permanent, creative--a
triumph. The two were inseparable, each indispensable to the other. Just
as the party would never have existed if there had been no movement,
so the movement would not have attained such a surpassing measure of
achievement so swiftly without the party.

The Progressive party came into full being at the convention held in
Chicago on August 5, 1912 under dramatic circumstances. Every drama must
have a beginning and this one had opened for the public when, on the
10th of February in the same year, the Republican Governors of West
Virginia, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Wyoming, Michigan, Kansas, and
Missouri addressed a letter to Roosevelt, in which they declared that,
in considering what would best insure the continuation of the Republican
party as a useful agency of good government, they had reached the
conclusion that a large majority of the Republican voters of the country
favored Roosevelt's nomination, and a large majority of the people
favored his election as the next President. They asserted their belief
that, in view of this public demand, he should soon declare whether, if
the nomination came to him unsolicited