These were the days when Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Root and Mr. Taft were known and very aptly caricatured as "The Three Musketeers," a tiling which both pleased and amused them. Mr. Roosevelt was, of course, D'Artagnan, Mr. Root was Athos and Mr. Taft was Porthos, and they worked together in such harmony and with such high mutual regard as one remembers now with singular satisfaction.
Mr. Hearst was running against Mr. Hughes for Governor of New York, and the situation in Idaho, complicated by the murder of Governor Steunenberg and the activities of the anarchistic element in the Western Federation of Miners, seemed also to demand special attention from the Administration, so Mr. Root was delegated to "hurl the spear of civilisation and right thinking" in New York, while Mr. Taft was sent into the West with Idaho as the climax of his itinerary.
All this had been arranged for him while he was away on the mission of averting disaster in Cuba, and when he returned to Washington he had just time, as he expressed it, "to pack the War Department into a suitcase" before he was off on a speech-making trip which took him from Baltimore through Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho and back through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Orleans to Washington, with only such time for preparation of speeches as he could get on the trains between stops.
His letters to me were dictated to his stenographer, and in re-reading them I get the impression that I was made the victim of his thinking processes since he poured into them all the politics and the turmoil of the hour, together with lengthy comments which kept me very much alive with interest in the campaign in which he was engaged.
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