tactics of the Republican managers, who were attempting to discredit 

 Governor Wilson by filthy slanders as to his private life. These in- 

 famous lies ran all through the country from coast to coast and were 

 kept aUve so long as Mr, Wilson was in the White House, yet they 

 never appeared in print, in which case they might have been met by 

 a libel suit. A Cape Cod neighbour who went up to Boston every day, 

 asked me what I knew of Mr. Wilson's morals, quoting a friend who 

 said he would Hke to vote for Mr. V/ilson but could not do so because 

 of the latter's infamous private life. I answered that, in a little town 

 like Princeton, it was impossible for any one to lead a double life with- 

 out detection; that I had known Governor Wilson intimately for more 

 than thirty years and that his life was as completely irreproachable as 

 that of any man could be. So thoroughly inapplicable were these tales, 

 that they were grotesquely absurd. 



President Roosevelt had been slandered in a somewhat similar, un- 

 derground fashion; tales representing him to be a drunkard had been 

 gleefully circulated by the more unscrupulous of his political enemies. 

 At last, an incautious editor, somewhere in Michigan, printed these 

 fables and gave Mr. Roosevelt a chance to nail the lie in open court. 

 Mr. Wilson never had the opportunity to bring the matter to an issue; 

 indeed, I am not sure that he knew of the slanders, for, in conversation 

 with me, he never alluded to them. 



A representative of one of the New York newspapers called on Pro- 

 fessor Paul van Dyke and asked him to confirm the stories which were 

 so rife as to Mr. Wilson's morals, and, when van Dyke declared that 

 he knew of nothing which could, even remotely, support the slanders, 

 the reporter gave an illustration of his own code of honour. As Paul 

 told the story to me at the time, the reporter said: "You were strongly 

 opposed to Wilson, when he was president of Princeton, and you must 

 be willing to tell something discreditable about him." Van Dyke an- 

 swered : "I was very much against some of his policies, but that wouldn't 

 justify me in slandering him. I know nothing to his discredit." Not sat- 

 isfied with this, the newspaper man made a second call, to see if he 

 couldn't extort something to substantiate the rumours, of course, with 

 no better success. The slanderers were eager enough and tried hard 

 enough to find corroboration, but they never secured anything which 

 they dared to print. 



The schism in the Republican party and the nomination of Mr. Roose- 

 velt by the Progressives made Mr. Wilson's election a certainty and, 

 therefore, no one was surprised by the result in November. Very shortly 



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