No man in the country has waged the battle for National honesty with greater courage and success, with more whole-hearted devotion to the public good; and no man has been more traduced and maligned by the wrong-doing agents and representatives of the great sinister forces of evil.

He secured the conviction of various men of high political and financial standing in connection with the Oregon prosecutions; he and Burns behaved with scrupulous fairness and propriety; but their services to the public caused them to incur the bitter hatred of those who had wronged the public, and after I left office the National Administration turned against them.

One of the most conspicuous of the men whom they had succeeded in convicting was pardoned by President Taft--in spite of the fact that the presiding Judge, Judge Hunt, had held that the evidence amply warranted the conviction, and had sentenced the man to imprisonment.

As was natural, the one hundred and forty-six land-fraud defendants in Oregon, who included the foremost machine political leaders in the State, furnished the backbone of the opposition to me in the Presidential contest of 1912.

The opposition rallied behind Messrs.
Taft and LaFollette; and although I carried the primaries handsomely, half of the delegates elected from Oregon under instructions to vote for me, sided with my opponents in the National Convention--and as regards some of them I became convinced that the mainspring of their motive lay in the intrigue for securing the pardon of certain of the men whose conviction Heney had secured.
Land fraud and post-office cases were not the only ones.