When Woodrow Wilson heard of the assault upon Roosevelt, he chivalrously offered to discontinue his own campaign, but the Colonel refused this concession. After a few days spent in recuperation he resumed his speaking tour with undiminished vigor. In the Presidential election which followed he received eighty-eight electoral votes. He had divided the Republican party in all states. In twenty-eight of the states he received a majority over Taft. Through this division in the Republican ranks, Woodrow Wilson became President.
While Roosevelt and Wilson were for the most part in opposition to each other, some have wrongly said, with regard to the proposal for a league of nations, that Roosevelt was backward and reactionary in his attitude. This is directly confuted by the prophetic speech he delivered at Christiania, Norway, May 5, 1910, while on his world tour. His utterance there shows that fundamentally President Wilson and he were thinking alike on this subject:
“Something should be done as soon as possible to check the growth of armaments, especially naval armaments, by international agreement. No one power could or should act by itself; for it is eminently undesirable, from the standpoint of peace and righteousness, that a power which really does believe in peace should place itself at the mercy of some rival which may at bottom have no such belief and no intention of acting on it.
“But, granted sincerity of purpose, the great powers of the world should find no insurmountable difficulty in reaching an agreement which would put an end to the present costly and growing extravagances of expenditures on naval armaments. An agreement merely to limit the size of ships would have been very useful a few years ago, and would still be of use; but the agreement should go much further.
“Finally, it would be a master stroke if those great powers honestly bent on peace would form a league of peace, not only to keep peace among themselves, but to prevent by force if necessary, its being broken by others.
“The supreme difficulty in connection with developing the peace work of The Hague arises from the lack of any executive power, of any police power to enforce the decrees of the court. In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force; on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect.