respect Blaine; on the contrary, he regarded Blaine as a bad man:
but he believed that the future of the country would be much
safer under the control of the Republican Party than under the
Democratic. This doctrine exposes its adherents to obvious
criticism, if not to suspicion. It enables persons of callous
consciences to support bad platforms and bad candidates without
blushing; but after all, who shall say at what point you are
justified in bolting your party? The decision must rest with the
individual. And although it was hard for the bolting Independents
in 1884 to accept the tenet that party transcends persons, it was
Roosevelt's reason, and with him sincere. Some of his colleagues
in the better element who had struggled as he had to defeat
Blaine, and then, almost effusively, exalted Blaine as their
standard-bearer, were less fortunate than he in having their
sincerity doubted. George William Curtis, Carl Schurz, Charles
Francis Adams, and other Independents of their intransigent
temper formed a Mugwump Party and this turned the scale in
electing Grover Cleveland President.

There used to be much discussion as to who persuaded Roosevelt,
although he detested Blaine, to stand by the Republicans in 1884.
Those were the days when very few of his critics understood that,
in spite of his youth, he had already thought for himself on
politics and had reached certain conclusions as to fundamental
principles. These critics assumed that he must have been won over
by Henry Cabot Lodge, with whom he had been intimate since his
Harvard days, and who was supposed to be his political mentor.
The truth is, however, that Roosevelt had formed his own opinion
about bolting, and that he and Lodge, in discussing possibilities
before they went to the Chicago Convention, had independently