Now, just one more moment about Mr. Lorimer.
I know his record well. Mr. Taft was originally, a year and a quarter
ago, against Mr. Lorimer, and at that time he requested me not to
assault Mr. Lorimer in public for fear it would help Mr. Lorimer.
[Laughter.]
And accordingly I kept quiet for several months, until I became
convinced that the assault against Mr. Lorimer was going on with such
excessive secrecy [laughter] that neither Mr. Lorimer nor any of his
friends knew that there was an assault at all. [Laughter.] And then
I took up the cudgels that I had dropped and I attacked Mr. Lorimer
again. [Applause.] And I didn’t attack him in Massachusetts after
the Illinois primary; I attacked him in Illinois before the Illinois
primary. [Applause.] I was informed before I went there that I ought
not to attack Mr. Lorimer because he had many friends, some of whom
“intended to vote for me,” and that I would alienate their support. And
I answered to them that I would rather lose every delegate in Illinois
than by silence connive at the wickedness of which Mr. Lorimer had been
guilty.
And I fought it out fair and square on that issue from one end of
Illinois to the other. [A voice: “You did.”] And I won. [Applause.]
And I got every delegate in Illinois excepting two, the two from the
district which Mr. Lorimer carries in his waistcoat pocket, and those
two are for Mr. Taft. And, friends, it would not have been possible
for me to have supported Mr. Lorimer at all――to have acquiesced in his
support of me; but if it had been, and I had been going to repudiate
him, I would have repudiated him before the Illinois primary and not
afterwards. [Applause.]