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.  We were especially zealous in prosecuting all of the “higher up” offenders in the realms of politics and finance who swindled on a large scale.  Special assistants of the Attorney-General, such as Mr. Frank Kellogg, of St. Paul, and various first-class Federal district attorneys in different parts of the country secured notable results:  Mr. Stimson and his assistants, Messrs. Wise, Denison, and Frankfurter, in New York, for instance, in connection with the prosecution of the Sugar Trust and of the banker Morse, and of a great metropolitan newspaper for opening its columns to obscene and immoral advertisements; and in St. Louis Messrs. Dyer and Nortoni, who, among other services, secured the conviction and imprisonment of Senator Burton, of Kansas; and in Chicago Mr. Sims, who raised his office to the highest pitch of efficiency, secured the conviction of the banker Walsh and of the Beef Trust, and first broke through the armor of the Standard Oil Trust.  It is not too much to say that these men, and others like them, worked a complete revolution in the enforcement of the Federal laws, and made their offices organized legal machines fit and ready to conduct smashing fights for the people’s rights and to enforce the laws in aggressive fashion.  When I took the Presidency, it was a common and bitter saying that a big man, a rich man, could not be put in jail.  We put many big and rich men in jail; two United States Senators, for instance, and among others two great bankers, one in New York and one in Chicago.  One of the United States Senators died, the other served his term. (One of the bankers was released from prison by executive order after I left office.) These were merely individual cases among many others like them.  Moreover, we were just as relentless in dealing with crimes of violence among the disorderly and brutal classes as in dealing with the crimes of cunning and fraud of which certain wealthy men and big politicians were guilty.  Mr. Sims in Chicago was particularly efficient in sending to the penitentiary numbers of the infamous men who batten on the “white slave” traffic, after July, 1908, when by proclamation I announced the adherence of our Government to the international agreement for the suppression of the traffic.