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So it is that we relive his opening statement in the first television address with the dramatic immediacy of the present.

No consideration of risk urges itself upon him now: for this is what the mind does with the ideas on which it has not properly focussed.

Yet with a mind less shallow, if less sharp, than some of the fortune-happy syndicates which back him, he feels what he cannot formulate ; ;

and we watch him amid the overtones which suggest he could never in any conscience urge a risk upon the voters.

Moving as he is into the phase of the campaign which demands conviction of him, he adopts a position that is morally indefensible.

He ascribes to the mercy of God the peace which this personal matter -- the assurance that he can physically sustain the burden of the office longer than any individual in the history of our nation has been able to do -- has brought him.

What is simply an opinion formed in defiance of the laws of human probability, whether or not it is later confirmed, has become by September of the election year `` a firm conviction ''.

As a means of silencing a discussion which ought to have taken place, the statement is an effective one: we sympathize with the universal confusion which gives rise to such convictions.

But it is also the climax to one of the absorbing chapters in our current political history.