WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

BY

ROBERT LEE DUNN

 

THE POLITICAL LIFE OF WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

 

 

THE FAMILY LIFE OF WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

 

CHAPTER I.

 

THE busiest, hardest working, most effective Secretary of War that the United States Government has had in many years is William Howard Taft, yet he is the most accessible. Any one may go to see him, and he has time to listen to each one, but where the time comes from is a mystery. No one else has so much to do, unless it be Theodore Roosevelt, and no one else ever did so many other things, with the same notable exception, yet the War Office has seen more work undertaken and carried on successfully under Taft’s supervision than under anyone else since Stanton during the Civil War.

Secretary Taft’s range of activity, however, is vastly more extensive than was Stanton’s. It reaches from Porto Rico and Cuba on the East, to the Philippines, which are so far west that they are called east; and from Nome, Alaska, on the north to Panama and the Big Ditch on the south. That is an expansive job, one that needs an expansive man,—a great man to take care of it.

But no matter how big the job may be, and Taft jobs have been growing bigger ever since his first one over thirty years ago, he has always proved himself to be a little bigger yet, and he has invariably made good. He has, one might say, literally devoured the work before him and looked around for more. He has always had a healthy American appetite for work.

His first job was before he was old enough to vote. He was in his father’s office then, in Cincinnati, and made such a sturdy American fight for purity and clean dealing that he was appointed Assistant Prosecuting Attorney. He showed his mettle and won public approval. Four years later, when he was twenty-three, he became Collector of Internal Revenue. It was a good job from the salary point of view, bringing him in about four hundred dollars a month, but after the young man had mastered the details and understood the work thoroughly, he resigned and re-entered his father’s office. There were things better worth working for than much money, he said, and we shall find he was American in doing this, if we read our country’s history aright.

How many young men would have looked out on life as Taft did then, seeing as clearly as he what was worthy of his best efforts? His life was just beginning. He had won a name, he had social position, and his income from not very arduous work was forty-five hundred dollars a year. He was engaged to be married. Forty-five hundred dollars would look good to most young men in Taft’s position, but the sum does not seem to have appealed to him at all, nor to her whom he was to marry, for he turned from the easy work and easier money to the private prac­tice of law where the work was infinitely harder and the money was not only hard but intermittent. But the good old-time American spirit said “No” to the money — and Fate did the rest.

Fate had little of private life in store for William Howard Taft. She had found him to be the right sort of timber, and she had decided he should be an American demonstration. Soon, therefore, he was in the public eye again—this time as Assistant County Solicitor, which proved to be merely a tep to a judgeship in the Superior Court, to which Governor Foraker appointed him, to’ fill out an unexpired term.

Young Taft served out the remainder of the term and then stood for election at the polls. He won and continued on the Superior Bench for two years longer, when President Harrison appointed him Solicitor General of the United States. Taft was thirty-three years old then, and glad that he had not remained a revenue collector. Had it not been for his earnest Americanism, he might have been a collector yet.

The Solicitor General’s office was a busy  one in those days. There is always something doing there; but when William Howard Taft arrived in Washington there were big things on. The seal fisheries dispute was up before the Supreme Court of the United States, and British interests had retained Joseph Choate as counsel. There was good backing for the British, but the verdict was for the Americans. Taft won. He won again when the constitutionality of the McKinley Bill came up. After this American triumph, the President appointed him a United States Circuit Judge. His father had sat on this same circuit before him, that of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. One would think that even one of so impressive propor­tions as Mr. Taft would have room enough in these four states, of which the area is 205,460 square miles, but soon he was away over the boundaries of these commonwealths and making a national reputation. His decisions in several labor cases sent his name around the world, advertising American principles of justice to all peoples, and these very decisions which were against the acts of certain labor organizations back in the 90’s are now recognized as embodying principles which union men vigorously uphold. That was a triumph for William Howard Taft which was emphatically American.

President McKinley, a keen judge of men, realized that the four states of the Middle West, splendid though they were, did not afford sufficient scope for so big a man as Taft; therefore, when the time came, he offered the Judge the Presidency of the Philippine Commission in 1900.

For two reasons Taft said “No.” “He did not believe,” he said, “in the United States having possessions so far away — America was large enough without them — and besides his ambition was toward the Supreme Bench.

“That is all very good,” replied the President. “We had to take the Philippines, and someone has to look after them. They cannot be left to themselves. You go out there and when you come back you’ll be the better Supreme Court judge for the experience.”

Even those who knew Judge Taft well thought that the Philippine job would be big enough for him; big enough for any man, one would say. He was to organize a government for an archipelago of fifteen hundred islands, inhabited by no one knew how many tribes, speaking languages that were utterly strange to the western world, islands where there was always warfare and much savagery, many religions and little education. He was to plant in these islands, ten thousand miles away, seeds of American civilization, and was to stay by while these seeds sprouted and grew up into plants,— hopingly, into trees.

First, as President of the Philippine Commission, and then as Governor of the Islands, Taft planted the seed with prudence—American seeds, quite different from any ever seen in the islands before; different, too, from the seeds others had planted in China, the

East Indies, India, Egypt, or the East coast of Africa; and in gardening the plants he did so well that the Filipinos grew to love him and to pray that he would stay with them always. This prayer he was pleased to heed once, and then a second time, for he refused twice the coveted seat on the Bench of the Supreme Court of the United States that he might stay with his wards. He would not have taken the Secretaryship of War when President Roosevelt offered it to him had he not been assured that he would still have the Philippines under his especial care.

He accepted the Cabinet position in 1903, and has been out to see “his people” twice since then. Last year’s journey was especially to fulfill the promise he had made that he would return to open their first National Assembly—their first formal step in becoming Americans.

Such is the brief outline of the man who today is as adequate an illustration of Americanism as can be found among our citizens; a man whose continuous advance­ment must be most gratifying to himself as assuredly it should be to each and every one of his countrymen throughout this land.

 

CHAPTER II

 

OF course I knew much about Secretary Taft before I saw him, or thought I did. I knew, anyway, what I have recounted in the preceding chapter, but I must acknowledge that my first personal impression of the man, when  met him in Minneapolis, was that he was a curiosity. Not from his size at all, nor from his greatness in other ways, nor from his buoyant Americanism, but because he was the first public man I had ever encountered, or even heard of, who cared little for personal advertisement.

I had trailed the War Secretary to the Northwest, where he had gone on an inspection tour. I wished to accompany him. I was explaining that the eastern papers were keenly interested in what he did and what he said, when he broke in with:—

“I’ll take your word for it, and believe it is all as you say, but, to be quite frank, I’d rather you would not come along.”

I had had experiences so different with other men prominently in the public eye, that these words of the Secretary astonished me greatly—I might almost say amazed me —and, of course, I was interested. I felt that I must study this new “specimen” of statesman.

That night I saw him at the great banquet in Minneapolis, easily distinguishable by his amplitude. It was pleasant to note that his appetite was good, and that water was a beverage he was fond of. When the eating was over, the speeches began. The Secretary arose and 'smiled, then those near him also smiled. He smiled more, and in a minute, I dare say, there was not one of the five thou­sand faces which were turned eagerly toward him that had not broadened into a welcoming grin.

Mr. Taft’s speech was not political. He merely told what “we Americans” were doing,—first in the Philippines, and then in Panama and in Cuba and Porto Rico. There was no gesturing—almost none—for most of the time his hands were on his hips or in his pockets or reposing against his midriff. Sometimes he leaned a little forward to be emphatic. There was no spread-eagle ora­tory at all. No attempt at elocution. All was simple, straightforward, genial, kindly. Manifestly, the Secretary had established a bond of comradeship in the very beginning, and this bond held.

Early the following morning the Secretary crossed the river to St. Paul with Senator Clapp and President Locke of the Commer­cial Club and joined General J. Franklin Bell, to review the troops at Fort Snelling. Mr. Taft was very thorough with his review. It was not mere formality with him by any means. He inspected everything down to the pack train with great care. When the review was over he climbed into a motor-car, and —though it was a piping hot day—put on an overcoat. Turning up the collar, he gave the word to start.

“One moment, please,” said the camera man.

“All right,” answered the Secretary, “but please be quick,” and turning toward the camera, he tried to smile. It was the ghastliest attempt to appear at ease that I ever saw; a weird, heart-rending effort, and without a vestige of the joyousness that we had seen in his countenance the night before. We only looked and wondered, for none of us knew of the mortal agony the Secretary was enduring behind that courageous mask.

Some thirty minutes later, when Mr. Taft had reached the house of a friend, where he was a guest, a bulletin was issued stating that though the Secretary was then resting easily, it would be necessary to cancel all of his immediate engagements. He was suffering from ptomaine poisoning, a bit of fish having done the mischief, and, as the Secretary said: “the larger the corporation, the greater the capacity for pain.”

He had passed an uncomfortable night, and was a very sick man indeed when he attended the review, but he went through that morning on sheer American grit. Nor was the grit by any means all gone, even when he was assured that his condition was dangerous, for, despite bulletins and the protests of physicians, he persisted in putting in an appearance at the St. Paul banquet that night, though for only a few minutes. He could not bear to disappoint the upwards of nine thousand citizens assembled there to greet him. This brave courtesy, by the way, cost him three days in bed.

The St. Paul toastmaster, introducing the Secretary, spoke of the guest of the evening coming late because, owing to his perennial youth, he still had trouble occasionally with that complaint of childhood, a little stomach­ache. Whereupon Mr. Taft, arising rather slowly, begged to ask how a man of his dimensions could have a “little” stomach-ache!—a remark which brought down the house—and though the Secretary was not able to make a speech, he made a friend of every man and woman in that great hall.

A few days later I handed him a character photograph I had taken of him. It was of the same sort, of which I have nearly four thousand, that I have taken of President Roosevelt, President McKinley, Vice-President Fairbanks and other statesmen. He looked it over carefully, passed it to a friend, and said:

“I’m not quite as big as I thought I was. I was beginning to think I might be like one of those moving vans my good friends, the cartoonists, would have the public believe I am sometimes mistaken for. I rather like the picture.”

At one place on this tour the War Secretary was inspecting a cavalry post. A company rode by in somewhat broken alignment, in sympathy, evidently, with its captain who was manifestly badly rattled. The trouble proved contagious, for the officer of the day who rode by Mr. Taft, also became confused, spurring this way and that and giving hysterical and contradictory orders. The Secretary understood at once, and looking over the parade ground, said:

“Never mind, Major, that’s only human nature. We won’t let trifles bother us.”

Not many days later this same major was journeying northward with Mr. Taft and was standing on the rear platform while the Secretary was making a speech to a small but enthusiastic crowd. “ In this beautiful state of Iowa,” Mr. Taft was saying, when the Major, having more regard for precision of statement than for the Secretary’s feelings, leaned forward and whispered very audibly: “South Dakota, Mr. Secretary,—South Dakota. We’ve been in South Dakota the last four hours.”

Since the above incidents occurred I have traveled with Mr. Taft quite around the world and enough more miles here in America to go around again. I find the genial Secretary as thorough an American as I have ever known and the best traveler. Traveling with men identified with the nation’s politics has been my principal business for a dozen years, so the reader will understand that I rate the Secretary high. He has the diplomacy of the late Secretary Hay, the energy of President Roosevelt, and the conservatism of McKinley. Secretary Taft is as good a voyager as you will find in all this land of magnificent distances. There is not a drummer, not a bag-man that can beat him, and as for the other folk with whom long journeys by rail are so important a part of their day’s occupation, —I mean the politicians—they are not in his class at all.

Men who travel much, as a rule, find many annoyances on board the train—find them as though they were looking for them and had to have them. I know, for I have been on over a score of “progresses” up and down and across the country during political campaigns, with men of national reputation, and I have repeatedly seen how the little things annoy the big fellows. But with Secretary Taft it is different. He is not looking for annoyances. He does not expect them. He would not know an annoyance if he saw one. He would have to be introduced and have it explained to him; and the explanation would be the occasion for his saying, “ Ha—ha, that reminds me,—” and then those about the Secretary would hear a story — a rattler — clean and full of American humor, whereupon the annoyance, like the boy upon the burn­ing deck, would become non-existent.

Secretary Taft does not owe his accomplishment to long practice, though he is so great a traveler. Nor is it due to study and careful preparation. He has not studied how to travel, nor has he ever bothered about preparation. He travels just as he breathes, just as he eats and sleeps, that is, naturally, as any man whose nerves are right and who has never had reason to suspect that he was possessed of a digestive apparatus, performs these elemental acts.

No, the trifles that are such an irritation to others are not apparent to the great Secretary. He is comfortably, even joyously, oblivious of them. He boards a car just as any other able-bodied citizen of the United States boards it. And it is a car that is for the use of any other citizen as much as it is for him, for he does not care for specials. There is never any exclusiveness about his mode of traveling. What is good enough for Messrs. Smith, Jones, and Robinson is good enough for him. It is true that he usually asks for a lower berth, but almost any man will do that. He finds his number himself, unless the porter is speedier than one was ever known to be, gets into the two-thirds of the seat nearest the window, pulls out a book or a magazine and the day’s papers, and is absolutely at peace. He has not taken the whole of the section for himself, and is as pleased as possible to have another good fellow on the seat opposite, for a chat and an exchange of some of the latest good ones.

On these occasions of chance acquaintance he is free and natural, and talks on any and every subject except politics. He never seeks to convert a casual companion nor to impress him in any way. He has no interest in him other than that of good-fellowship and good­will. He is not forward nor imperative; only hearty, and he is ready for the first call when the man from the dining car comes down the aisle.

“Shall I reserve a table for you, Mr. Secretary?” asks the head of the sustenance section of the train. “Not at all, not at all,” replies Mr. Taft. “I’ll be in on time. You may always trust me for that. Thank you just the same,” and in he goes, to take a fourth seat, perhaps, and spending forty minutes very pleasantly, he leaves the table with three new adherents for his campaign, to say nothing of the chef and the darkey who had waited upon the unreserved table.

The Secretary looks after himself all along the route. He lays out his own clothes, and frequently shaves himself. A less jovial person might look dangerous with the instrument he wields so dexterously round about his countenance. It is of magnificent proportions, as is fitting for a man of such distinction. It is also keen and even-tempered—which is fitting, too. Evidently shaving is a pleasant occupation to the Secretary when traveling, as it does not interrupt the flow of small talk that others busy in the wash room may take part in while he is there.

Although Secretary Taft does not use tobacco, he has no objection to chatting amongst the smokers, just as he does not criticise the man who, as Solomon allowed was proper, takes a little for his stomach’s sake. He is broad and tolerant, and very human. He might take advantage of his remarkable ability as a story-teller to gather the boys around him, hand out cigars from a pocket of purposeful capacity, and also “set ’em up” till the small hours of the morning,—but he does not. He never plays to the gallery, nor does he play for popu­larity in any vulgar sense. The limelight has to seek him if it wants him. He will not go to it. He never tries to be on the plat­form to advertise his presence on a train. Nor does he hunt out the press men to ask them to let the world know that he is there. Ostentation and Secretary Taft are not on speaking terms. His tips are unostentatious, too. They are just what the ordinary trav­eler might give to those who are of service. He might hand waiters five-dollar-bills and write his name across them, if he chose, without fear that doing so would bring him to the poorhouse; but to do so never occurred to him. Nor will he indulge in any such extravagances, even after he has read this article. He is not that sort of man.

He is outspoken, frank, altogether fearless. Men lean over and whisper to him sometimes. But in the reply there is no whispering. The whisperer will not need an ear trumpet to gather in the gist of the Secretary’s remarks. He could hear him across the table, and probably he will not whisper any more. Surely not to this man who cares nothing for personal advertisement.

 

CHAPTER III.

 

MR. TAFT is the happiest man of his size in all America when summer comes ’round. Not because summer means a holiday for him (there are no holidays for secretaries of war), but because his family will be with him; Miss Helen coming up from Bryn Mawr and Robert from Yale, and he will see each and all the members every day, besides having his brothers and their families near him, too. Then the Secretary is happy all over, which means immensely happy.

The annual foregathering of Tafts takes place at Murray Bay. Murray Bay is up in Canada, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence, in the Province of Quebec. One can reach there by floating down the river from Montreal in a canoe, or more slowly by following the regular route so far as it goes, from Montreal to Quebec, then on down the river and across to Riviere du Loup, then across again and up the river once more to the landing in front of the Manoir Richelieu, the only absolutely perfect caravansary that I know of, which is in Murray Bay. From the Manoir, a few miles up and down in a calash — and the Taft summer home is in sight.

The house is ancient—one of the oldest frame houses in Canada—and age has only added to its homeliness, so that to look at it is to feel the cockles of one’s heart grow warm. Age has added to the attractiveness of the grounds about it, too. They are just as Nature laid them out, and they have had time to grow. They are a delight to look upon from the gable windows jutting from the shingle roof. Such ornaments as the old house has within are very largely from the Philippines, testimonials mostly of affection and high regard from those distant islands.

Manifestly, it is a place for wholesome outdoor life, for recreation and for hard work, and Mr. Taft is keen for both. He gets great satisfaction from the fact that he does not have to “dress.” To be comfortable all day long is so different from Washington, such a grateful change from the tours and their unending functions.

On Sundays Mr. Taft dons city clothes. Six days in flannels and one in blue serge is the routine. On Sundays he goes to the Union Church, where anyone and everyone is welcome, irrespective of faith or creed. The good-fellowship of the congregation is conspicuous after worship, when everybody shakes hands with everybody else, and the War Secretary, whose title should be Great Keeper of the Olive Branch, chats pleasantly with all.

Sitting in soulful silence, after the Sunday service, the Secretary rests. One can see youth returning to him then. The mystery of his extraordinary vigor vanishes. Nature does the work she always will, if only we will give her opportunity, and here, near to her heart, in Canada, the Secretary gives her free reign.

But on week days, what a difference! Mr. Taft begins at seven in the morning then, dictating to his secretary until nearly nine, when he breakfasts leisurely, quite as Mr. Fletcher would surely approve. A little later, whether the weather be fair or foul, he is off with his golf clubs to the links a mile and a half away—always on foot, too. Over the hills for eighteen holes he goes, and three hours later he is under the shower, saying what a fine thing it is to be alive. He may have a sandwich now, or he may not, but he surely has a secretary and has the War Department going all the afternoon. Then supper, which is ample, and the evening with Mrs. Taft and the children, until it is time to go to the rooms above with their gabled windows. There the clear air and the ozone from the hills make anything but slumber quite impossible.

“It was not ever thus,” says Mr. Taft.

“I remember when we first came here—a whole cargo of Tafts—twenty-one of us— fifteen years ago, we had nothing but a cigar­box of a house with half a dozen rooms in it, to hold us all. Maybe you think they didn’t say things to me! I was the one who persuaded them all to try this resort, and in the usual happy family manner they told me what they thought of my judgment.”

"I remember those days, too,” joins in Charles P. Taft. “Will was in the baby­raising business then, and in the middle of the night of course the babies would cry. All Taft babies have vociferating apparatus and attachments quite complete. The partitions between the rooms were thin,—the usual summer cottage partitions—so, in order not to disturb our sleep any more than was unavoidable, Will used to carry his wee ones out to the cool night air and pace up and down the board walk with them. I can still remember the sight of him in his night-shirt. It was worth being waked out of my sleep to see.”

The Secretary laughs and says: “Charles is very kind to put it that way. It eases my conscience, and I’ve no doubt at all that I was a picture.”

There is absolutely no false pride about the man. He can see himself as others,— even the cartoonist—sees him, and laughs as heartily as anyone at a joke on himself. No pomposity; no demagogue.

An incident illustrates this: The Secretary was sitting on a shaded bench overlooking the St. Lawrence River one day, his mind deep in some war papers which the government had forwarded him from Washington. Looking up, he espied an old woman standing on his porch.

“You spikka Inglees?” she asked. Little but the French Canadian patois is spoken at Murray Bay.

“No,” answered “M’sieu Taft,” as the natives up there call him; “we want nothing today.” She did not understand.

Shaking his head vigorously, he repeated: “No want!” Then he went back to his papers. In about five minutes a shadow fell across his table, and this time a one-eyed man with farm truck was seeking his attention.

“Well, what have you got?” queried Mr. Taft in his easy tones.

“Chickee, peegee (pigeons), potatoes—” began the man. The Secretary laid down his documents and went over to the vendor’s wagon. There he poked around among the stuff, but he did not find anything that he liked, and so he called to Mrs. Taft to come and tell the man in French that there was “nothing doing.”

Perambulating markets are not the only interruptions that come upon Mr. Taft while he is busy with the future of the Philippines, the perennial insurrection of Cuba, or the tariff and the Porto Ricans,—there is Charlie. Charlie demands attention, and he usually gets it.

Charlie Taft had been gnawing into a loaf of bread. He had a crumby face, and he wanted his sister to come out for a game of tennis, but she would not. “Never mind, Charlie, I’ll play tennis with you,” said the War Secretary, as he patted his little son affectionately on the back.

The youngster’s face brightened at once through its veil of bread crumbs.

“All right, Papa,” he shouted. “You can’t play very good tennis, but you’re an awful lot of fun.” And the two boys went hand in hand to the court in front of the house.

That one of the boys had been a judge and was now Secretary of War made no difference to the other one. He had found a playmate who was “an awful lot of fun.”

Charlie, who is ten years old, was at the head of his class—almost. When asked about it, he said: “Oh, yes, I’m at the head of my class, all but a girl.”

The Taft idea of exercise and still more exercise is as thorough as the Roosevelt idea in this regard. The young Tafts play golf and tennis very well indeed, and recently a nephew rowed in the Yale crew that won against Harvard.

Speaking of the Secretary’s sayings about boys in general, some one said to him that young Brown was a fatalist and about ready to blow his brains out.

“Why?” asked Mr. Taft.

“Well,” said his informant, “I don’t know. But I’ve often heard him say the game wasn’t worth the candle.”

“I see,” said the Secretary, thoughtfully. “Well, those folks to whom the game isn’t worth the candle are generally the ones who are burning the candle at both ends.”

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

As I have said, the Secretary of War works hard. Results tell that, and he plays every bit as hard as he works—a little harder, if that is possible, and also with admirable results.

To anyone who might be looking forward to a few days of recreation on the Secretary’s playground, I would recommend at least two months of hard physical training. Unless he is in condition, one day’s outing with Mr. Taft will put the average man out of commission for a week.

At Murray Bay the Secretary plays golf and tennis, frolics with his children, takes long walks over the fine Canadian roads, and occasionally puts out fires. He does not shoot. He never shot anything in his life. Though he is head of the War Department, he does not believe in killing things.

Justice Harlan of the United States Su­preme Court also summers at Murray Bay. The Justice enjoys golf as much as does the Secretary with whom he is very chummy, though he is nearly a quarter of a century older. He also enjoys a joke as much as his somewhat stouter neighbor.

One morning the Secretary came up on the green where the Justice was jumping up and down to coax a ball in that was hovering on the very edge of the first hole.

“Here, Taft!” cried the Justice, “come on! You jump. That will do the business.”

Perhaps it was when Justice Harlan, who hails from Kentucky, was looking round Mur­ray Bay for mint and some of the things that go with it that Secretary Taft told this story.

“Justice Harlan used to have a sort of valet down South, before the War, you know,” said Mr. Taft. “He was a darkey, and his name was Jackson. Jackson never used the first person singular—he always said ‘we,’ and he had an eye for the health of ‘Marse John.’” (here the Secretary pointed at the Justice) “and he believed in moderation.

Well, one night Marse John came home in the rain. He was drenched and felt he needed something. He knew there would be a protest, but he called out: ‘ Hey, you Jackson ! I’m wet to the skin and cold all through; bring me something to warm me up.’

“Jackson went off watching the bail wagging his head in protest, but came back with a toddy.

“ ‘ That’s a powerful weak drink for a man like me,’ said Marse John.

“‘It hain’t more’n moderately strong”, Jackson admitted. ‘Yo’ see, Marse John, I kinder ’lowed as how we was taperin’ off.’”

Of course we laughed, and the Justice, rubbing his chin reflectively, asked:

“Did I ever tell you about the marvelous drive my distinguished friend the Secretary of War made one morning on these very links of Murray Bay?

“ Well, I was with him at the time and that establishes the veracity of what I am about to declare. Come up near,” he said, turning toward a newspaper man who was present; “I want to be sure you hear the figures correctly.”

“Yes,” broke in the Secretary, “he might forget them and have to make them up all over again.”

“For, what I want,” continued the Justice, ignoring the interruption, “is to get onto the golf page of the Sunday papers. To do that I must adhere to the truth strictly—the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“But, as I was saying, this rolly-polly youngster over here—Taft I mean—was just finishing up a bit behind me, as usual; ahem, three or four behind me, if I remember rightly. It was growing dark, and he was in a hurry to complete the score and yet anxious not to be too far behind. He made a terrific drive for the last hole, one that made the ground ripple like the surface of a lake when a boulder drops into it. You all have noticed that often. Then he plunged on, riding the ripples toward the hole and looking for the little white ball.

“ ‘ By Jove, I struck a good one that time,’ he sang out, as he went further and further and no ball in sight. ‘I believe I made the green.’

“And, sure enough, just then the caddy called out:

“'Here you are, Judge, right in the hole,’ and lo and behold! when Taft looked in, there was the ball as snug as you please, and Taft began to turn handsprings for joy. I confess I thought it was pretty good, too, and I went back to the last tee, to see if I couldn’t do something like that myself. I knew, of course, it was a fluke, a one-in-a million drive, but I was bound to try. When I got to the tee I understood. There was Taft’s ball just where he had set it up. His club hadn’t even grazed it. The rest of the story the caddie can explain.”

Though Mr. Taft does most of his recreating up at Murray Bay, he enjoys being out of doors wherever there is opportunity. He did a lot of golfing in the Philippines for instance, besides going over hills and mountains on foot, and in Yellowstone National Park he made the most of his opportunities to observe the marvelous. He and Charlie romped together like two youngsters, and the larger of the “boys” enjoyed the frolic as much as the other, every bit. They went to the “Devil’s Bath Tub,” where Charlie tried to photograph the party. He is just visible in the middle of the picture I took, sighting his camera over the sulphur-crusted rail of the fence.

They watched the silver-tip bears, too, which roam socially in the neighborhood of Canon Hotel and relieve the garbage man of considerable work by appropriating refuse, which they carry away in their capacious interiors. These bears never retreat or show alarm unless they have word of the presence in the park of a certain exalted personage who wears eye-glasses.

At Turquois Pool the Secretary held Charlie over the edge, where the lad could test the temperature of the water, which he found to be warmer than it looked. He declined an invitation to bathe therein, having a young­ster’s prejudice against boiled boy.

The mule teams which took the party through in record time were a source of joy to Charlie. He rode up front always alongside the “mule skinner,” the man with the whip, who could, were he that sort of person, easily flay the animals with the terri­ble lash he wields. He explained to Charlie, however, that he used it merely to keep the flies off his pets. He pointed out a fly to the youngster one afternoon as the party was going up hill, and said:

“Just you watch, kid, and see me pick that insect off the leader’s left ear”; then out over the leader’s head there was a report such as the old muzzle-loader made in the days of Leather-Stocking.

“ What’d I tell yer!” said the mule skinner. I can do that every time.”

“Whew!” exclaimed Charlie, “That’s a dead fly all right.”

“They die instantly I hit ’em,” replied the driver.

Fish abound in Yellowstone, though at times they are a little shy. Charlie had heard of catching a fish in the lake, and, without moving even one step, swing it round into a pool where it would be boiled alive. Charlie spent three hours, nearly, at the edge of the lake, for he has remarkable persistence, but the fishes evidently had been forwamed and would not carry out the part of the pro­gram Charlie had allotted to them in his ‘‘stunt.” Finally, it being well past lunch time, he returned regretfully to the Lake House.

“Did you cook a fish, my son?” asked the Secretary.

“No sir,” replied Charlie, “but the sun cooked me all right.”

 

CHAPTER V.

WE were on board at Seattle and glad to be there—looking over the rail at the crowd and talking of our experiences thus far on our tour of the world.

Several bits of conversation were wafted to us from the wharf as we were cast­ing loose.

“It’s just like launching a Dreadnought, ain’t it?” queried a bystander, as Taft went up the Minnesota’s gangplank, shaking hands and waving his last adieus.

“Reminds me of a great big, fine-looking fighting-ship, Taft does,” remarked another. “He ain’t getting worried about little things; you don’t see him unlimbering his guns for  every little oysterboat that cuts up didos. But he’ll be the big thing in a big scrap, you mark my words. I’ve seen the ‘ good-natured giant’ kind before. They’re all smiles when it’s smiling time; but when it comes time for business, they can do the work of three men. Yes, sirree! And Big Bill Taft is that kind, too.”

With a send-off such as that, from a crowd numbering several hundreds, the Secretary of War naturally began his long voyage in a pleasant frame of mind.

Secretary Taft is himself a good sailor. In his hours of ease the Secretary had all sorts of fun. He climbed ventilators on a wager with Ambassador O’Brien; he inspected every part of the steamer in company with the various employees; he went down into the Asiatic steerage and he spent three hours and a half in the hold, talking to the engineers, stokers and firemen; he passed hours in the gymnasium astride bucking horses and other electrical appliances, reducing his weight and taking his exercise. He attended all the sailors’ concerts, taking interest and enjoy­ment in their jokes, their “coon songs” and their dances, and before he left the*ship he was the warm friend of every man back on board.

Secretary Taft celebrated his birthday, or rather all on board the Minnesota celebrated that happy anniversary on the fifteenth of last September in latitude 41° N. and 137° W. This is a wet locality, and it was thought by some to explain why all of the first cabin passengers drank the Secretary’s health in water.

A goodly number of presents had appeared on the breakfast table in the morning, bear­ing greetings and good wishes from all the Tafts that had the honor of kinship with the Chief of the War Department. Either they came by wireless or there had been collusion somewhere. Personal friends had remembered the day, too, and were evidently in on the collusion as well as the relatives. And besides gifts, there were delegations, and games and speeches.

In reply to several of the speeches in his honor, after dinner that evening, Mr. Taft, who had been repeatedly referred to as the next President, told a story. “We Ohioans,” he said,“ are reputed to have a fondness for office—and this reminds me of Pete Robinson who came to a certain Ohio town right after election, looking for a job. He put up at the best hotel at first, but when his funds grew low he moved to lodgings and by and by to the cheapest lodgings, but no job came, and being at the end of his funds, he saddled his old mare and started back for the hills. Passing the best hotel on his way, one of his former acquaintances hailed him with ‘Hello, Pete, where you goin’?’ ‘Home,’ answered Pete, and, after a pause—‘Say boys, you all know I’ve been hanging around here after a job —and now I hear the job should seek the man. If any of you see a job out on the search—you might just mention that you saw me going along the road toward my farm up in the hills, and that I was riding dern slow.’ ”

Captain Austin arranged for a special dinner in the Secretary’s honor. In commemoration of the event a large cake was baked; and, needless to remark, the voracious eye of Charlie spied it. A few hours later the steward was surprised to learn, from the grave lips of the boy himself, that, marvelous to relate, he had been looking into his diary or the family Bible, or the captain’s log, and had discovered that he, too, was due to have a birthday, and that it came on the eighteenth.

A cake was promised him; and then the captain took a hand. He proposed to shuffle the calendar around a bit and discard a day, just to show the Pacific that he was a regular dyed-in-the-hide captain and that he meant to do the square thing by the Orient and the Occident and all concerned.

“Sometimes I get a chance to stick in a day,” he remarked, “and if there are enough energetic missionaries on board, I succumb to the inevitable law of supply and demand and hang up a couple of Sundays in the same week. But this time I’ll have to drop out one day—and (with a long look at Charlie) that day will be Friday the eighteenth.”

With this the son of the Secretary went off into a corner and did some thinking. He was about as gloomy a boy as could be found anywhere on the Pacific. As he now figured it, he would not only lose a cake and a birthday, but he would lose a whole year out of his life as well! He had left school with the distinct understanding that he was nine years and ten months old; and that he was to be ten years of age on the eighteenth of August. And here an ogre in the shape of a common or garden sea-captain comes along and monkeys with the calendar, intending to copper the one day out of the whole year that was of supreme importance to him. He needed the year badly, needed it as only a boy of nine could possibly need a year.

He worried and did mental arithmetic and sums with the chalk on the hurricane deck persistently, until, on the night of the seventeenth, he was able to show the captain that the morrow, the eighteenth, would be the day for crossing the one hundred and eightieth meridian, wherefore no man—not even a steamship captain—had a right to change a date or a day on such an occasion. The situation was ethical rather than nautical. The captain gave in, acknowledged the com, and Charlie Taft ate a four-pound cake to celebrate his duly-accredited ten years.

In spite of all his ocean travel, Secretary Taft says he has never been seasick in his life. He lives while aboard ship on an almost perfect schedule. At seven o’clock he arises and takes a cold shower-bath; from eight until nine he and Mrs. Taft and their youngest son, Charlie, have breakfast; at nine-thirty he starts upon his walk a r o u n d the deck, counting the laps upon his fingers until he has done six miles. He thinks over his speeches and official reports as he walks. At eleven o’clock, covered with perspiration, he takes another shower and lies down for a nap. At twelve-thirty every one is eating luncheon. He knows it, and comes out with his secretary and a pile of books and papers, to begin a three-hour grind at his documents, messages to Washington, his speech before the Filippine Convention and other serious governmental work. He is dieting himself, and omits luncheon. Although he is a marvelously large man, Taft has very little “dead weight” upon him; he is mostly muscles. He doesn’t want to get fat if he can help it. Therefore he eats only a cracker or two at noon. After his official work he goes back to his room and reads law or a magazine or a book from the ship’s library.

Late in the afternoon he goes on deck to play shuffleboard or to watch Charlie, and toward half-past six he dresses for dinner. There is no ceremony about his entrance into the dining room; he never keeps the orchestra waiting.

At dinner he is merry. After the meal he usually reads or studies or writes until midnight. Though on shipboard, and cut off from general communication with the outside world, he manages to accomplish considerable diplomatic business; thus on his arrival at Yokohama he was joined by Judge Wilfley of Shanghai and a number of business men from China, who talked over the industrial system there and gave him some pointers of value to the United States and her policies in the Far East. Bankers made the trip across to Hongkong with him, hoping for a quiet half-hour’s conversation when the decks were clear. He talked law with law­yers, and politics with the politicians

From Seattle to the Philippines his time was much occupied in preparing the speech he would deliver at the opening of the First National Assembly. After he had visited Manila and had delivered his frank, outspoken message to the Islanders, he put in all his time, from Manila to Vladivostok, writing his huge report on all that happened in the Far Eastern islands, and, so far was this report from being completed when he. left Berlin three weeks later, that he used most of the thirteen days it took to cross the Atlantic in finishing the work. Mr. Fred Carpenter, his secretary, had been left behind in Germany for a two weeks’ vacation. Mr. Taft wrote out the report in long-hand.

Mrs. Taft, once seeing him laboring over this document, said:

“Will, why on earth don’t you quit?”

The big man looked up with a laugh: “Well,” he answered, “it’s a good policy to make your reports extra long, so folks won’t read them and find out your mistakes.”

Somebody asked him then if that rule applied to the President’s message, and he merely shrugged his shoulders and laughed again.

On the way back across the Atlantic an incident occurred which showed the diplo­matic suavity of the big war chief. The sailors of the President Grant were to have a benefit, and the Secretary was asked to make a fifteen-minute talk.

At the appointed time he stepped into the salon and said:

“I want to give the other passengers here a bit of advice. Never put Honorable or Reverend or Doctor before your name when you are traveling, for there is always some ferret-eyed soul hanging around who will book you as a prominent man good for a fifteen-minute talk for the benefit of the sailors or the heathen Chinese or something—and the chances are you haven’t anything to talk about, to boot.

“For instance, as soon as I had promised to speak here tonight Mrs. Taft asked: ‘ Why, what can you do? You can’t sing or dance. You can’t play any musical instrument— remember this is a concert, not a political convention.’

“ ‘ I might tell them about my travels,’ said I.

“‘Why those people aren’t interested in your travels; they are all travelers themselves!’ she answered. ‘What! Not inter­ested in the time I—’” and here he went off into a long and amusing story of his adventures in the Filippines. “‘And not interested in the time we had at the Imperial Palace in Tokio, when I—’” and here he detailed some of his experiences while in Japan. “‘And wouldn’t they be glad to hear how, when I was at Tsarskoe-Selo I—’” and here he went off into an intimate account of some of his Russian adventures.

The crowd was laughing and following him with great interest through it all; it took something like twenty-five minutes or half an hour, and only at the end did every one realize that the Secretary, while ostensibly deploring the fact that we would not be interested in hearing the story of his travels, had actually been giving it to us all the time!

 

CHAPTER VI.

MR. TAFT is far and away the greatest traveler of any man now holding public office in the United States, and what is more remarkable, he is the greatest family man, of all our statesmen. To hold this double record seems impossible, but the impossible has been natural and inevitable for Mr. Taft almost from the beginning of his career. His life of continuous achievement illustrates this.

Most public men of the day have no home life at all. The demands of government service make it difficult for a man to be more than a lodger in his home after his career in Washington begins. For this reason many public men do not take their families with them to Washington, but leave them behind, preferring to have a few uninterrupted days of visiting with them from time to time, rather than the succession of peeps which is all that Washington affords.

But Mr. Taft has always managed to have his family with him ever since he had a family to care for. Wherever he has been, there has been his home; not off in some distant town or city, separated from him by days of railway travel. His family has kept him company from Cincinnati to Washington and Murray Bay to the North West, to Panama, Cuba and Porto Rico, to Honolulu, Tokio, Manila, Vladivostok, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris.

Two of the children, Helen and Robert, have been to college, but vacation time has always found them with their father again wherever he might be; which means, of course, that they were with their mother, too, and that Charlie, the irrepressible, was there also.

When one has come to see something of the Taft viewpoint, to have a glimpse of life as he sees it, one realizes that he must be a family man. It is his nature, it is inherent—as much a part of him as his smile and his capacity for friendship and for hard work. The members of his family are not only blood relations, they are his friends, his chums.

He has been making friends, loyal, constant friends for half a century now, but one does not hear of his losing any, and his friends for the most part come to know his family, too, for some of the other Tafts are always near.

Any one that is a friend of a friend of Mr. Taft is Mr. Taft’s friend, and therefore, the family’s friend—but a friend does not signify with him a man with a pull, or a man in the axe-grinding business. There are no strings on the word friend as Mr. Taft uses it. All his family know this too, even if it never consciously occurs to them. They act up to it instinctively and without premeditation. It is the Taft way.

Obviously the Taft family could not be the unit it is, were it scattered and not well in hand. That is why Mr. Taft takes his family with him, even though doing so requires no little planning and contriving, much simplicity and  absolutely no display. Were Mr. Taft a man of wealth it would be easy enough to manage, but he has always been a salaried man and has no private fortune. Sacrifice is necessary and a simplicity that astonishes persons abroad.

No European functionary of Mr. Taft’s exalted rank would think of traveling as quietly as did the Secretary of War on his journey round the world. If this journey seemed more like a royal progress at times, it was none of the Secretary’s doings. The distinction was thrust upon him by those who gathered to do him honor. His personal arrangements for his family and himself were almost meagre.

Incidentally it may be remarked that it was also one of the most difficult trips for which any American woman has had to plan. An extended railway journey in this country, in late fall, with important social functions along the way and many outdoor excursions on the side, a long sea voyage to a tropical country, with an important stop in Japan, where receptions would be many, a consider­able stay in Manila where much surely would be expected of the wife of the Secretary of War. Then north, almost to the Arctic, and across Siberia, a meeting with the Czar and the Czarina, a flying visit to the gay capitals of Europe on the way home, and again the steamer in company with many stylish and critical Americans.

Here was a journey to call for all the plan­ning, the resourcefulness, and ingenuity of an American woman. How many women who read this story would be willing to attempt such a journey without a maid or servant, and with an irrepressible small boy who must be kept at least respectable?

Yet Mrs. Taft’s fine taste in dress and ready sense of the fitness of things carried her through the long trying trip with flying colors. There could not be a better traveler.

“ Charlie,” Mrs. Taft was once overheard to say at table, “you haven’t observed that there is a conspicuous tract of ground in the immedi­ate neighborhood of your ears, have you?” Charlie would gaze into space, his countenance depicting that profound melancholy that comes to the juvenile consciousness upon the realization of the utter futility of all mundane effort.

Observing this, the Secretary would say, “Oh, we won’t be too hard on him. I guess he likes fixing up about as much as I do. I’m most despondent too with all this clothes-changing every time a function comes along.”

Charlie is the one of the children most at home. He will soon go away to preparatory school.

One may be fairly certain that life will not be dull where Charlie is. This statement has the endorsement of no less a person than the Secretary of War of the United States. Were there occasion, he would testify to the truth of the assertion under oath. Indeed, the mental and physical vigor of both his parents may be traced in some degree to Charlie. Not only does he keep them guessing, but he affords them opportunity for exercise. Here is an in­stance.

The Taft family had just stood for a photograph in front of the locomotive that had been pushing the train to the summit of the road, passing through the Cascade Mountains. Af­ter the picture-taking, Charlie disappeared. So did the train. It went on down from the summit along the route the party was to take and did not stop for nearly a mile. The pusher the meanwhile returned in the opposite direction. We watched it zigzagging below us, but did not think of the train until we saw it at a turning half a mile away with Charlie on board waving his hand merrily. How the train came to start and eventually to stop we never found out. Charlie might possibly have explained, but he did not. We learned, however, that the train did not have enough power along to come back for us, and as not so much as a hand car was available, we had to walk. We were thankful it was down grade.

“Where is Charlie?” was a question heard frequently on the journey round the world and it never failed to stimulate mental activity in as many as several individuals simultaneously. And even when the question was not asked audibly, it was in the minds of all whenever the train started up, for Charlie was anywhere but in evidence then. He could not bear to be in sight at so critical a moment. He would be much more comfortable under a seat of the rear coach or between the tender and the baggage car, or on the roof if he could get there, and lie flat enough not to be seen. Occasionally he varied this by hiding round the corner of the station until the train had started, then running alongside it, grabbing some urchin’s cap on the way and scrambling aboard the train end at the ultimate moment, waving his trophy and crying, “Hey, Kiddo! Wan’ your cady?”

In Moscow he was particularly happy for he managed to interest officers of distinction in the service of His Imperial Majesty, the Czar. Being as elusive as the quarterback of a Yale foot-ball team, another Harry Beecher as it were, he got out of the throng of “ Eminences” that greeted the War Secretary at the railway station and began “rubbering round,” as he explained later, altogether unintelligibly to several officers whose suspicions he aroused and who promptly “pinched” him and instituted a search for bombs. They were marching off to headquarters with their prey when the Secretary espied Charlie, then some fifty yards away, and made a portly sprint that filled the resplendent breasts of the official well comers with wondrous admiration. There indeed was a mighty man, Mars and Mercury in one. No wonder such a man spoke fearlessly to Japan. So would they if they could get away as fast.

Charlie was rescued and reprimanded in language that sounded to the Russians like one of their most rugged northern dialects. The Secretary smiled and all was well.

The youngster’s greatest achievement, how­ever, was to provide trout for breakfast one of those grand Tokio mornings when every one’s appetite is eager. Moreover, they were imperial trout from the preserves of Tenshi Sama, the Heaven Descended, His Imperial Majesty, Mustu Hito, Ruler of Dai Nippon. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Taft knew this, however, until they had partaken and had expressed themselves enthusiastically as to the freshness and delicacy of the fish. The Tafts were guests of the Mikado in the Shiba Palace in the capital of Japan and Charlie had “just been trying to see if Japanese fish would bite.”

Charlie did not devote himself entirely to pranks though. He was always interested to know “where he was at,” and what was going on. He liked to study places and routes, to know about the different peoples he would meet, why they were this way and why they were not some other way. In a geography examination he would make any other boy in these United States look ahead some distance to find him. He is a clever little student, with a boy’s capacity for questions. Seldom is Mr. Taft too busy to listen and to answer. It is a parent’s duty and pleasure, part of the family life which was with him even in Siberia.

There on the train, crossing the snow-covered plains, so many thousands of miles from America, was a sample of the American home. The Secretary and Mrs. Taft were sitting by the electric globe and Charlie was nearby. Mrs. Taft was reading, the Secretary busy with his report on his visit to the Philippines, while the youngster was engaged with a time table, a map and a lot of views, studying the route and from time to time asking his older chums to show him where they would be in the morning and what there would be a chance to see.

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

AS Secretary of War, Mr. Taft has been for peace first, last and all the time. His tour of the world was a peace mission, and though he spoke with astonishing frankness, particularly in his speech at the Tokio banquet, he made friends everywhere and enemies nowhere. He did not use the big stick, either. His only argument was plain common sense, an appeal to the reasonableness of the people to whom he spoke.

In Japan, for instance, he was able to show clearly to his hearers that America was ready and unafraid, that she would meet any foe on occasion without a tremor; yet, nevertheless, the United States Government was not looking for trouble. Looking for trouble was a poor way of putting in time. What the United States Government was keen for was peace, and he believed that other governments felt the same way.

The Secretary’s speechmaking began at Columbus, Ohio, and continued on to the Pacific Coast, over to Japan, China, and the Philippines. Various though his audiences were, and whether he spoke officially or as a private citizen, the keynote of all his speeches was a lofty Americanism. He showed that this Americanism was a promise of peace; peace with honor and with justice to all mankind. Taken as a whole, Mr. Taft’s utterances display a breadth above and beyond mere party doctrine or admin­istration policy; they are worldwide in their application.

Here is the famous Tokio speech which Mr. Taft made at the Imperial Hotel to the Chamber of Commerce late in September, when the San Francisco troubles with the Japanese were being discussed with excitement and even apprehension throughout the civilized world, and the whole world listened to every word.

The excitement in the banquet hall as the Secretary read his speech was nothing less than terrible, not in its demonstration but in its restraint. Enunciating with particular distinction, his finger on each line, he frequently paused at the end of a sentence and waited for the interpreter to translate. When he came to the words—“I can talk of war. I am not one of those who hold that war is so frightful that nothing justifies a resort to it,” hearts beat fast, and even the mask of impassiveness ever worn by the Japanese did not avail.

This is what Mr. Taft said:

“Baron Shibusawa, Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen of the Municipality and Chamber of Commerce and Other Distinguished Citizens of Tokio:—

“ I beg to extend to you my heartfelt thanks and acknowledgments for this magnificent evidence of your hospitality and good will. It is a little more than two years ago since a large party, of whom I was one, was the recipient of a similar courtesy and attention in this very hotel at the hands of the then Prime Minister Count Katsura. So many were we then that I ventured to compare our coming to the descent of a cloud of locusts upon this devoted land. But you stood the onslaught nobly, and your treatment of us is a bright memory never to be effaced.

“At that time you were engaged in a titanic struggle with another great nation, but the first traces of the dawn of peace were appearing in the East. We Americans shall always feel proud of the part that Theodore Roosevelt, with the prestige of the headship of our people, was able to play in hastening the end of the war. Peace has come under circumstances honorable to both parties, and Japan having proved her greatness in war as in peace, has taken her stand in the first rank of the family of nations. You have concluded new treaties with your former antagonist of amity and commerce, and the wounds of war are healed.

“ The growth of Japan from a hermit coun­try to her present position in the last fifty years is the marvel of the world. In every step of that development, even at the very beginning, we Americans are proud to re­cord the fact that Japan has always had the cordial sympathy and at times the effective aid of the United States. The names of Commodore Perry, of Townsend, Harris, of John A. Bingham, of General Grant and of Theodore Roosevelt will be inseparably connected with the history of the advance of Japan to the front rank among the world powers.

“But now for a moment, and a moment only, a little cloud has come over the sunshine of a fast friendship of fifty years. A slight shock has been felt in the structure of amity and good will that has withstood the test of half a century. How has it come about? Well, in the first place it took a tremendous manifestation of nature to bring it about. Only the greatest earthquake of the century could have caused even the slightest tremor between such friends. I do not intend to consider the details of the events in San Francisco. I cannot trespass on the jurisdiction of the Department of State, of my colleague Mr. Root, or my friend Mr. O’Brien, to discuss them. But this I can say, that there is nothing in these events of injustice that cannot be honorably and fully arranged by ordinary diplomatic methods between the two governments conducted as they both are by statesmen of honor, sanity and jus­ice, and representing as they do two peo­ples bound together by half a century of warm friendship.

“It is said that there is one word that is never allowed to creep into the diplomatic correspondence between nations, however hostile, and that word is 'war? But I am not a diplomat, and am not bound by diplomatic usage. I can talk of war. I am not one of those who hold that war is so frightful that nothing justifies a resort to it. We have not yet reached the millennium, and there are international grievances that can be accom­plished in no other way. But, as one of our great generals has said, ‘War is hell,’ and nothing but a great and unavoidable cause can justify it.

“ War between Japan and the United States would be a crime against modem civilization. It would be as wicked as it would be insane. Neither the people of Japan nor the people of the United States desire war. The governments of the two countries would strain every point to avoid such an awful catastrophe.

“What has Japan to gain by it? What has the United States to gain by it? Japan has reached a point in her history when she is looking forward with confident hope to great commercial conquests. She is shaking off the effects of war, and is straining every nerve for victories of peace. With the mar­velous industry, intelligence and courage of her people, there is nothing in trade, com­merce and popular contentment and enlightenment to which she may not attain. Why should she wish a war that would stop all this? She has undertaken with a legitimate intent in so close a neighbor, to reform and rejuvenate an ancient kingdom that has been governed or misgoverned by fifteenth century methods. His Majesty, the Emperor, has shown his appreciation of the difficulty of the task by sending to Korea Japan’s great­est statesman, who has exhibited his patriot­ism by accepting the heavy burden, when, by his years and his arduous labors for his country in the past, he has earned a right to rest. No matter what reports may come, no matter what criticism may be uttered, the world will have confidence that Prince Ito and the Japanese Government are pursuing a policy in Korea that will make for justice and civilization and the welfare of a backward people. We are living in an age when the intervention of a stronger nation in the affairs of a people unable to maintain a government of law and order to assist the latter to better government becomes a na­tional duty and works for the progress of the world. Why should Japan wish a war that must stop or seriously delay the execution of her plans of reform in Korea? Why should the United States wish war? War would change her in a year or more into a military nation and her great resources would be wasted in a vast equipment that would serve no good purpose but to tempt her into war­like policies. In the last decade she has shown a material progress greater than the world has ever before seen. Today she is struggling with the abuses which accompany such material development, and is engaged in an effort by process of law to retain the good for her people and to suppress the evil. Why should she risk war in which all the evils of society flourish and all the vultures fatten? She is engaged in establishing a gov­ernment of law and order and prosperity in the Philippine Islands and in fitting the people of those Islands by general education and by actual practice in partial self-government to govern themselves. It is a task full of difficulty, and one which many Americans would be glad to be rid of. It has been sug­gested that we might relieve ourselves of this burden by a sale of the Islands to Japan or some other country. The suggestion is absurd. Japan does not wish the Philippines. She has problems of a similar nature nearer home. But, more than this, the United States could not sell the Islands to another power without the grossest violation of its obligation to the Philippine people. It must maintain a government of law and order and the protection of life, liberty, and property itself or fit the people of the Islands to do so and turn the government over to them. No other course in honor is open to it.

“Under all these circumstances, then, could anything be more wicked and more infamous than the suggestion of war between nations who have enjoyed such a time-honored friendship and who have nothing to fight for. ‘If this be true,’ some one asks, ‘why such reports and rumors of war?’ The capacity of certain members of the modem press by headlines and sensational dispatches to give rise to unfounded reports has grown with the improvement in communication between distant parts of the world. The desire to sell their papers, the desire for political reasons to embarrass an existing government and their even less justifiable motives have led to misstatements, misconstructions, unfounded guesses, all worked into terrifying headlines that have no foundation whatever. In each country, doubtless, there are irre­sponsible persons that war would aid or make prominent, who try to give seriousness to such a discussion, but when one considers the real feelings of the two peoples as a whole, when one considers the situation from the standpoint of sanity and real patriotism in each country, it is difficult to characterize in polite or moderate language the conduct of those who are attempting to promote mis­understanding and ill-feeling between the two countries.

“It gives me pleasure to assure the people of Japan that the good-will of the American people toward Japan is as warm and cordial as ever it was, and the suggestion of a breach of the amicable relations between them finds no confirmation in the public opinion of the United States. It is exceedingly gratifying for me to have as my companion in my visit to these shores, Mr. O’Brien, the Ambassa­dor to Japan from the United States. We have been friends for years. I am sure you will find in Mr. O’Brien all that could be d­sired in one whose chief official duty it will be to preserve the friendship between our two countries.

“I have always referred to the enthusiastic welcome which was accorded our party of American Congressmen two years ago by the people of Japan. So great was the kindness of His Majesty the Emperor and the officers of the Government that we were over­come with our welcome. Coming now to this country for the fourth time, I am an old story, and am not entitled to any other welcome than that to be accorded an old friend who comes often. The distinction of being the Emperor’s guest another time, I do not deserve, and should feel it my duty to decline, enjoyable as the honor is, but for the fact that I know that His Imperial Majesty graciously adopts this course not as a per­sonal matter but to signify to the American people and government the continuance of his friendship for the United States. It gives me the greatest pleasure and is a great honor for me to be able to bring a reciprocal mes­sage of good will from our President and our people.”

 

CHAPTER VIII.

 

ALTHOUGH the whole world knew of John Hay’s “open door” in China, there had been no little speculation as to what that meant. There were some who thought it was merely a diplomatic phrase of the American Secretary of State, which might be ignored by the traders of other nations if they could only make special arrangements with the Celestial Empire. “ It is only the Yankee bluff,” said these sanguine folk, and possibly some Chinese statesmen thought this too. But Secretary Taft disillusioned these individuals. Not one of them is now laying plans on the theory that America will tolerate any other policy than fair play for all on China’s part. There are to be no special privileges. America proposes to stand steadfast by China’s side against all threats or even hints that suggest privilege. By virtue of her Philippine possessions, the United States and China are now neighbors, and Secretary Taft declares—not officially, it is true, but none the less emphatically—that they are and will continue earnest and sincere friends. The open door for all.

Mr. Taft’s speech in Shanghai was an illumination. Shanghai is the one city of China considered a true nerve center. Here public opinion is made. He availed himself of his opportunity to tell his audience what America stood for out in China, and to illustrate how Americanism meant good-fellowship, fair play, and in short a square deal all round. Here is his deliverance:

“ Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen :—For the courtesy and hospitality evidenced by this beautiful banquet, I wish to express to you my grateful acknowledgment. It is a great opportunity and pleasure to meet the prominent citizens and residents of this great city. Shanghai is the business centre and in some respects the political centre of the Empire of China.

“On my way to the Philippines, as a representative of the President of the United States, to signify the importance which he attaches to another step in the extension of popular self-government in those Islands, I am here only, by the way, as a traveler, accredited with no official authority or duty or message in respect of China. What I am about to say in respect to China, therefore, is said as an American citizen and not as a representative of the American government.

 

THE FILIPPINES.

 

“One word in respect to the Philippines before I come to America’s relation to China. Americans interested in Oriental and Chinese trade naturally look to the Philippine policy of the government as having a bearing upon the attitude of America toward the Orient in general. Reports have been circulated with an appearance of authority throughout this part of the world that the United States intends to sell the Philippines to Japan or some other country.

“Upon that point I do not hesitate to express a decided opinion. The Philippines came to the United States by chance, but the Government assumed a duty with respect to them and entered into an implied obli­gation affecting them with the people of the Philippines, of which it would be the gross­est violation to sell the Islands to any other Power.

“The only alternatives which the United States can in honor pursue with respect to the Philippines are either permanently to retain them, maintaining therein a stable government in which the rights of the humblest citizen shall be preserved, or, after having fitted the people for self-government, to turn the Islands over to them for the con­tinuance by them of a government of the same character.

“It is enough to say here that there is not the slightest danger of a sudden cessation of the present relation of the United States to the Philippines, such as would be involved in a sale of those Islands, and that, for our present purpose, the attitude of the United States toward China must be regarded, not alone as a country interested in the trade of China, but also as a power owning territory in China’s immediate neigh­borhood.

 

THE POLICY OF THE OPEN DOOR

“The policy of the Government of the United States has been authoritatively stated to be that of seeking the permanent safety and peace of China, the preservation of Chinese territorial and administrative entity, the pro­tection of all rights guaranteed by her to friendly Powers by treaty and international law, and, as a safeguard for the world, the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.

“This was the policy that John Hay made famous as that of ‘open door.’ By written memorandum, all the Powers interested in the trade of China have subscribed to its wisdom and declared their adherence to it. The Government of the United States has not deviated in the slightest way from its attitude in this regard since the policy was announced in 1900.

“I am advised by Mr. Millard, who has written much and well on the Far East and has given close attention to the statistics of the trade between China and the various countries of the world, that the trade, both export and import, between China and the United States is second only to that of Great Britain. He says there is much difficulty in fixing the exact amount of trade because of the long-established custom of treating every piece of merchandise that comes from Hong­kong as an importation from British terri­tory.'

“It is certain, therefore, that the American-Chinese trade is of sufficiently great importance to require the Government of the United States to take every legitimate means to protect against diminution or injury by the political preference of any of its competitors.

“It cannot, of course, complain of loss of trade effected by the use of greater enterprise, greater ingenuity, greater attention to the demands of the Chinese market and greater business acumen by its competitors; but it would have the right to protest against exclusion from Chinese trade by a departure from the policy of ‘the open door.’

“The acquiescence in this policy by all interested nations was so unhesitating and emphatic that it is hardly worth while to speculate as to the probable attitude of the United States were its merchants’ interests injured by a violation of it. How far the United States would go in the protection of its Chinese trade, no one, of course, could say. This much is clear, however, that the merchants of the United States are being roused to the importance of their Chinese export trade, that they would view political obstacles to its expansion with deep concern, and that this feeling of theirs would be likely to find expression in the attitude of the American Government.

“Domestic business in the United States has expanded so enormously and has resulted in such great profits as to prevent American business men from giving to the foreign trade that attention which it deserves and which they certainly would give but for more profitable business at home. As the population of the United States increases, as its territory fills and its vast manufacturing and agricultural interests become greater, its interest in foreign trade is certain to increase. The manufacturers now take little care to pack their goods as desired by Chinese purchasers or to give them the size desired, but this stiff-necked lack of business-sense is disappearing.

“We shall soon find the same zeal and the same intense interest on their part to induce purchasers in foreign markets that now char­acterize the manufacturers of other nations whose home business is not so absorbing as that of the manufacturers of the United States.

“While we have been slow in rousing ourselves to the importance of a trade which has grown without government encouragement and almost without business effort to its present important proportions, I feel sure that in future there will be no reason to complain of seeming government indifference to it.

“The United States, and others who favor the open door policy sincerely, will, if they archwise, not only welcome, but encourage this great Chinese Empire to take long steps in administrative and governmental re­forms, and in the development of her natural resources and the improvement of the welfare of her people. In this way she will add great strength to her position as a self-respecting government, may resist all possible for­eign aggression seeking undue, exclusive or proprietary privileges in her territory, and without foreign aid can enforce an open-door policy of equal opportunity to all.

“I am not one of those who view with alarm the effect of the growth of China, with her teeming millions, into a great industrial empire. I believe that this, instead of injuring foreign trade with China, would greatly increase it, and, while it might change its character in some respects, it would not diminish its profit. A trade which depends for its profit on the backwardness of a people in developing their own resources and upon their ability to value at the proper relative prices that which they have to sell and that which they have to buy, is not one which can be counted upon as stable or permanent.

“I may stop a moment in this connection to say that the Monetary Commission, headed by Professor Jenks, which was sent at the expense of the United States to China to induce China to adopt a gold standard, sought .to effect a reform that would have inured greatly to the benefit of the Chinese people.

The example of Japan and the Philippines justifies this statement.

“ While the recent rise in the price of silver has reduced somewhat the difficulty of the two standards, the elimination from business of the gambling element involved in the fluctuations of exchange due to the difference between the gold and the silver standard, would be ultimately of great benefit to the merchants and the common people of China, and to the stability and fairness of Oriental business. I am sincerely hopeful that it will not be many years before such a reform is brought about.

“ For the reasons I have given it does not seem to me that the cry of ‘China for the Chinese ’ should frighten any one. All that is meant by that is that China should devote her energies to the development of her industrious people and to the enlargement of the Empire as a great national government.

“Charges of this kind could only increase our trade with her. Our greatest export trade is with the countries most advanced in business methods and in the development of their particular resources. In the Philippines we have learned that the policy which is best for the Filipinos is best in the long run for the countries who would do business with the Islands.

 

THE FUTURE OF CHINA.

 

"It is a pleasure to know that the education of Chinese in America has had much to do with the present steps toward reform begun by the Government in China. It is not to be expected that these reforms shall be radical or sudden. It would be unwise if they were so.

“A nation of the conservative traditions of China must accept changes gradually, but it is a pleasure to know and to say that in every improvement which she aims at she has the deep sympathy of America — and that there never can be any jealousy or fear on the part of the United States due to China’s industrial or political development, provided always that it is directed along the lines of peaceful prosperity and the maintenance of law and order and the rights of the individual, foreign or alien.

“ She has no territory we long for, and can have no prosperity which we would grudge her and no political power and independence as an empire justly exercised which we would resent. With her enormous resources and with her industrious people, the possibilities of her future cannot be overstated.

“It is pleasant to note a great improvement in the last two years in the relations between the United States and China. In the first place, through the earnest efforts of President Roosevelt, the administration of the Chinese immigration laws of the United States have been made much more considerate. The inquisitorial harshness to which classes properly admissible to the United States under the treaty between the two countries were at one time subjected has been entirely mitigated without in any way im­pairing the effectiveness of the law.

“The boycott which was organized ostensibly on the ground of such harshness of administration proved in the end to be a double-edged knife which injured Chinese even more than Americans and other foreign countries quite as much. Happily that has now become a closed incident, a past episode.

“Again the United States has exhibited its wish to do full justice to China by a return or waiver of the indemnity awarded to it for injuries and expenses growing out of the Boxer trouble—part of it. It has been said that we have done only what we ought to do. This may be so, but a nice sense of international obligation is not so universal— that it may not justly increase the friendly feeling between the parties to the transaction.

 

THE CONSULAR SERVICE.

“ With the full approval of President Roosevelt, Mr. Root secured the legislation needed to improve our consular service and to place it on a merit basis. I do not think it too much to say that the consular representatives in China within the last decade have not been up to the standard which the importance of the business interests of the United States in China demanded.

“Aware of this, the administration at Washington has within the last three years given special attention to the selection of consuls in China. This was made evident in the selection of both Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Denby as consul-generals at Shanghai. It is a new sensation for an American to come to a Chinese city and find as his consular representative one who knows the Chinese language and who understands the Chinese Empire as few Chinese understand it. I con­gratulate you citizens of the United States on having such a representative of your in­terests in this great commercial community as Mr. Denby.

 

THE UNITED STATES COURT FOR CHINA.

 

“ Finally another great step has been taken by the Government of the United States to improve its relations to China. Many years ago the Chinese Empire granted the right to citizens of the United States to reside in so-called concessions within the borders of the Chinese Empire, and there enjoy the security of living under the government and admin­istration of law by officers of the United States.

“This extraterritoriality was chiefly important in securing an administration of jus­tice in accordance with the principles and laws obtaining in the United States. It imposed an imperative obligation upon the United States to see to it that the justice thus administered by the officers whom it vested with judicial powers should be of the highest and most elevating character.

“I regret to say that this obligation for many years did not receive the attention and care that it ought to have had, but in the last Congress, at the instance of Secretary Root, under guidance of Mr. Denby, then the chief clerk of the State Department and now your Consul-General at Shanghai, with the able assistance of Mr. Denby’s brother, a member of Congress from Michigan, and of Senator Spooner of Wisconsin, a law was passed which properly recognizes the dignity and importance of the power conferred by the Chinese treaty upon the Government of the United States to administer justice in re­spect of citizens of the United States commorant in China by the creation of a United States circuit court for China.

“Our Government was fortunate in the selection as the first judge of that court of a gentleman who had had four or five years’ experience in the Orient as Attorney-General of the Philippines, and who came to Shanghai with an intimate knowledge of the method of uniting, in one administration, the principles of the common law of the United States with the traditions and conditions of a foreign country.

“His policy in raising high the standard of admission to the bar and in promoting vigorous prosecutions of American violators of law and the consequent elimination from this community of undesirable characters who have brought disgrace upon the name of Americans in the cities of China, cannot but commend itself to every one interested in the good name of the United States among the Chinese people and with our brethren of other countries who live in China.

“It involves no small amount of courage, and a great deal of common sense, to deal with evils of this character and to rid the community of them. Interests which have fattened on abuses cannot be readily disturbed without making a fight for their lives, and one who undertakes the work of cleansing and purifying must expect to meet resistance in libel and slander and the stirring up of official opposition based on misinformation and evil report.

“ I am glad to think that the Circuit Court for China has passed through its trial and that the satisfaction which its policy has brought to the American and foreign communities in China and to the Chinese people will not be unknown to the Administration at Washington, at whose instance this Court was first established.

“ I have read Judge Wilfley’s opinions both in civil and in criminal matters. He has worked hard and well. He has made it plain that some additional legislation by Congress is necessary to lay down a few more general principles of law which are to govern in the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the Court in China. I sincerely hope and believe that the establishment of this Court will make much for the carrying out of exact justice in the controversies that arise in the business between Chinese and Americans.

“There is nothing for which the Oriental has a higher admiration than for exact jus­tice, possibly because he is familiar with the enormous difficulty there is in attaining such an ideal. If this Court shall lead the Chinese to believe, as it ought to do, and will do, that the rights of a Chinaman are exactly as secure when considered by this tribunal as the rights of an American, and that there is no looking down upon a Chinese because he is a Chinese and no disregard of his business rights, because he is an Oriental, it will make greatly for the better relations between the two countries.

 

NEW COURT AND CONSULATE.

 

“And now what else is needed? It goes without saying. What you need is a great government building here, to be built by the expenditure of a very large sum of money, so that our Court and your Consulate shall be housed in a dignified manner. Our Government should give this substantial evidence of its appreciation of the importance of its business and political relations to the great Chinese Empire.

“In the Orient, more than anywhere else in the world, the effect upon the eye is important, and it must be very difficult for Chinese to suppose that the Government of the United States attributes proper importance to its trade with China when it houses its consulate and its judges in such miserably poor and insufficient quarters as they now occupy.

“All over the United States, Congress has provided most magnificent Court rooms for the administration of Federal justice. Will it, now that it has created a Court whose jurisdiction is co-extensive with the Chinese Empire, be less generous in the erection of a building which shall typify its estimate of the importance of its relation to Chinese trade and the Chinese people?”

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

Somen achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. In one or the other of these ways Shake­speare declares the fame of all men is accounted for, but there are exceptions. The progress of William Howard Taft illustrates this. It is not in one or the other way with him; it is in both ways. Obviously, he has achieved greatness and obviously, too, he has had greatness thrust upon him. President McKinley thrust greatness upon him when he sent Mr. Taft to the Philippines.

President McKinley knew Mr. Taft, and had talked with others who knew him. To Secretary Day he had said: “I must have a big broad man for the head of the Filip- pine Commission, and he must be strong, faithful and honest.”

“ Why don’t you appoint him, then? You know the man. Your description fits Bill Taft to a hair.”

Surely it was a good appointment, though many in those days thought that the Philippines should be cast adrift—“given independence ” the anti - imperialists called it. Minds have changed since then, for, excepting prophets, all men see more clearly behind than ahead. President Roosevelt said:

“No great civilized power has ever managed with such wisdom and disinterestedness the affairs of a people committed by the accident of war to its hands. If we had followed the advice of the misguided persons who wished us to turn the Islands loose and let them suffer whatever fate might befall them, they would already have passed through a period of complete and bloody chaos, and would now undoubtedly be the possession of some other power which there is every reason to believe would not have done as we have done; that is, would not have striven to teach them how to govern themselves or to have developed them, as we have developed them, primarily in their own interests. Save only in our attitude toward Cuba, I question whether there is a brighter page in the annals of international dealing between the strong and the weak than the page which tells of our doings in the Philippines.”

About Mr. Taft, to whom we owe this splendid page, the President said:

“His is a standard of absolutely unflinching rectitude on every point of public duty, and a literally dauntless courage and willingness to bear responsibility, with a knowledge of men and a far-reaching tact and kindness, which enabled his great abilities and high principles to be of use in a way that would be impossible were he not gifted with the capacity to work hand in hand with his fellows.”

Looking over the work that lay before Mr. Taft when he went to the Philippines, one sees such a complication of embarrassing conditions in the way, so many hindrances to successful accomplishment, that one is convinced that no one would take hold of such a task but a very wise man or a fool.

It will be remembered that the United States did not begin the trouble in the Philippines. There had always been trouble there. Robber bands had been busy since the time of the earliest records, and undoubtedly before. These ladrones, as they were called, lived by blackmail, and Spain had been unable to subdue them. But the first real in­surrection took place in 1896 under Aguinaldo.

This was the outbreak of the sentiment that had been growing since 1871, the year of the opening of the Suez Canal. This opening shortened the route from Spain to the Islands tremendously, so that there was an unusual immigration of Spaniards, especially of Republican Spaniards who were angry that Spain should have gone back to monarchial government. These immigrants who had tasted of republicanism and wished for more spread abroad in the Islands doctrines that were anything but harmony with the idea of the divine right of kings. These ideas, like seeds, took root and eventually sprouted and blossomed in spite of all the repressive measures of the Spanish Governor-Generals. The Philippines who wished to get rid of Spain were repeatedly foiled by the activ­ity of Spanish spies, and they suspected that much of the spying was done by the priests or friars. This is why the Filipinos hated the friars.

Mr. Taft in his report to President Roosevelt speaks of the friars as belonging to the Dominicans, Augustinians, Franciscans and Recoletos. There were many native priests, but these were of the secular clergy and were against the Spanish friars. In well-nigh all rural communities the friars represented the increasingly unpopular Spanish Government and owned personally great areas of cultivated land.

The insurrection of 1896 was against this government for the particular purpose of getting rid of the friars and getting possession of their lands. It resulted in the treaty of Biac-na-Bato. Aguinaldo and his lieuten­ants were to leave the Islands and Spain was to pay them much money.

Spain did not make good, and when Admiral Dewey sailed through the Spanish fleet to Manila in 1898 Aguinaldo was quite willing to come back home and help the Americans. Things were in a bad way in the Islands then. Agriculture was almost impossible, the friars’ rents were two years behind, and so trade was nearly at a standstill. Dewey’s ob­literation of the Spanish fleet pricked Spain’s prestige bubble, and straightway the embers of Aguinaldo’s revolution of 1896 were burning brightly in practically every province.

In return for Aguinaldo’s help in gathering insurrectos to aid the Americans drive Spain from the Islands, General Merritt permitted these comrades in arms to enter Manila. He wished the city for himself and his own people only. Bitter feeling toward Americans developed rapidly. Ingratitude is an excel­lent fertilizer of bitter feeling, and the Treaty of Paris, by which Spain handed the Islands over to the United States, did not help affairs. Aguinaldo went to Malolos and organized a government. Several other insurrectos did the same thing on the Visayan Islands. Neither government maintained order. On February 4, 1899, the Filipinos outside of Manila a­tacked the Americans within, and on the twenty-third there was an outbreak in the town itself.

So began the war that led to eventual Filipino defeat. But though Aguinaldo could not offer further resistance, Funston having decoyed and captured him, guerrillas continued to make trouble. They were encouraged by the “Anti-imperialists” at home, who declared that there would soon be a change of administration, and that the new administration would hand the Islands over to the Filipinos. Without this encouragement there would have been none of the guerrilla warfare.

The almost continuous warfare from 1896 till June, 1902, was certainly bad for the  Islands. Mr. Taft says:—“ Not only did the existence of actual war prevent farming, but the spirit of laziness and restlessness brought about by guerrilla life affected the willingness of the natives to work in the fields. More than this, the natural hatred for the Americans which a war vigorously conducted by American soldiers was likely to create, did not make the coming of real peace easy.”

When the war ended the ladrones were still about and were still keen to live in idleness by blackmail. They needed con­siderable attention. There was the great mass of the population, 5,000,000 out of 7, 000,000 of whom could neither read nor write, and who had sixteen spoken languages, no one of which was recognizably like any of the others. It recalled the Tower of Babel. There was no Esperanto. Every community was under a boss who ruled chiefly because of the fact that he could read and write. Master or owner might be a more correct word than boss. He had far too much power. “The history of the insurrection,” says Mr. Taft, “and of the condition of lawlessness which succeeded the insurrection is full of instances in which simple-minded country folk, at the bidding of the local leader, have committed the most horrible crimes of torture and murder, and when arrested and charged with it, have merely pleaded that they were ordered to commit the crime by the great man of the community.”

This irresponsible power which the bosses possessed over communities would have been fatal to anything like successful government had the Islands been handed over to Filipinos. Filipino leaders, whether bosses or municipal officials, were given to oppression and subject to corruption. There was no public opinion to restrain them, and could not be where eighty per cent of the inhabitants were wholly without education, a prey to fraud, mistreatment, to religious fakirs — a condition, in short, that was intolerable altogether, and which demanded far-seeing vision to apply the remedy.

In another chapter I shall show how William Howard Taft appeared, applied — and achieved.

 

CHAPTER X.

 

SPANISH friars have made possible the Americanization of the Philippines; have made it certain that the Filipinos can become self-governing. They blazed the trail and prepared the way by converting the Filipinos to Christianity three hundred years ago. The Filipinos have been professing Christians ever since; the only Christian race in the Orient. “The friars,” says Mr. Taft, “beat back the wave of Mohammedanism and spread their religion through all the Islands. They taught the people the arts of agriculture. They preached to them in their own dialect. They lived and died among them. They controlled them. The friars left the people a Christian people — that is, a people with Western ideals, who looked towards Rome, Europe and America. They were not like the Mohammedan or the Buddhist, who despise Western civilization as inferior. They were in a state of tutelage, ripe to receive modern Western conceptions as they should be educated to understand them. This is the reason why I believe that the whole Christian Filipino people are capable by training and experience of becoming a self-governing people.”

Those Spanish friars built better than they knew. Possibly they would have built differently had they looked clearly into the future, but surely the Christian world owes much to these early men who, without ques­tion or hesitation, went to the uttermost parts of the earth to preach their faith, to preach it with no hope of reward or even of comfort in this world—taking, as the Master had commanded, “ neither scrip nor raiment,” and with only the joy of service for their recompense.

Gratitude is due the friars for the teachableness of the Filipino as our Government finds him today. His intellectual and spiritual inheritance for ten generations is in accordance with our own, wherein he has an advantage over Chinese and Japanese, for he can assimilate American ideas better, and American ideas, thanks to the expanse and freedom of American life, are keenly active towards the world’s enlightenment.

Mr. Taft believes thoroughly that today is too soon to give the Filipinos independence, because they lack experience. They would not know how to exercise political franchise, but the present Filipino government is demonstrating that it is a question merely of time, perhaps of only one generation, when the Filipinos may be allowed to govern themselves freely. He is not sure that then they will desire independence, but time will tell. He is emphatic in declaring his belief that America must guide at present.

Mr. Taft says that the presence of the Americans in the Islands is essential to the due development of the lower classes and the preservation of their rights. If the American Government can only remain in the Islands long enough to educate the entire people, to give them a language [English] which enables them to come into contact with modern civilization, and to extend to them from time to time additional political rights, so that by the exercise of them they shall learn the use and the responsibilities necessary to their proper exercise, independence can be granted with entire safety to the people. I have an abiding conviction that the Filipino people are capable of being taught self-government in the process of their development, that in carrying out this policy they will be improved physically and mentally, and that as they acquire more rights, their power to exercise moral restraints upon themselves will be strengthened and improved. Meantime they will be able to see, and the American public will come to see, the enormous material ben­fit to both arising from the maintenance of some sort of a bond between the two countries which shall preserve their mutually bene­ficial business relations.

No one can study the East without hav­ing been made aware that in the development of China, Japan and all Asia are to be presented the most important political questions for the next century, and that in the pursuit of trade between the Occident and the Orient the having such an outpost as the  Philippines, making the United States an Asiatic power for the time, will be of immense benefit to its merchants and its trade. While I have always refrained from making this the chief reason for the retention of the Philippines, because the real reason lies in the obligation of the United States to make this people fit for self-government and then to turn the government over to them, I do no think it improper in order to secure support for the policy to state such additional reasons. The severe criticism to which the policy of the Government of the Philippines has been subjected by English Colonial statesmen and students should not hinder our pursuit of it in the slightest. It is of course opposed to the policy usually pursued in the English Government in dealing with native races because in common with other colonial powers, most English colonial statesmen have assumed that the safest course was to keep the native peoples ignorant and quiet, and that any education which might furnish a motive for agitation was an interference with the true and proper course of government.”

Without any of the spread-eagleism that occasionally affronts good taste this work of educating another people to take care of themselves is altruistic and as yet has not become a habit with those nations that call themselves Christian. It would seem, however, to be in accordance with Christian precept.

It is doing the Filipinos good. They are in far better condition than they were and this in spite of the fact that the rinderpest carried away seventy-five per cent of their cattle, and about half their horses have died of “ surra.” They have good roads now and can get to market easier. They have no longer to fear the raids of the robber bands; rents are easier since the Church has sold her splendid lands to the government, after the negotiations of Mr. Taft in person at the Vatican; the postal savings banks offer opportunity to put money away securely; farmers can obtain cash at a rate of interest that is not outrageous usury, elections are held, there is civil service embodying the merit system in good working order. Experiments that experts are making constantly in the department of agriculture are doing much to assure good management of crops, and sanitation is immensely improved.

There was a great deal of disease in Manila due to bad water from the Mariquina River, which flowed through three large towns before it reached the capital and brought sewage and refuse with it to Manila Bay. Mr. Taft set about to do away with this constant menace to health and thanks to his efforts water­works are just now completing which will bring pure mountain water to Manila from a reservoir some twenty-five miles away. The cost of this enterprise is about $2,000,000. This, together with pumping stations now building, will make the city as healthy as any other in the tropics; the death rate is largely reduced, in the case of infants especially. It is perhaps fifty per cent of what it was. But, above all, general education is making one peo­ple of the many tribes with their mutually incomprehensible languages. Mr. Taft has es­tablished schools throughout the islands. The Spanish school system was in large part on paper. The American system is a reality, with headquarters in Manila. There are thirty­seven divisions each in charge of a division superintendent. These are divided into 379 districts with a supervising teacher at the head of each, and in place of almost no schools at all (for Spain had no great desire that the common people should read and write) there are at present about thirty-seven hundred, with some 500,000 pupils. The municipalities support their 3,500 primary schools at an annual cost of $750,000 and the Filipino government spends $1,750,000 more on the other schools each year.

Schools open in August and the long vaca­tion begins in March. Sixty per cent of the pupils are boys, and forty per cent are girls. Today there are eight hundred American teachers in the Islands and six thousand Filipino teachers who are either graduates of American Normal Schools or have received their education from Americans. There are several kinds of schools in the Islands now that had not so much as been heard of when Mr. Taft arrived. For instance, there are seven­teen schools of Domestic Science, thirty-two Arts and Trades schools, five Agricultural schools, and thirty-six provincial high schools.

The Arts and Trades schools are a remarkable innovation. Formerly young Filipinos scorned handicrafts. They wished to become lawyers, physicians, chemists, or priests. No trades for them, but Mr. Taft has taught them. He has been to them what Booker Washington has been to the colored folk in the Southern States. The American idea of the dignity of labor is now a realization in the Islands.

Mr. Taft says very little practical political education was given by the Spaniards to the Filipinos. Substantially all the important executive offices in the Islands were assigned to the Spaniards, and the whole government was bureaucratic. The provincial and municipal authorities were appointed and popular elections were unknown. The administration of the municipalities was largely under the super­vision and direction of the Spanish priest of the parish. No responsibility for government, however local or unimportant, was thrust upon Filipinos in such a way as to give them political experience; nor were the examples of fidelity to public interest sufficiently numerous in the officeholders to create a proper standard of public duty. The greatest difficulty that we have had to contend with, in vesting Filipinos with official power in municipalities, is to instill into them the idea that an office is not solely for private emolument.”

The Filipino seems to have been a natural sportsman, but Mr. Taft has kind words for him nevertheless.

“The educated Filipino,” he says, “has an attractive personality. His mind is quick, his sense of humor fine, his artistic sense acute and active; he has a poetic imagination; he is courteous to the highest degree; he is brave; he is generous; his mind has been given by his (Spanish) education a touch of the scholastic logicism; he is a musician; he is oratorical by nature.”

That is good material to build on and now that American methods of education have superseded Spanish methods and are actively at work over the Islands instructing the youth of both sexes, and always in the English lan­guage, the future is bright indeed for the Filipinos. That they appreciate Mr. Taft’s work for them is shown by the fact that the first bill passed by the National Assembly, which he formally opened in 1907, was one appropriating 1,000,000 pesos or $500,000 in gold for public schools.

 

CHAPTER XI.

 

AS is natural for a man with a clear conscience and a good digestion Mr. Taft is optimistic. He believes in American ideals and he believes in the young men of America. He delights to talk to these young men concerning the things that his quarter of a century of active life in the public service has shown him to be worth while.

“ I acknowledge,” he says, “ the necessity of the material pursuits. None of them is in danger of being neglected by Americans. The greater part by far of the energy of a people will always be absorbed by manufacturing, production, business, transportation—the development of the country’s resources and the increase of its material prosperity. That is natural enough and right enough.

“But there are interests which are not material, and there is work to be done which is not that of business. The material interests indeed depend upon others which are nor material. The very possibility of conducting business depends upon conditions established by government—and government is itself a sort of business, or a profession, or, at all events, a duty, which has to be undertaken by some one. Isn’t it apparent on this aspect of it alone that the work of administering the Government is one which calls for the best brain, the best blood, the best conscience of the Nation? And isn’t it beyond all things clear that in the position in which our Nation finds itself today; with the glorious history of the past inspiring it with the serious prob­lems of the present pressing upon it; and with a future, boundless and inconceivable in its possibilities, inviting it; isn’t it clear that there is nothing in the world that calls so loudly for the devotion of their best talents by our best young men as does the Nation and its Government?

“We pride ourselves on our National prosperity, and we have reason to do so. And that did not come of itself nor without the tireless labor of thousands of keen Amer­ican minds and strong American arms. But neither did it come without the work of the American statesmen who established and maintained the Nation and made its laws and determined its place in the family of nations, nor of the soldiers who fought for it, nor of all the various grades of men in its service, conspicuous and inconspicuous, who carried on its work and fulfilled its duties as a Nation, perpetuating it, and strengthening it newly each year, and with it all the institutions of society which depend upon it—all those relations in which men live in comfort and security, all that confidence in which they sleep and rise again and carry on their labors and provide for the unquestioned future.

“There will never be, I say, any dangerous denial of the need that most men work at the productive and material duties. The danger is that material things may become all-absorbing. Prosperity may be so great that to share in it may come to seem the one end of living. The rewards of the commercial life are tangible and they are alluring. In times when these rewards are large and their attainment easily probable within a very short time, it would be strange if a people were not tempted to forget other and higher things and devote themselves entirely to the less noble.

“ But I say to you that if the young men of this country, enchanted by the glittering .prizes of commercial life, close their eyes to the lofty duties of patriotism, forget that their country calls no inconsiderable number of them to her own definite, professional service, alas for the country!

“ If the instructed, disinterested, and patriotic abilities especially of its educated youth are not at the call of the country, alas for it, and alas for them! To little avail have they read their Plato and been told that they who do not take their share in the Government shall be slaves of a Government by the more ignoble.

“ Our National wealth is the result of efforts such as perhaps no people ever put forth before, coupled with natural resources, good fortune, and divine favor. But we cannot rest in this. We cannot abandon ourselves to merely material superiority. We must not yield to the fascination of its ready rewards. There is danger of a people becoming at first intoxicated and then besotted by its own prosperity. We need above everything else now a realizing consciousness that our country’s material prosperity is nothing unless it enables us the better to fulfill those high duties to which we as a people are called—to carry on here the most enlightened government, un­der which free men are progressing toward the loftiest ideals, and to extend the blessings of that government, with the same beneficent ends, for their sake and for no advantage of our own, to those who have been providenti­ally brought under it.

“Our wealth will enable us to do this the better in various ways. It has been necessary to the possibility of culture and the existence of art. But it is on my mind that perhaps in no way is the country’s wealth a more profitable asset than in the fact that it may now support young men who are willing to devote attention to public matters, to study the work and assume the responsibilities of public administrators.

“The service of young men of wealth is likely to be especially efficient, because their income makes them indifferent. The indifference they would feel with regard to the emoluments of office would tend to make them faithful, independent, conscientious officeholders.

“ If there is any one thing upon which I feel strongly it is this subject of the duty of the wealthy and educated young man to his country. It has many times been remarked that much of England’s administrative success, in municipal and in imperial affairs, has been due to the existence in England of a class free by birth from the need to labor and indeed forbidden to do so, but expected to enter the country’s service. Now, we do not want and could never possibly have a ‘governing class’ here. But if it is a fact that a considerable number of young Americans are nowadays an­nually leaving college of whom necessity does not require that they should give their time to bread winning, is it not also a fact that the loud voice of public opinion should require of those young men that they consider whether their country does not need them? Oh! we may talk of culture and books and of serving the country by being a good citizen. That is very well. But good citizens need to know where their polling place is, and need to feel the obligation to do jury duty, and need to be acquainted with the affairs of the municipality and the country, and need to offer themselves for definite work in the municipalities or the State or in the dependencies, if they believe that they could do that work well.

“I am disposed to insist very positively upon this point: that the young man who is wealthy enough to be free from anxiety as to his own comfort and his family’s, owes it to society to devote himself to public affairs. He is failing in his duty if he does not.

“Seek office? Why should he not seek office? What is there wrong or objectionable in a good man’s seeking office, when he feels himself competent to discharge its duties, is conscious of having a high idea of its responsibilities, and finds his heart warm with ambition to be of those to whom his country’s honor is confided? He may be sure that men less well qualified and with lower ideals than him­self will be sure to seek it.

“Assuredly there is a career in the public service. One may not prophesy for every man commendably ambitious to enter it that he will end an Ambassador, but there is abundant opportunity for useful work. A good head and good health are necessary, with the disposition to work and work hard. There are opportunities on every hand for men to distinguish themselves by services of eminent value.

“ As to rewards. I do not talk of rewards. For the class of men to whom I would have the idea of public service appeal, the matter of re­wards would be irrelevant. There are no fortunes to be gained. In many instances there might be few great honors to be won. But is there no satisfaction in being of the number of those who are living their lives peculiarly in their country’s life? Is there no inspiration in the sense that one is helping to do the Big Things—the things that count, that last, that go into history? Or rather is there anything in the world that compares with the joy that rises in the heart of him who knows he has a part in those things?”

“ I say to him that there are rewards which are unknown to him who seeks only what he regards as the substantial ones. The best of all is the pure joy of service. To do things that are worth doing, to be in the thick of it, ah! that is to live.

“The poor man who chooses this way will have to live plainly, as things go nowadays. At least, he won’t pile up a surplus of wealth. Why should he want to? We used to be told in a homely adage that a millionaire had no advantage over a poor man in his capacity for food and drink. Wealth provides small satisfactions, but not deep ones. It can give no felicity like that which comforts the man who has identified himself with something big­ger than himself, which thrills the heart of the patriot, of the public servant.

 “There is not, however, the least cause for despair, nor is there perhaps the least occasion for this exhortation which you have artfully drawn out of me. There is evidence that the country’s young manhood does appreciate and is ready to respond splendidly to the call to its : service. There has never been a time when the young men of the country were so interested in public questions, or when the problems and the work before us so rested upon their minds and consciences.

“ I have means of knowing this. For illustration, I have remarked lately an increasing number of inquiries about Government matters, especially about affairs in the dependencies, as to which I am supposed to know something. I have cause to know that the interest in public affairs is keen at Yale; I believe it is so at many colleges and universities. The fine, vigorous, eager new manhood of our country will give us all lessons in this matter of civic duty, depend upon it.

“ Do not let it be for a moment understood that there is or has been any difficulty in filling the public posts for the most part with competent, high-class men. Certainly this is not so in the case of the administration of the dependencies. There may have been some difficulty at first, when the whole question of our attitude toward the islands lately released by Spain was undecided. Men could not be blamed for unwillingness to commit themselves to an enterprise neither the direction nor the end of which could be foreseen. But when it appeared the general agreement of the country that we had a work to do in the tropical islands which had so unexpectedly come to us, there was no longer any trouble in finding men to do that work. I rejoice to say there is plentiful evidence that in neither this nor in any other work which may fall to us to undertake will there be a dearth of men of high ideals and enthusiasm to carry it forward.

“It is in the tropics apparently that there is most of the world’s material, intellectual, and moral work to be done at this moment. Medical science has developed to the point where it is now possible for people of the temperate zone to live in the tropics for an extended period. The great progress of the next cen­tury will be indubitably in the tropic lands. Is there anything more vital to civilization than that it should be demonstrated that a Nation like the United States can be trusted not to exploit, but to educate and lift up from savagery, cruelty, and idleness, races which up to now have slept under the equatorial sun?

“ I conceive that the same rule applies to a nation in a community of nations as applies to a man in a community of men, and that when the Lord blessed one member of a com­munity with wealth and power and influence, and then by some series of circumstances has thrown into his arms some less fortunate member, it is his duty morally to use that fortune which is given to him as a trustee to help out his poorer neighbors. That was the view which McKinley took.

I “ The newspapers of the past fortnight have been filled with eulogiums upon the work done in Egypt by Lord Cromer, who is now retiring. All that is being said is fully justified by the brilliant record of that great administrator.

“ But do the young men of America appreciate it that ideals which we have set for ourselves in the administration of the Philippines are advanced far beyond those entertained by Lord Cromer in Egypt or avowed by Great Britain anywhere? When they do appreciate it, can there be any doubt that in their enthusiasm they will rally to devote themselves to the realization of those ideals?

“There can be no doubt. Our ideals are said to be too high. All the more do we require the help of our best blood to realize them, and all the more surely shall we have it. It is a glorious sight to see young men awaken to the vision of the Nation in her beauty and her ceaseless need of their devo­tion—to observe some among them grow suddenly indifferent to the sordid allurements of wealth or pleasure, as their hearts are smitten by the compelling charm of her call.”

 

CHAPTER XII.

 

IN a life rich in achievement one cannot declare with competent knowledge which of the many achievements is the greatest, but those who were at Cooper Union that Friday night, the tenth of January, —when Mr. Taft spoke on Capital and Labor, will doubt if any other single effort of his will rank higher in accomplishment.

It was a big opportunity for the War Secretary and he was big enough to take advantage of it. It was an opportunity that would bring joy to the heart of a brave man, but it would have filled a timorous or uncertain man with apprehension. Secretary Taft’s countenance wore a happy anticipatory smile from the moment he received the notification that he might declare to labor why it should ally itself with capital. His was the sensation of the athlete who knows he is in condition, and needs only the contest to complete his happi­ness. He tingled with enthusiasm.

Not only would he tell this East side audience of workingmen and socialists what he thought of Labor and of Capital, but he would stand before them a target for their questions, face them as an opponent, an antagonist if they would have it so—and battle single-handed against the whole 3,000.

He knew what his audience would be and he knew what they thought he would be. Many of them were as keen for this chance to “get together” as he was. There were socialists whose hairs stood up like bristles at the sight of any one in evening dress and who had no doubt whatever that Secretary Taft was a plutocrat, because he had in several instances ruled that certain corporation claims were not iniquitous, were even quite within the law as he understood the meaning of the statutes.

The labor element would be ready for him, too. They remembered his decisions. When he was Judge of the Supreme Court in Cin­cinnati and of the United States Circuit Court of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, and they had heard some of these deci­sions denounced vo­ciferously; one case concerned Moores & Co.,Parker Brothers, and the Bricklayers Union. Here is an outline of it as given by Jacob Waldeck.

Parker Brothers, mason contractors, had refused to collect a fine that had been imposed by the Bricklayers Union on one of their employes. The firm had also refused to discharge an apprentice and hire another satisfactory to the Union.

A strike was declared. The Union then called upon all dealers in building work the material of such firm in any building material, to refuse to sell to Parker Brothers. If any firm ignored the request, the Union would, according to its warning, refuse to worh the material of such firm in any building.

Moores & Co. continued to sell lime to Parker Brothers. The Union thereupon refused to handle Moores & Co’s, material. The firm sued the Union for damages and in the lower court was given a verdict for $2,250. An ap­peal was taken to Judge Taft in the Supreme Court.

Judge Taft said that the bricklayers might refuse to handle material that would make their labor greater, was hurtful or was for any reason not satisfactory. They might quit their employment if they chose.

He decided, however, that they had used coercion to prevent customers from dealing with Moores & Co. They had no direct dealing with that firm, their grievance being against Parker Brothers alone, and the coercion used against Moores & Co. was malicious and unlawful. It was boycotting.

The Judge sustained the judgment rendered against the ruling in the lower court. His decision was afterwards upheld by the Ohio Supreme Court.

At another time the locomotive engineers on the Ann Arbor railway struck. Engineers on connecting lines then notified their respective managers that they would not handle freight to or from Ann Arbor. They cited rule 12, of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers.

Judge Taft ruled that the existence and enforcement of such a rule makes the whole brotherhood guilty of criminal conspiracy against the laws of their country.

The decision in the case of W. F. Phelan was more talked about perhaps than either of the other two. It was at the time of the great railroad strike of 1894. The Cincinnati Southern railway was in the hands of a receiver whom Judge Taft had appointed.

The American Railway Union, it will be remembered, had declared a strike against the Pullman Company, and had ordered a sympathetic strike on all railways using Pullman cars. F. W. Phelan, who was an official of the American Railway­Union, went to Cincinnati to arrange the sympathetic strike on the Cincinnati Southern. He did not succeed with the strike, but he got into jail for sixty days for contempt of court.

“Phelan came to Cincinnati,” said the Judge, “ to carry out the purpose of a combination of men, and his act in inciting the employes of all Cincinnati roads to quit service was part of that combination. The combination to compel the railroads to refuse to handle Pullman cars and so to break their contracts with the Pullman Company was unlawful; and therefore Phelan, as a member of the combination, is guilty of contempt of court.”

With these decisions in mind labor leaders had declared against Judge Taft vigorously and now he was coming to Cooper Union, into their very midst and where they could almost get at him with their hands. It was too good to be true. They saw his finish. The Presidency for Taft? Ha, ha Not much. Just Twenty-Three! Extinction!

Such a throng sought to see this “finish” that the crowd outside exceeded that inside by possibly a thousand. Several hundred had gathered round the entrances before five in the afternoon. So keen was the outside crowd to see the “remnants and remains” of the War Secretary when the contest should be ended in the manner they expected, that they waited from before seven in the evening until after ten o’clock. Those who saw the “remnants” come out amidst much shouting were surprised and puzzled by his condition. He did not show a scratch and they did not know what had happened until they read the morn­ing papers. Here is one of the paragraphs they saw:

“But he is a good, earnest, honest, manly, better-than-the-average man to look at. If the boat were sinking, and he could swim and you couldn’t, you’d hand him your $50,000,—if you had it—saying ‘ Give this to my wife,’ and she’d get it if he lived to get ashore.”

Those inside the great assembly room of Cooper Union knew what was going on, however. They will long remember the two hours they spent there—two hours of triumph for William Howard Taft, and likely they will tell their grandchildren some day how they had heard a Secretary of War, who was afterward President of the United States, intro­duced to a great throng as “ Secretary of the Navy.”

Professor Charles Sprague Smith was responsible for this incident.

“ I have the honor to introduce to you Mr. Taft, the Secretary of the Navy”—laughter, and “Secretary of War,” “Secretary of Peace, ” came from various parts of the house.

Then the Secretary arose laughing too, and bowing.

“My friends,” he began, and paused to laugh a little more. “I am reminded of a story President Roosevelt told me not long since. It was about a politician who was to speak in the Middle West. The introducer after the usual jolly, turned toward this politician and said:

‘ “ I have now the honor of introducing to you a man who is known to you all, an eminent man whose name is a household word. It gives me the greatest possible pleasure to introduce Mr. ahem! Mr. — er—ahem! Mr. —’ here the introducer leaned over slightly and in a distinctly audible ‘aside’ said: ‘What the devil is your name, anyhow?’”

Just as any other speaker on the platform of the People’s Forum, Mr. Taft had to stand for what he said. Stand for it literally. The Secretary’s speech of itself by no means ended the evening’s entertainment and enlightenment. The Secretary did not sit down when he had finished, as he would have in some other hall; he continued to stand waiting for the audience to finish him—if it could. Evidently those before him had made ready to hit hard and had left all diffidence at home.

And all through the ordeal which consisted of written questions coming in rapid fire, Mr. Taft’s courtesy, his deference to his audience, never lessened. Even when some of the younger men in their zeal for information forgot the request the Chairman had made when he declared the meeting open and asked that all questions be written on slips of paper, called out sundry interrogations orally. These did not worry Mr. Taft at all.

Here are several samples of the questions that poured in on him. The first was from Bishop Walters of the American Methodist Episcopal Church.

“ In the name of 38,000 negro voters of this State I ask if you indorse President Roosevelt’s discharge of the colored troops as a result of the Brownsville incident, and if so, are you willing, as a candidate for president, to stake your fortunes on that action?”

“ I do not believe that that question is germane to the subject. It is likely to come before me officially. It is now before a committee of the Senate. The matter cannot arise for action of the President or myself un­til that committee has reported. Therefore, I must decline to answer the question.”

Another question was: “Why should not a blacklisted laborer be allowed an injunction as well as a boycotted capitalist?”

“He should be. Were I on the bench, I’d give him one quickly.”

“Do you think that the laboring man of today receives sufficient compensation?”

“I do not know what his labor is, or how much he gets for it,” said the Secretary. “I am sure some laborers receive too little—and some of them too much.”

“Why has your attitude toward working­men changed since you were on the bench in Ohio?” one man wrote; to which the Secretary replied: “It hasn’t.”

A question that brought down the house was:

“ If it took that Louisville concern, Moores & Co., Lime Dealers—fifteen years to collect $2,500 from the Bricklayers Union, how long will it take the government to collect that $29,000,000 fine”—(laughter).

“That,” replied the Secretary, when he could be heard, “requires a peculiar applicational authentical rule which I am not able to make.”

One man asked, “What do you advise a workingman to do who is out of a job and whose family is starving because he can’t get work?”

Looking up gravely Mr. Taft said, “God knows. If he cannot get work the charities of the country may be appealed to, but it is an awful thing when a man who is willing to work and who scorns the charity of any man is put in this condition.”

 

CHAPTER XIII.

 

IN 1906 Mr. Taft went to Cuba. There was a political crisis, a revolution in fact, and President Roosevelt directed the War Secretary to extinguish it. Cuba has had so many and such continuous revolutions that another was not only unnecessary but would be ridiculous. Therefore, by command of the President of the United States, Secretary Taft sailed for Havana. On September 29th he issued a proclamation to the people of Cuba, and on October 13th, sailed for home bearing with him an address from a committee of residents expressing gratitude that the revolution was totally extinct and a new and trustworthy government established on the Island. In a fortnight, Mr. Taft had done better than the whole government of Spain had failed to do in forty years.

Here is the proclamation of the Secretary and the resolutions of gratitude adopted by the American residents of Havana on the eve of Mr. Taft’s departure. They tell the story. It is Caesar’s “Veni, vidi, vici,” over again. “ To the People of Cuba:

“The failure of Congress to act on the irrevocable resignation of the President of the Republic of Cuba, to elect a successor, leaves this country without a government at a time when great disorder prevails and requires that pursuant to a request of President Palma, the necessary steps be taken in the name and by the authority of the President of the United States to restore order, protect life and property in the Island of Cuba and islands and keys adjacent thereto and for this purpose to establish therein a provisional government.

“ The provisional government hereby established by direction and in the name of the President of the United States will be maintained long enough to restore order and peace and public confidence, and then to hold such elections as may be necessary to determine those persons upon whom the permanent government of the Republic should be devolved.

“ In so far as is consistent with the nature of a provisional government established under authority of the United States, this will be a Cuban government conforming, as far as may be, to the Constitution of Cuba. The Cuban flag will be hoisted as usual over the government buildings of the Island. All the executive departments and the provincial and municipal governments, including that of the City of Havana, will continue to be administered as under the Cuban Republic. The courts will continue to administer justice, and all laws not in their nature inapplicable by reason of the temporary and emergent character of the Government will be in force.

“President Roosevelt has been most anxious to bring about peace under the constitutional government of Cuba, and has made every endeavor to avoid the present step. Longer delay, however, would be dangerous.

“In view of the resignation of the Cabinet, until further notice the heads of all departments of the Central Government will report to me for instructions, including Major-General Alejandro Rodriguez, in command of the Rural Guard and other regular Government forces, and General Carlos Roloff, Treasurer of Cuba.

“Until further notice, the Civil Governors and Alcaldes will also report to me for instructions.

“ The people of Havana forgot their political differences,” says Governor Magoon, in de scribing the results of Secretary Taft’s visit, “ and taking thought of the fact that the horrors of civil war had been averted, all parties joined in a demonstration of gratitude and praise for the work that was accomplished. The shore of the Bay was lined with thousands of cheering people, all available water craft was pressed into service to escort the ships to the mouth of the harbor, the forts exchanged salutes with the vessels, and amid cheers and all possible display of good will the Peace Commission concluded its labors. The character and extent of their service is shown by the resolution adopted by a mass meeting of the American residents of Havana, as follows:

“ Gentlemen:

“The American residents of Cuba, temporarily organized for the purpose of making known to you their situation and necessities in connection with the recent disturbances desire to express to you their high appreciation of the great services your wise and prudent measures have secured to thein and to all the people of Cuba.

“The results you have accomplished are greater than could have reasonably been hoped for at the time of your arrival. Nearly thirty thousand armed men, moved by the most intense and bitter passions, were then arrayed against the armed forces of the government and a disastrous conflict was imminent, in which enormous loss of life and property would have been inevitable. It scarcely seemed possible that these angry elements of discord and strife could be brought into peaceful and orderly citizenship without bringing into active service the military power at your command between the contending forces. But in less than one month the wise and sagacious methods you pursued and the skill and adroitness with which you approached the difficult task committed to your charge have brought peace and quiet to Cuba. Warlike conditions have vanished, with no immediate probability of their resumption. The armed forces have surrendered their arms and most of them are already in their fields and shops engaged in peaceful industry.

“Not the least satisfactory of the considerations involved is the fact that in the settlement of the turbulent conditions that prevailed you have caused but little irritation or resentment, and have secured from the Cuban people increased respect and regard for the United States and greater confidence and trust in the good-will and wishes of the American people for the people of Cuba and their future welfare.

“We do not believe that so successful and speedy an achievement under conditions so difficult and dangerous has any parallel. And the thanks and gratitude of the people of Cuba, as well as of the great people you repre­sent, are due to you for these inestimable services.

“Wishing you a safe return to the United States and the enjoyment of higher honors in the future we are,

“Sincerely yours, (Signed)

S. S. Harvey, H. E. Havens, Wm. Hughes, H. W. Barker, C. Clifford Ryder, Alfred Liscomb, W. Roberts, Wm. B. Hine, J. E. Barlow, Chas. Hasbrook, Committee.”

 

CHAPTER XIV.

 

MISSIONARIES are much discussed persons. They have been talked about by individuals of many degrees of ignorance and by others representing various degrees of knowledge. Excepting Her Majesty, the late Queen Victoria of England, almost every one has expressed an opinion on the subject of foreign missions. Here is what Mr. Taft says. His words will carry weight:

“ I have known a good many people that were opposed to foreign missions. I have known a good many regular attendants at church, consistent members—perhaps like our friend Governor Smith, of Georgia—that religiously, if you choose to use that term, refused to contribute to foreign missions.

It has been the custom in literature sometimes to make fun of them. You remember in Dickens, when Sam Weller came home to see his father, Tony, and the widow whom Tony had married, the widow and the Rev. Stiggins framed an indictment against Tony on the ground that he would not contribute any money to pay for flannel waistcoats and colored pocket handkerchiefs for little infants in the West Indies. He said they were little humbugs and he said, moreover, in an undertone to Sam, that he would come down pretty handsome for some straight veskits for some people at home.

Now, I confess that there was a time when I was enjoying a smug provincialism that I hope has left me now, when I rather sympathized with that view. Until I went to the Orient, until there were thrown on me the responsibilities with reference to the extension of civilization in those far distant lands, I did not realize the immense importance of foreign missions. The truth is we have got to wake up in this country. We are not all there is in the world. There are lots besides us, and there are lots of people besides us that are entitled to our effort and our money and our sacrifice to help them on in the world. Now no man can study the movement of modern civilization from an utterly impartial standpoint and not realize that Christianity and the spirit of Christianity is the only basis for the hope of modern civilization and the growth of popular self-government. The spirit of Christianity is pure democracy. It is the equality of man before God, the equality of man before the law, which is, as I understand it, the most God-like manifestation that man has been able to make. Now I am not here tonight to speak of foreign missions from a purely religious standpoint. That has been done and will be done. I am here to speak of it from the standpoint of political, governmental advancement, the advancement of modern civilization. And I think I have had some opportunity to know how dependent we are on the spread of Christianity in any hope that we may have of uplifting the peoples whom Providence has thrust upon us for our guidance.

 

FOREIGN MISSIONS AND THE FILIPPINES

 

Foreign missions began a long time ago. In the Philippines from 1565 to 1571 there were five Augustinian friars that came out by direction of Philip II, charged with the duty under Legaste of Christianizing those islands. By the greatest good luck they reached there just at the time when the Mo­hammedans were thinking of coming into the same place, and they spread Christianity through those islands with no violence, but in the true spirit of Christian missionaries. They taught the natives of those islands agriculture, they taught them peace and the arts of peace. And so it came about that the only people as a body that are Christians in the whole Orient are the Filipino people of the Christian pro­vinces of the Filippines,—7,000,000 souls.

Now I dwell upon this because it is the basis of the whole hope of success that we have in our problem in those islands. It is true that these people were not developed beyond the point of Christian tutelage. Those old mis­sionaries felt that it was not wise to expose these people to the temptations of the knowledge which European Christians had, and so they were kept in a state of ignorance, but, nevertheless, they were Christians, and for 300 years have been under that influence, and now in this condition of Christian tutelage, their ideals are Western, their ideals are European, their ideals are Christian, and they understand us when we attempt to unfold to them the theories and doctrines of self-government, of democracy; because they are Christians, they are fit material to make in two or three generations a self-governing people. Now we have the opportunity to know, be­cause we have got 1,000,000 non-Christians there; we have 400,000 or 500,000 Mohammedans, and they don’t understand republican government; they don’t understand popular government. They welcome a despotism. And they never will understand that kind of a government until they have been converted to Christianity.

 

OUR BUSINESS IN THE FILIPPINES

 

Now I suppose I ought not to get into a discussion here of our business in the Filippines, but I never can take up that subject without pointing a moral. It is my conviction that our nation is just as much charged with the obligation to help the unfortunate people of other countries that are thrust upon us by fate until they are fit to become self-governing people, as it is the business of the wealthy and fortunate in the community to help the infirm and the un­fortunate of that community. I know that it is said that there is nothing in the Constitution of the United States that authorizes national altruism of that sort. Well, of course, there is not. But there is nothing in the Consti­tution of the United States that forbids it. What there is in the Constitution of the United States is a breathing spirit that we are a nation with all the responsibilities and power that any nation ever had, and, therefore, when it becomes the Christian duty of a nation to assist another nation, the Constitution authorizes it because it is part of its being. We went into the Cuban war, and we didn’t go there for conquest. We went there because we thought there was an international scandal there that ought to be ended, and that we had some responsibility with respect to that scandal, if we could end it and did not do it— and with the best and most self-denying purpose with respect to Cuba—and then we find these countries on our hands.

 

ROMAN CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS

 

Now then, in the islands: I have been at the head of the Philippines, and I know what I am talking about when I say that the hope of these islands depends upon the development of the power of the churches that are in those islands. One of the most discouraging things today is not the helpless, but the poverty-stricken condition of the Roman Catholic Church, which has the largest congregation in those islands; and every man, be he Protest­ant or Catholic, must in his soul hope for the prosperity of the Roman Catholic Church in those islands in order that it may do the work that it ought in uplifting those people.

So, too, with reference to the Protestant missions in those islands. They are doing a grand and noble work. It may be that their congregations will not be so large as those of the Roman Catholic Church—it is not to be so expected—but the spirit of Christian emulation, if I may use it, of competition, between the representatives of the churches, has the grandest effect upon the agents of all the churches, and so indirectly upon the people. And it is the influence of the churches upon a people as ignorant as they are that holds up the hands of the civil governor, charged as he is with the responsibility of maintaining peace and order, of inducing them to educate their children, and to go on upward toward the plane of self-government.

I am talking practical facts about the effect of religion on the political government, and I know what I am talking about. Now foreign missions accomplish—I did not realize it until I went into the Orient the variety of things that they accomplish. They have reached the conclusion that in order to make a man a good Christian, you have got to make him useful in a community and teach him some­thing to do and give him some sense and intelligence.

So, connected with every successful foreign mission is a school, ordinarily an industrial school. Also you have to teach him that cleanliness is next to Godliness, and that one business of his is to keep himself healthy, and so in connection with every good foreign mission they have hospitals and doctors. And, therefore, the mission makes a nucleus of modem civilization, with schools, teachers, and physicians, and the church. In that way, having educated the native, having taught him how to live, then they are able to be sure that they have made him a consistent Christian.

 

CHINA HEADED RIGHT

 

Of course, they say there are a great many rice Christians in China. Doubtless there are. Chinese do not differ from other people, and they are quite willing to admit a conversion they do not have in order that they may fill their stomachs; but that does not affect the real fact, which is: that every foreign mission in China is a nucleus of modern civilization. Now China is in a great state of transition. China is looking forward to progress. China is to be guided by whom? It is to be guided by the young Christian students and scholars that either learn English or some foreign language at home or are sent abroad to be instructed, and who come back and whose words are listened to by those who exercise influence at the head of the government. Therefore it is that these frontier posts of civilization are so much more important than the mere numerical count of converts seems to make them.

I speak from the standpoint of, as I say, political civilization in such a country as China. They have, 1 think, 3,000 missionaries in China. The number of students was 35,000 last year. They go out into the neighborhood, and they cannot but have a good effect throughout that great empire, large as it is, to promote the ideas of Christianity and the ideas of civilization. Now two or three things make one impatient when he understands the facts. One is this criticism of the missionaries as constantly involving the governments in trouble, as constantly bringing about war. The truth is that western civilization in trade is pressing into the Orient and the agents that are sent forward, I am sorry to say, are not the best representatives of Western civilization. The American and Englishman and others who live in the Orient are, many of them, excellent, honest, God-fearing men; but there are in that set of advanced agents of Western civilization gentlemen who left the West for the good of the West, and because their history in the West might prove embarrassing at home. More than that, even where they are honest, hard-working tradesmen and merchants attempting to push business into the Orient, their minds are constantly on business. It is not human nature that they should resist the temptations that not infrequently present themselves to get ahead of the Oriental brother in business transactions. They generally are quite out of sympathy with a spirit of brotherhood toward the Oriental natives. Even in the Philippines that spirit is shown, for while I was there I can remember hearing on the streets, sung by a gentleman that did not agree with my view of our duty toward the Filipinos:

He may be a brother of William H. Taft But he ain’t no brother of mine.

Now that is the spirit that we are too likely to find among the gentlemen who go into the East for the mere purpose of extending trade. Then I am bound to say that the restraints of public opinion, of a fear of the criticism of one’s neighbors that one finds at home, to keep men in the straight and narrow path are loosened in the Orient, and we do not find that they are the models, many of them, that they ought to be, in probity and morality. They look upon the native as inferior, and they are too likely to treat him with insult.

Hence it is that in the progress of civilization we must move along as trade moves; and as the foreign missions move on it is through the foreign missions that we must expect to have the true picture of Christian brotherhood presented to those natives, the true spirit of Christian sympathy. That is what makes, in the progress of civilization, the immense importance of Christian missions. You go into China today and try to find out what the conditions are in the interior—consult in Peking the gentlemen who are supposed to know and where do they go? They go at once to missionaries, to the men who have spent their lives far advanced into the nation, far beyond the point of safety if any uprising takes place, and who have learned by association with the natives, by living with them, by bringing them into their houses, by helping them on to their feet, who have learned the secret of what Chinese life is. And, therefore, it is that the only reliable books that you can read, telling you the exact condition of Chinese civilization, are written by these same foreign missionaries who have been so much blamed for involving us in foreign wars.

It is said that the Boxer War was due to the interference of missionaries, and the feeling of the Chinese against the Christian religion as manifested and exemplified by the missionaries. That is not true. It is true that the first outbreak was against the missionaries—because the outbreak was against foreign interference, and it was easiest to attack those men who were farthest in the Chinese nation, and there they made expression of that feeling by their attack against the whole foreign interference. But that which really roused the opposition of the Chinese was the feeling that all we Christian nations were sit­ting around waiting to divide up the Middle Kingdom, and waiting to get our piece of the pork. Now, that is the feeling that the Chinese have; and I am not prepared to say that there was not some ground for the suspicion.

I think when a man has done his duty, when he has made an issue, that he is entitled to have it stated in the face of accusations that are unjust. I have described to you some of the conditions that prevail with respect to the Americans in the cities of the Orient—in Shanghai and in other of those cities; and I am sorry to say that there was nothing there that ought to fill the mind of an American with pride. Our consular system has been greatly improved; and then was established a court, a consular court of China, the Circuit Court of the United States; and a man was put in there who had been attorney-general in the Philippine Islands, who had had some experience in dealing with the waifs that come around up the coast and through one town and then go on up to another town. They left Manila, and then after they had left Manila they spent their time in damning the government of Manila. We call them in Manila Shanghai roosters.

Wilfley went up there as judge of that court and he found a condition of an Augean stable that needed cleaning out, so far as the Americans were concerned; and I think perhaps in this audience I would be able to call on witnesses who could testify to the condition of morality that was carried on there under the protection of the American flag; because we have extra-territorial jurisdiction, under con­cession made by the Chinese Government to us. Wilfley went to work, and before he got through the American flag floated over a moral community; and in so doing he had the sym­pathy of the foreign missionaries that were in that neighborhood. But he has come home —and when you are a good many miles away facts are difficult to prove—pictures are easy to paint in lurid colors, of the tyranny of a judge away off there—and he has been sub­jected to a good deal of criticism of that kind. I want to give my personal testimony on the subject in favor of the defendant.

With this change in our diplomatic relations to China, by doing what was a clean honest thing to do, but which as between nations seems to be a little more exceptional, perhaps, than between individuals—by agreeing to re­turn the money that we really ought not to have taken as the Boxer indemnity, by the influence of our own foreign missions there and by the belief in China that we are not there for our own exploitation, or to appropri­ate jurisdiction, territorial or otherwise, I think we stand well in China today.

I think we stand in such a position that such a movement as this, in order to raise money to increase the number of missionaries and the number of nuclei of Christianity and civilization in that teeming population of 450,000,000, has a better prospect today than it ever had before. Therefore such a move­ment as this must enlist the sympathy and the aid of all who understand the great good that self-denying men who go so far to accomplish their good are doing.

 

missionaries: their life and dwellings

 

Now you can read books—I have read them—in which the missions are described as most comfortable buildings; and it is said that missionaries are living more luxuriously than they would at home, and, therefore,  they do not call for our support or sympathy. It is true that there are a good many mission buildings that are handsome buildings; I have seen them. It is true that they are comfortable; but they ought to be comfortable. One of the things that you have got to do with the Oriental is to fill his eye with something that he can see, and if you erect a great missionary building, he deems your coming into that community of some importance; and the missionary societies that are doing that, and are building their own buildings for the missionaries, are following a very much more sensible course than is the United States in denying to its representatives anything but mere hovels. But it is not a life of ease; it is not a life of comfort and luxury. I do not know how many have felt that thing that I think the physicians call nostalgia. I do not know whether you have experienced that sense of distance from home, that being surrounded by an alien people, that impression that if you could only have two hours of association with your old friends of home, if you could only get into the street car and sit down, or hang by a strap, in order to be with them. I tell you, when you come back after an absence of five or ten years, even the strap seems a dear old memory. These men are doing grand, good work. I do not mean to say that there are not exceptions among them; that sometimes they do not make mistakes, and sometimes they do not meddle in something which it would be better for them from a politic motive to keep out of; but I mean as a whole, these missionaries in China and in other countries worthily represent the best Christian spirit of this country, and worthily are doing the work that you have sent them to do.

I thank you for the opportunity of speaking on behalf of this body of Christian men and women who are doing a work which is indispensable to the spirit of Christian civilization.”

 

CHAPTER XV.

 

THAT William Howard Taft’s career has been a continuous demonstration of the worth of Americanism is obvious to the reader of even these meagre chapters. That this career was inevitable is also obvious if one thinks of who he was and whence he came.

He was born as thoroughly American as it is possible to be and he was brought up in accordance with his birth. Even in a democracy, ancestors are accountable for much. William Howard Taft’s ancestors go back through six New England generations in a direct line to Robert Taft, who settled in Mendon, Massachusetts, in 1660. On his mother’s side—who was a Torrey—there is another unbroken New England line reaching back to William Torrey, who settled in Massachusetts in 1640. These two parallel lines of inheritance are surely a warrant of Americanism, but we may add that one of the Tafts, Aaron, by name, a great-grandfather of William Howard, married Rhoda Rawson. Rhoda Rawson’s great­great-grandfather was Edward Rawson, Sec­etary of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a good secretary too. Blood will tell. Our best Secretary of War, best because of his achievements in Peace, comes only into his heritage in receiving his high appointments.

So much for Americanism by inheritance; now for the equally American home. Home spells out the story for most of us. Ancestors furnish the metal and the home is the mould. The family has charge of the work and so the man’s character is determined for this life. Later circumstances, various as they may be, do not change the man; they merely give various views of the same man. That is all they can ever do when home has finished with him.

The Taft home was a grand mould to be formed in. In the first place it was in Ohio, which is a fine thing. Ohio ranks high as a president producer and maker of statesmen. It was suburban, with ground about it, and plenty of ozone-laden air and good schools near by. The children had much freedom in their outdoor life and within doors what every true American home never lacks, discipline. There they learned that benevolence in little things which makes for manners, and to be considerate for others which is what makes life in this world livable. No. 60 Auburn Avenue, on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The house, which is still there, was on a ridge, with Butcher Town to the east and Tailor Town to the west. Between the urchins of these “Towns” and those on the Ridge existed a feud, since the time when the memory of the Taft boys runneth not to the contrary. This feud was in no way obnoxious to the embryo War Secretary nor to his brothers. It added to the zest of life for all of them.

Besides the feud, they had the out-door games that all normal boys delight in, also field sports and wrestling. At wrestling William Howard Taft was never defeated. He was a fine swimmer also, and it is remembered that he played marbles with great skill.

He had a good in-door record as well, but it was for books. He was keen to learn and if he had not been so lusty outside of the house, he would have been called a grind. Throughout his school days his father was a guide, companion, counselor, and friend. A rather stem pacemaker perhaps, for when after an examination at the high school the present Secretary of War ranked Number Five in a particularly bright class, the father demurred, replying to Mrs. Taft’s rather propitiatory comment, with, “ No, my dear, mediocrity will not do for William.”

This remark, by the way, was taken up by the other children, who on occasion would chant the words deriving thereby considerable enjoyment of which William did not partake.

Besides the mother, Louise Torrey, and the father, Alphonso Taft, there were six children in the family in those days. The youngest was a girl, Fanny Louise, now the wife of Dr. Edwards of Los Angeles, California. The oldest was Charles Phelps, who was graduated from Yale in 1864 and now lives in Cincinnati where he edits and owns the Times-Star. Next came Peter Rawson, valedictorian of the Class of ’67 and a member of Skull and Bones Society, an honor of much significance in New Haven. William Howard came next, who graduated in 1878, salutatorian, and like his brother, a Bones man. Then came Henry Waters, now of New York City, who was of the Class of ’80, at Yale, and also Skull and Bones, and last came Horace Dutton, now head of the great Taft School at Watertown, Connecticut; he was Yale ’83 and, as had then come to be a Taft habit, likewise a Skull and Bones man.

That all the Taft boys should have gone to Yale is another demonstration of the Taft Americanism, proof that their home life was American. It was a simple, wholesome life; active, democratic, and always interesting. A home with pleasant grounds in summer and open fireplaces in winter, about which the family gather and where homelife is healthier, happier, and more helpful than under any other conditions.

Indoors William Howard Taft was all for books. Even though he had just led his side to victory in an association foot-ball match, or had charged successfully through both Butcher Town and Tailor Town, he did not discourse upon his triumphs when he came in-doors, nor even go off by himself to gloat. He took down his books and went to work.

His first school was the nearby Grammar school, the Nineteenth District public school. He never had a governess, a private tutor, or a coach, but in good American fashion ground out all the work for himself. He went through the Nineteenth with flying colors and then on to the Woodbury high school where only once did he approach so near to mediocrity as Number Five. That was not really shameful, when we learn that the class William had entered was the brightest class the school had ever known.

In 1874, at seventeen, he was admitted to the freshman class of Yale, and graduated in 1878. All through his college course no one else was so strong as he, nor so affable, it is good to say. He showed prowess in various individual contests, especially in wrestling. He did not join any of the ’Varsity teams, though once he was anchor in a tug of war. His father had sent him to Yale to study and the young man sought to win honors in scholarship as Judge Taft has done in the same college before him. He succeeded for he was graduated with distinction, the faculty of the University having appointed him salutatorian; that is, he ranked Number Two in scholarship.

His classmates nominated him class orator. Besides this he had several special honors in subjects he had taken special personal interest in. With his diploma of Bachelor of Arts and his certificates of honor the young graduate went back to Cincinnati and entered the law school there, whence he was in due course graduated again as a Bachelor of Law, incidentally dividing the first prize with a fellow classman. He kept in touch with his Alma Mater also, and having done the reading she prescribed, received from her some time later a second parchment awarding him the degree of Doctor of Laws.

He also did law reporting for the Times-Star which belonged to his brother Charles, and did it so well that Murat Halstead gave him a job on the Commercial Gazette at six dollars a week.

Though Halstead offered to give him a raise if he would stay—to graduate him from reporting to something higher—young Taft said he would do the graduation this time by himself, and so leaving newspaper work with his testimonials of efficiency as a law reporter, he went over to his father with his three sheep­skins and enough prizes to fill a cabinet, and became clerk in the office of Taft and Lloyd.

 

CHAPTER XVI.

 

ADDRESS of Hon. William H. Taft, Secretary of War, delivered before the Cooper Union, New York City, Friday, January 10, 1908:

“Looking back to a time when society was much ruder and simpler, we can trace the development of certain institutions that have come to be the basis of modern civilization. We can hardly conceive the right of personal liberty without private property, because involved in personal liberty is the principle that one shall enjoy what his labor produces. Property and capital were first accumulated in implements, in arms, and personal belongings, the value of which depended almost wholly on the labor of their making. As man’s industry and self-restraint grew, he produced by his labor not only enough for his immediate necessities, but also a surplus, which he saved to be used in aid of future labor. By this means the amount which each man’s labor would produce was thereafter increased. There followed at length the corollary that he whose savings from his own labor had -increased the product of another’s labor was entitled to enjoy a share in the joint result, and in the fixing of these shares was the first agreement between  labor and capital. The certainty that a man could enjoy as his own that which he produced or that which he saved, and so could dispose of it to another, was the institution of private property and the strongest motive for industry beyond that needed merely to live.

This is what has led to the accumulation of capital in the world. It is the mainspring of human action which has raised man from the barbarism of the early ages to modern civilization. Without it he would still be in the alternating periods of starvation and plenty, and no happiness but that of gorging unrestrained appetite. Capital increased the amount of labor’s production and reduced the cost in labor units of each unit produced. The cheaper the cost of production, the less each one had to work to earn the absolute necessities of life, and the more time he had to earn its com­forts. And as the material comforts increased the more possible became happiness, and the greater the opportunity for the cultivation of the higher instincts of the human mind and soul.

 

ALL BENEFITTED BY INCREASE OF CAPITAL

 

It would seem, therefore, to be plainly for the benefit of every one to increase the amount of capital in use in the world, and this can only be done by maintaining the motive for its increase.

Labor needs capital to secure the best production, while capital needs labor in producing anything. The share of each laborer in the joint product is affected not exactly, but in a general way, by the amount of capital in use as compared with the number of those who labor. The more capital in use the more work there is to do, and the more work there is to do the more laborers are needed. The greater the need for laborers the better their pay per man. Manifestly, it is in the direct interest of the laborer that capital shall increase faster than the number of those who work. Everything, therefore, which legitimately tends to increase the accumulation of wealth and its use for production will give each laborer a larger share of the joint result of capital and labor. It will be observed that the laborer derives little or no benefit at all from wealth which is not used for production. Nothing is so likely to make wealth idle as insecurity of invested capital and property. It follows, as a necessary conclusion, that to destroy the guaranties of property is a direct blow at the interest of the workingman.

 

MATERIAL GROWTH OF LAST TWO GENERATIONS

 

The last two generations have witnessed a marvelous material development. It has been effected by the assembling and enforced co­operation of simple elements that previously had been separately used. The organization of powerful machines or of delicate devices by which the producing power of one man increased fifty or one hundred-fold was, however, not the only step in this great progress. Within the limits of efficient administration, the larger the amount to be produced at one time and under one management the less the expense per unit. Therefore, the aggregation of capital, the other essential element with labor in producing anything, became an ob­vious means of securing economy in the manufacture of everything. Corporations had long been known as convenient commercial instruments for wielding combinations of capital. Charters were at first conferred by special act upon particular individuals and with varying powers, but so great became the advantage of incorporation, with the facility afforded for managing great corporations, and the limitation of the liability of investors, that it was deemed wise in this country, in order to pre­vent favoritism, to create corporations by general laws, and thus to afford to all who wished it the opportunity of assuming a cor­porate character in accordance therewith.

The result was a great increase in the number of the corporations and the assumption of the corporate form by seven-eights of the active capital of the country. For a long time it was contended that the introduction of machines to save labor would work an in­jury to those who made things by hand, be­cause it enabled the capitalist to reduce the number of hands that he employed. The argument was a strong one, but the result has shown that it was erroneous in that it did not take into account two things—first, that the saving made by machinery so increased the profit on the capital and thus made so much new capital that while the demand for labor in one factory or business was reduced, the number of businesses and factories grew so that on the whole the demand for labor increased greatly; and, second, the use of machinery so reduced the cost of production and price of both the necessities and comforts of life that the laborer’s wages in money were given a substantial increase in purchasing power.

What has been said, it seems to me, shows clearly enough that the laborer is almost as keenly interested in having capital increase as the capitalist himself. As already said, anything that makes capital idle, or which reduces or destroys it, must reduce both wages and the opportunity to earn wages. It only requires the effects of a panic through which we are passing, or through which we passed in 1873 or 1893, to show how closely united in a common interest we all are in modem society. We are in the same boat, and financial and business storms which affect one are certain to affect all others. It was not so much so in olden times, when the population was scattered, and when each family supplied almost all its own wants, when it raised its food on the farm and made its clothes in the winter, and depended but little on what it sold, and bought practically nothing. Now we live in a society that is strictly co-operative. Destroy the buildings of a city like San Francisco by an earthquake, and then learn the complete de­pendence that all the urban population has upon the rest of the country for more than a week’s life. As the population increases, as the cost of production for our necessities and comforts is reduced by having them made in great quantities, and at a low price, we become dependent on the working of this co-operative mechanism to such a point that a clog in any one of the wheels which stops them causes stagnation and disaster.

Therefore, to come back to my original proposition, the laboring man should be the last to object to the rapid accumulation of capital in the hands of those who use it for the reproduction of capital. The thoughtful and intelligent laborer has, therefore, no feeling of hostility toward combinations of capital engaged in lawful business methods.

The capitalist, however wealthy, who is willing to devote his nights and days to the investment of his capital in profitable lawful business or manufacture and who studies methods of reducing the cost of production and economizing expenses therein should be regarded with favor by the workingman, be­cause, while his motive is merely one of accumulation, he is working not only for himself but for labor and for society at large. The in­ventors on the one hand, and the men of judgment, courage, and executive ability, who have conceived and executed the great lawful enterprises, on the other, have reaped princely profits, which the world may well accord them for the general good they have done. The wealth they accumulated is not wrested from labor, but is only a part of that which has been added to the general stock by the ingenuity, industry, judgment, and ability of those who enjoy it. If, with the growth in the population, the condition of man is to improve, new plans for the use of capital to better advantage must be devised, which shall, at the same time, increase capital more rapidly than the popu­lation and reduce the cost of living.

What has been said should not be misunderstood. The men who have by economic or­ganization of capital at the same time increased the amount of the country’s capital, increased the demand and price for labor, and reduced the cost of necessities are not philanthropists. Their sole motive has been one of gain, and with the destruction of private property that motive would disappear, and so would the progress of society. The very advantage to be derived from the security of private property in our civilization is that it turns the natural selfishness and desire for gain into the strongest motive for doing that without which the upward development of mankind would cease and retrogression would begin.

 

FAIR LAWS FOR CAPITAL SHOULD BE FAVORED BY LABOR

 

It is greatly in the interest of the working­man, therefore, that corporate capital should be fairly treated. Any injustice done to it acts directly upon the wage-earners who must look to corporate wealth for their employment. Take the large body of railroad employees. Any drastic legislation which tends unjustly to reduce the legitimate earnings of the railroad must in the end fall with heavy weight upon the employees of that railroad, because the manager will ultimately turn toward wages as the place where economy can be effected. So in respect to taxation, if the corporation is made to bear more than its share of the public burdens, it reacts directly, first, upon its stockholders, and then upon its employees. In the election of 1896, when the cry was for free silver, a great many wage-earners in that campaign of education were enabled to see that while the serious impairment of the standard of value by going on to a free-silver basis might work advantageously for the debtor class, the laboring man belonged to the creditor class. The wage-earners had no debts of any amount to pay; they were benefited by having their wages paid in the best currency possible; and they were directly interested that their em­ployers with capital should collect the debts due them in the same medium in which those debts had been contracted. The truth was that the wage-earners were in effect part of the moneyed classes of this country in the sense that their interest and that of the capitalist was identically the same in requiring the honest payment of debts.

We are suffering now from a panic. It was brought on, in my judgment, by the exhaustion of free capital the world over, by the lack of an elastic system of currency, and also by a lack of confidence in our business fabric pro­duced in Europe through the revelations in certain great corporations of business dishonesty, corruption, and unlawfulness. It has been necessary for us to purify some of our business methods; but the purification cannot stop the panic. It will doubtless make another in the far future less likely. Meantime all must suffer, both the innocent and guilty, and the innocent more than the guilty. Certainly the laborer who is thrown out of his employment by the hard times is innocent and suffers more than the capitalist, whether innocent or guilty, who has money to live on meantime until prosperity shall be restored.

The conclusion I seek to reach is that the workingman who entertains a prejudice against the lawful capitalist because he is wealthy, who votes with unction for the men who are urging unjust and unfair legislation against him, and who makes demagogic appeals to acquire popular support in what they are doing is standing in his own light, is blind to his own interests, and is cutting off the limb on which he sits. It is to direct the interest of the workingman to use careful discrimination in approving or disapproving proposed legislation of this kind and to base his conclusion and vote on the issue whether the provision is fair or just, and not on the assumption that any legislation that subjects a corporation to a burden must necessarily be in the interest of the workingman. What I am anxious to emphasize is that there is a wide economic and business field in which the interests of the wealthiest capitalist and of the humblest laborer are exactly the same.

 

WHERE LABOR AND CAPITAL ARE NECESSARILY OPPOSED—LABOR UNIONS NECESSARY

 

But while it is in the common interest of labor and capital to increase the fruits of production, yet in determining the share of each in the product, their interests are plainly opposed. Though the law of supply and de­mand will doubtless, in the end be the most potent influence in fixing this division, yet during the gradual adjustment to the changing markets and the varying financial conditions, capital will surely have the advantage unless labor takes united action. During the betterment of business conditions, organized labor, if acting with reasonable discretion, can secure much greater promptness in the advance of wages than if it were left to the slower operation of natural laws, and in the same way, as hard times come on, the too eager em­ployer may be restrained from undue haste in reducing wages. The organization of capital into corporations with the position of advantage which this gives it in a dispute with single laborers over wages, makes it absolutely necessary for labor to unite to maintain itself.

For instance, how could workingmen de­pendent on each day’s wages for living dare to take a stand which might leave them without employment if they had not by small assessments accumulated a common fund for their support during such emergency. In union they must sacrifice some independence of action, and there have sometimes been bad results from the tyranny of the majority in such cases; but the hardships which have followed impulsive resort to extreme measures have had a good effect to lessen them. Ex­perience, too, is leading to classification among the members, so that the cause of the skilled and worthy shall not be leveled down to that of the lazy and neglectful. This is being done, I am told, by what is called the maximum and minimum wage.

 

CONTROVERSY CONCERNS MORE THAN WAGES

 

The diverse interest of capital and labor are wider considerably than the mere pecuniary question of the amount of wages. They cover all the terms of the employment and include not only the compensation but also the cir­cumstances that affect the comfort and condition of the workingmen, including the daily hours of work, the place in which they work, the provisions for their safety from accident, and everything else that is germane to the employment.

 

GOOD EFFECT OF LABOR UNIONS -- LEGISLATION

 

The effect of the organization of labor, on the whole, has been highly beneficial in securing better terms for employment for the whole laboring community. I have not the slightest doubt, and no one who knows anything about the subject can doubt, that the existence of labor unions steadies wages. More than this, it has brought about an amelioration of the condition of the laborers in another way. The really practical justification for popular representative government rests on the truth that any set of men or class in a political community are better able to look after their own interests and more certain to keep those in­terests constantly in mind than the members of any other class or set of men, however altru­istic. This truth is fully exemplified in the course which legislation has taken since labor has organized and has made a systematic effort to secure laws to protect the working­man by mandatory provision against the heartlessness or negligence of the employer. Labor unions have given great attention to factory acts which secure a certain amount of air and provision for the safety of employees, to the safety-appliance acts in respect to rail­roads, to fixing the law governing the liability of railroads, to their employees for injuries sustained by accident, to the restriction of child labor in factories, and to similar remedial legislation. The interest of the workingman has been more direct in these matters than even that of the philanthropists, and he has pressed the matter until in the legislation of nearly every state the effect of his influence is seen.

 

WISE ATTITUDE OF CAPITALIST TOWARD ORGANIZED LABOR

 

What the capitalist, who is the employer of labor, must face is that the organization of labor—the labor union—is a permanent condition in the industrial world. It has come to stay. If the employer would consult his own interest he must admit this and act on it. Under existing conditions the blindest course that an employer of labor can pursue is to decline to recognize labor unions as the controlling influence in the labor market and to insist upon dealing only with his particular employees. Time and time again one has heard the indignant expression of a manager of some great industrial enterprise, that he did not propose to have the labor union run his business; that he would deal with his own men and not with outsiders.

The time has passed in which that attitude can be assumed with any hope of successfully maintaining it. What the wise manager of corporate enterprise employing large numbers of laborers will do, is to receive the lead­ers of labor unions with courtesy and respect and listen to their claims and arguments as they would to the managers of another corporate enterprise with whom they were to make an important contract affecting the business between them. At times some labor leaders are intoxicated with the immense power that they exercise in representing thou­sands of their fellow-workers and are weak enough to exhibit this spirit of arrogance. Dealing with them is trying to the patience of the employer. So, too, propositions from labor unions sometimes are so exorbitant in respect to the terms of employment as literally to deprive the manager of the control which he ought to retain over the laborers employed in his business. This is to be expected in a comparatively new movement and is not to be made a ground for condemning it.

On the other hand, the arrogance is not confined to one side. We all of us know that there are a number of employers who have the spirit of intolerance and sense of power because of their immense resources, and that their attitude is neither conciliatory nor likely to lead to an adjustment of differences. The wise men among the employers of labor and the labor leaders are those who discard all appearance of temper or sense of power and at­tempt by courteous consideration and calm discussion to reach a common ground. One of the great difficulties in peaceful adjust­ments of controversies between labor and capital is the refusal of each side to take time to understand the attitude of the other. The question which troubles the capitalist, of course, is how an increase in wages or a main­tenance of wages will affect the profits of his business. The question which troubles the workingman is how much he can live on and what he can save from his wages. And these things are affected by many different circum­stances, including, on the one hand, the condition of the market for the merchandise which is being manufactured and the other elements in the cost of operating the enterprise, and, on the other, the rate of rent and the price of necessaries of life. If the leaders of the workingmen believe that the employer is considering their argument and weighing it, and the labor leaders manifest an interest in the conditions with reference to expense and profit to the employer, the possibility of an adjustment is much greater than when each occupies a stiff and resentful attitude against the other.

The great advantage of such organizations as the Civic Federation is that they bring capitalists and labor leaders together into a common forum of discussion and cast a flood of light in which each party to the controversy derives much valuable information as to the mental attitude and just claims of the other. I do not think it a mere dream either to hope that by reason of this friendly contact between employers and labor leaders that labor unions may be induced to assist the cause of honest industry by bringing to bear the moral force of the public opinion of the union to improve the sobriety, industry, skill, and fidelity to the employer’s interests of the employee. Indeed, the rules of some labor unions already contain evidence of a desire to effect such a result.

 

ARBITRATION

 

This brings me to the question of arbitration. It goes without saying that where an adjustment cannot be reached by negotiation, it is far better for the community at large that the differences be settled by submission to an im­partial tribunal and agreement to abide its judgment than to resort to a trial of resistance and endurance by lockouts and strikes and the other means used by the parties to in­dustrial controversies in fighting out the issue between them. Not infrequently one side or the other—but generally the capitalist side —will say in response to a suggestion of submission to arbitration that there is nothing to arbitrate; that their position is so impregnable from the standpoint of reason that they could not abide judgment against them by any tribunal in a matter subject to their voluntary action.

In such a case, arbitration as a method of settlement is impossible, unless the system of compulsory arbitration is adopted. It is a very serious question whether under our Constitution a decree of a tribunal under a compulsory arbitration law could be enforced against the side of the laborers. It would come very close to the violation of the thirteenth amendment, which forbids involun­tary servitude. It has been frequently decided that no injunction can issue which will compel a man to perform his contract of employment, and that on the ground that while the breach of his contract may give rise to a claim for damages, he cannot be compelled, except in the peculiar employments of enlistment in the army and service on a ship, especi­ally to perform a labor contract. Hence, compulsory arbitration does not seem to be the solution.

 

MASSACHUSETTS PLAN

 

A method has been adopted in Massachusetts and some other states, and, indeed, has practically been adopted by President Roosevelt, in respect to the settlement of these labor controversies which has substan­tial and practical results. That is a provision of law by which an impartial tribunal shall investigate all the conditions surrounding the dispute, take sworn evidence, draft a conclusion in respect to the merits of the issue and publish it to the world. There often are dis­putes between great corporate employers and their employees which eventuate in a strike, and the public finds it impossible to obtain any reliable information in respect to the mat­ter because the statements from both sides are so conflicting.

We cannot have a great labor controversy or a great strike without its affecting injuriously a great many other people than those actually engaged in it. The truth is, that the class of capital and the class of labor repre­sented on the one side by the managers of the great corporations and on the other side by the leaders of the great labor unions do not include all the members of the community by a great deal. In addition to them are the farming community, the small merchants and storekeepers, the professional men, the class of clerks, and many other people who have nothing to do either with manual labor— skilled or unskilled—and who do not own shares in the stock of industrial or other enterprises requiring capital to carry them on. These are the middlemen, so to speak, in the controversy. The views of the members of this body make up the public opinion that, it is so often said, finally decides labor controversies. It is for the information of this body in the community that such a provision as that of the Massachusetts law is admirably adapted. That statute does not provide for compulsory arbitration, but it comes as near it in practical affairs as our system of constitutional law will permit.

 

ANTHRACITE COAL ARBITRATION

 

One of the instances, most striking in the history of this country, of the possibility of bringing capital and labor together to consider the question from a standpoint of reasonableness and patriotism is the settlement of the Pennsylvania anthracite coal strike. That of course, was by arbitration. And it was brought about through the influence of the President, who had no official relation to either side, but who as the first citizen of the country was deeply interested in preventing the cataclysm to which things seemed to be tending in the anthracite coal region. The permanence of the settlement which was there effected is a triumphant vindication of what was done. And it illustrates the possibilities when opponents in such controversies can be brought face to face and in the presence of impartial persons be made to discuss all the circumstances surrounding the issue.

 

STRIKES COSTLY

 

I shall not stop to cite statistics to show the enormous loss in the savings of labor as well as the savings of capitalists which strikes and lockouts have involved. Time was when the first resort of the labor leader was to order a strike. But experience has taught both sides the loss entailed, and strikes are now much less lightly entered upon, especially by the more conservative labor unions. Everybody admits their destructive character and that all means should be resorted to to avoid them. Still, there are times when nothing but a strike will accomplish the legitimate purpose of the laborer.

 

LEGAL RIGHT TO STRIKE

 

And, now, what is the right of the labor union with respect to the strike? I know that there has been at times a suggestion in the law that no strike can be legal. I deny this. Men have the right to leave the employ of their em­ployer in a body in order to impose on him as great an inconvenience as possible to induce him to come to their terms. They have the right in their labor unions to delegate to their leaders the power to say when to strike. They have the right in advance to accumulate by contributions from all members of the labor union a fund which shall enable them to live during the pendency of the strike. They have the light to use persuasion with all other laborers who are invited to take their places, in order to convince them of the advantage to labor of united action. It is the business of courts and of the police to respect these rights with the same degree of care that they respect the rights of owners of capital to the protection of their property and business.

 

CHANGE OF PUBLIC SENTIMENT TOWARD UNIONS

 

I have thus considered the necessity and justification of labor unions and their legal power. Those leaders of labor unions who have learned to pursue conservative methods have added greatly to the strength of their cause, and have given the unions a much better standing with the great body of the people who are neither capitalists nor laborers, and only favor the greatest good for the greatest number. I am inclined to think that the popular resentment against the revelations of corporate lawlessness may have had something to do with this change of sentiment. A resort to violence, or other form of lawlessness, on behalf of a labor union, properly merits and receives the sharpest condemnation from the public, and is quite likely to lose the cause of labor its support in the particular controversy.

 

NECESSITY FOR CONSIDERING ABUSES

 

I have been discussing the relations of capital and labor and the lawful scope of their action, on the assumption that they do not violate the law or the rights of any member of the community, and I am glad to say that I believe that this assumption is correct with respect to the great majority of those engaged as capitalists and of those engaged as wage­earners; but it would be a very insufficient consideration of the relations of labor and capital if I did not take up the abuses, law­lessness, and infractions of others’ rights, of which some of the combiners of capital and some of the wage-earners—members of labor unions—have been from time to time guilty and did not consider further the remedy for the restraint of these evils.

 

ABUSES OF CAPITAL COMBINATIONS

 

For the sake of clearness in examining into the character of corporate evils and abuses which need restraint and punishment, we may divide corporations guilty of them into industrial corporations organized for the purpose of manufacture and sale of merchandise, and into railroad and other corporations organized for the transportation of passengers and goods.

 

INDUSTRIAL CORPORATIONS

 

Let us deal first with industrial corporations. The valuable consideration moving to the public for conferring the franchise necessary in the incorporation of such companies is the public benefit to be derived in the lowering of prices. The temptation to the managers, however, when the enterprises become very large, is to suppress competition and maintain prices, and thus to deny to the public its proper share in the benefit sought to be attained and to ap­propriate to the corporate owners all the profit derived from improved facilities of production. One method of suppressing competition is by agreements between all the large concerns engaged in the same business to limit the output and maintain prices. Such agreements are usually secret and are difficult for public officials to obtain proof of; but when these agreements do become public and are successfully prosecuted, this method is enjoined and abandoned, and the independent corporations that acted together under secret agreements to maintain prices are absorbed into one great corporation, so that the large proportion of the producing capital in a single industry is placed under one control. Then competition with the trust, thus formed, is excluded by ingenious contracts of sale with middlemen, distributers, and retail dealers, who are coerced by the agents of the trust into a maintenance of retail prices and a withdrawal of all patronage from smaller inde­pendent and competing producers through the knowledge and fear that the trust in times of active demand for its products will either re­fuse to sell or will sell only at discriminating prices to those who do not comply with its demand.

 

ABUSES OF RAILWAY CORPORATIONS

 

The second class of corporations—that is, the railway and transportation companies—have misused their great powers to promote the unlawful purpose of these industrial combinations. One of the largest elements going to make up the selling price of a commodity in any part of the country is the cost of trans­portation from the place of manufacture. If one business concern can secure lower rates of freight in the transportation of its merchandise to its customers than another, the former will necessarily drive the latter out of business. This is exactly what has happened. The largest concerns controlling enormous shipments and able as between competing roads to determine which shall enjoy the profits of the transportation, have induced and sometimes coerced the railway companies into giving them either secret rates or open public rates so deftly arranged with a view to the con­ditions of the larger concern, as to make it impossible for its would-be business compet­itors to live. The rebate of a very small amount per hundredweight of goods shipped by any one of the great industrial corporations will pay enormous dividends on the capital invested. The evils of railroad management can be summed up in the words “unjust dis­crimination.”

 

INTEREST OF WAGE-EARNERS IN SUPPRESSION OF THESE ABUSES

 

Wage-earners are not injuriously affected in their terms of employment directly by such violations of law by combinations of capital as I have described. But they are very seriously affected in another way. The maintenance of such unlawful monopolies is for the purpose of keeping up the prices of the necessities of life, and this necessarily reduces the purchas­ing power of the wages which the wage-earners receive. This is a serious detriment to them and a real reason why they should condemn such corporate abuses and sympathize with the effort to stamp them out. It is not that they should sympathize with an effort to destroy such great corporate enterprises because they employ enormous numbers of wage­earners and lawfully and normally increase the capital from which the wage fund is drawn, but they should and do vigorously sustain the policy of the Government in bringing these great corporate enterprises within the law and requiring them to conduct their business in accordance with the statutes of their country. I have already said that they should discriminate in respect to legislation affecting their corporation, and should not assume that simply because it burdened the enterprise from which they derived their wages it was in their interest; but I would invoke with the utmost emphasis their approval of the present interstate-commerce law as needed to keep the railroads within the law.

 

VIOLENCE IN INTEREST OF CAPITAL

 

In rare instances corporate managers have entered into a course of violence to maintain their side of a labor controversy. They have justified it on the ground that they were simply fighting fire with fire, and that if the labor union proceeded to use dynamite they would use dynamite in return. I cannot too strongly condemn this course or this argument. No amount of lawlessness on the part of the labor striker will justify the lawlessness on the part of the employer. Such a course means a recurrence of civil war and anarchy.

A second abuse which employers are some­times guilty of is what is technically known as blacklisting, by which laboring men, solely because they may have been advocates of a strike, or have been against a compromise in a labor dispute, are tagged by one employer of labor, and all other employers of labor are forbidden on penalty of business ostracism to give them a means of livelihood. This is unlawful and should be condemned. It is the counterpart of the boycott, or indeed, it is itself a boycott in one form, to which I shall make reference hereafter.

 

ABUSES OF LABOR

 

What are the abuses which not infrequently proceed from some of the members of united labor? They are, first, open violence and threats of violence to prevent the employment of other workingmen in the places which such members have left on a strike, with the hope that they will thus prevent their former em­ployer from being able to carry on his busi­ness. Of course, this is the most effective method, if successful, of bringing the employer to terms. If the demand for labor is such that many persons of the same craft as those who strike, not members of the labor union, are idle, it will be easy for the employer to replace the strikers. They will be out of a job and he will continue his business.

It follows, therefore, that the wisest time for skilled or other labor to strike is when there is a great demand for labor, and it is difficult for the employer to replace those who leave him. But if there are other laborers available, then there are only two ways by which the strikers can accomplish their purpose, either by actual or threatened violence to those who would take their places, or by persuading them in the interest of all labor that they should join their union, receive the benefits of the common fund for support during enforced idleness, and join in the refusal to aid the employer in his extremity. Violence and threatened violence are, of course, unlawful, and are strongly to be condemned. Persuasion not amounting in effect to duress is lawful.

 

BOYCOTTS

 

Another method by which wage-earners sometimes attempt to coerce their employer into acquiescence in their demands is what is called a boycott. It is a method by which the striking employees and their fellows of their union attempt to coerce the whole community into a withdrawal of all association from their former employer by threatening the rest of the community that if they do not withdraw their association from such employer they will visit each one of them with similar treatment. This is a cruel instrument and has been declared to be unlawful in every court with whose decision I am familiar. The Anthracite Strike Commission, which was selected at the instance of President Roosevelt and which had upon it such a distinguished jurist as Judge George Gray, of Delaware, and Mr. Clark, the president of one of the great labor organizations of the country, and other men entirely indifferent as between labor and capital—men selected by agreement between the employers and the employees in that great controversy—used the following language in respect to the boycott:—

‘ It also becomes our duty to condemn an­other less violent, but not less reprehensible, form of attack upon those rights and liber­ties of the citizens which the public opinion of civilized countries recognizes and protects. The right and liberty to pursue a lawful calling and to lead a peaceable life, free from molestation or attack, concerns the comfort and happiness of all men, and the denial of them means the destruction of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the benefits which the social organization confers. What is popularlyknown as the boycott (a word of evil omen and unhappy origin) is a form of coercion by which a combination of many persons seek to work their will upon a single person, or upon a few persons, by compelling others to abstain from social or beneficial business intercourse with such person or persons. Carried to the extent sometimes practiced in aid of a strike, and as was in some instances practiced in con­nection with the late anthracite strike, it is a cruel weapon of aggression, and its use im­moral and anti-social.

To say this is not to deny the legal right of any man or set of men voluntarily to refrain from social intercourse or business relations with any persons whom he or they, with or without good reason, dislike. This may sometimes be un-Christian, but it is not illegal. But when it is a concerted purpose of a number of persons not only to abstain themselves from such intercourse, but to render the life of their victim miserable by persuading and intimidating others to refrain, such purpose is a malicious one, and the concerted attempt to accomplish it is a conspiracy at common law, and merits and should receive the punishment due to such a crime.’

I may add that the same Commission visited blacklisting with similar condemnation.

 

LEGAL REMEDIES FOR ABUSES

 

What are the remedies by which a person injured may be protected against the illegal acts of combinations of capital and of com­binations of labor? First, if the injury sought to be inflicted is one which will be inadequately compensated for in money damages, one can apply to a court of equity to prevent the in­jury from being done, and that court can, in advance of the proposed violation of the plaintiff’s rights, determine exactly what those rights are and advise the defendant accordingly; or he can wait until the acts are performed and then, by suit for damages, he can make himself whole if he can.

 

REMEDY BY INJUNCTION PREFERRED

 

In cases of unlawful combinations of capital, as well as of such combinations of labor, the method in equity by securing an injunction seems to be preferred by those who are about to be injured. In every statute which has been enacted to denounce the improper use of capital to secure illegal restraints of trade and illegal monopolies, a specific provision has been inserted enabling those who are injured or affected to bring an equity proceeding to enjoin the carrying on of the improper methods about to be attempted. In the same way, when labor unions or members of labor unions or workingmen on a strike resort to methods destructive of the business of their employer and his property, the employer deems it the most convenient method of defending himself to apply to a court of equity for an injunction against those who give indication of their intention to carry on such methods.

 

CRITICISM OF INJUNCTION REMEDY

 

This remedy by injunction has been very severely denounced and criticised, on the ground that it places in the hands of a judge legislative, judicial, and executive powers; that it enables him to make the law for one case against a particular individual and if he does not abide by it to try him and punish him. When this objection is analyzed it is found to be unjust.

 

CRITICISM UNJUST

 

An injunction suit does not differ in the slightest degree from a suit brought after the event, so far as the function of the court is concerned in declaring the law, except that the court declares the law in respect of antici­pated facts rather than in respect of those which have happened. He has no authority to make law. In an injunction suit, as in any other suit, he merely interprets the law and applies it to the circumstances. His judg­ment in the one case involves exactly the same precedents and the same rules of law as in the other. In order to save the party plaintiff from having to bring suit to recover for an injury that he is going to suffer, he says, ‘This is an unlawful injury; and as you threaten to do it I enjoin you from doing it.’

 

PREVENTION BETTER THAN CURE

 

Certainly, prevention is better than cure, and it is no wonder that a man who is about to have his business injured or his property destroyed prefers to prevent the injury rather than to allow it to occur. Neither a suit in damages nor a criminal prosecution is likely to bring him back his property or to restore his loss. Moreover, in cases of boycott, in many states there is no provision for criminal prosecution.

 

HISTORY OF WRIT OF INJUNCTION

 

I wish to invite attention to this writ of in­junction, which is one of the most beneficial remedies known to the law, and to trace its history and show how useful it has been in the past for the purpose of preventing injustice.

Originally, in England, from which we get our procedure and most of our law, the King was supposed to decide cases through his judges of the King’s bench or of the common pleas. The common law was rather rigid and severe, especially in holding persons to the letter of their contracts, and judgments went for the plaintiff on this strict interpretation that really shocked the conscience. And so, after a while, the people began to appeal to the King to save them from the severity of his own courts. He turned the matter over to the lord keeper of the great seal, and said: ‘ Work out equity in this case.’ The way the lord keeper worked it out was not to issue any direction to the court of King’s bench or the common pleas; but he took hold of the plaintiff in the suit and threatened him with excommunication if he did not stop the suit and do that justice which equity required.

In other words, he enjoined the plaintiff from proceeding with the suit in the court of the King’s bench or of the common pleas, as the case might be, and brought him into what grew to be a court of equity known as the court of chancery. As the lord keeper in those days was an ecclesiastic, he exercised power over the consciences of the litigants, and the threat of excommunication was generally sufficient to enforce what he wished. Subsequently, the lord keeper ceased to be a bishop and became known as the lord chancellor, and after the court of equity had been established, violation of the injunction was punished by imprisonment instead of by excommunication.

 

USEFULNESS OF WRIT

 

Let me take a case that illustrates the use­fulness of the writ of injunction. At common law, when a man wished to borrow $500 on his farm, which was worth $10,000, he gave a mortgage to secure it. The mortgage was a conveyance of the title to the land with the condition that the title should become absolute if the money was not paid on the date mentioned in the mortgage. If the money was not paid, the creditor could put the debtor out of possession by suit and for $500 become the owner of a farm which was worth $10,000. In such a case the lord keeper said to the plaintiff: ‘Here, you are trying to get this farm for $500 when it is worth $10,000. That is not equitable, and I will not let you do it. I will enjoin you from continuing that suit, because you are after something that is unjust, and I will make you come in before me and settle this, and if the defendant is not able to pay the $500 and interest we will sell the farm and pay you the $500 and interest and turn over the balance to the defendant.’ That was an equitable decision, and it was made effective by the power of injunction.

A man leases a farm, with a row of beautiful trees, to a tenant. The tenant advises him that he is going to cut the trees down during his tenancy. What is the landlord to do? Is he to let the tenant cut his trees down and then sue him for the value of the trees? No. Equity suggests the remedy that he go into court and enjoin the man and prevent injury which could not be compensated for in damages.

A man owns a lucrative business and a numerous set of people conceive a prejudice against him or a desire to injure him, and institute a boycott against him and threaten everybody that they will withdraw their patronage which is valuable from anybody that has anything to do with him. In that way he loses a lot of customers. Now, is it not better that he should apply to the court to enjoin them from taking that course and inflicting injury on him that he cannot measure in damages than that they should be permitted to destroy his business and he should have the burden of a lawsuit afterwards with all the uncertainty as to damages and the doubt about getting his money even if he secured a judgment?

So, too, where a body of strikers by con­tinued acts of violence, trespass, constituting a nuisance, attempt to stop his business, the injury he suffers, it is peculiarly difficult for him to estimate, and a judgment for money would be a very inadequate remedy.

 

ABUSE OF WRIT OF INJUNCTION

 

But it said that the writ of injunction has been abused in this country in labor disputes and that a number' of injunctions have been issued that ought never to have been issued. I agree that there has been abuse in this re­gard. President Roosevelt referred to it in his last message. I think it has grown chiefly from the practice of issuing injunctions ex parte; that is, without giving notice or hearing to the defendant. The injustice that is worked is in this wise: Men leave employ­ment on a strike intending to conduct them­selves peaceably and within the law. The counsel for the employer visits a judge, pre­sents an affidavit in which an averment is made that violence is threatened, injury to property and injury to business. And accord­ingly on this affidavit the judge issues a temporary restaining order ex parte against the defendants who are named in the petition or bill. The broadest expressions are used in the writ—frequently too broad. The defendants are workingmen, not lawyers. They are not used to the processes of the court. The expressions of the writ are formidable. A doubt arises in their minds as to the legality of what they are about to do. The stiffening is taken out of the strike, the men drop back, and the strike is over, and all before they have had a chance in court to demonstrate, as they might, that they had no intention of doing anything unlawful or doing any violence.

 

FAVORS REQUIRING NOTICE

 

Under the original Federal judiciary act it was not permissible for the Federal courts to issue an injunction without notice. There had to be notice and, of course, a hearing. I think it would be entirely right in this class of cases to amend the law and provide that no temporary restraining order should issue at all until after notice and a hearing. Then the court could be advised by both sides with reference to the exact situation, and the danger of issuing a writ too broad or of issuing a writ without good ground would generally be avoided.

 

FAVORS REQUIRING DIFFERENT JUDGE IN CONTEMPT PROCEEDINGS FROM THE JUDGE ISSUING INJUNCTION

 

There is another objection made and that is that the judge who issues the writ has a personal sensitiveness in respect to its viola­tion that gives him a bias when he comes to hear contempt proceedings on a charge of disobedience to the order and makes it unfair for him to impose a punishment if conviction follows. I think few judges on the bench would allow such a consideration to affect them, but I agree that there is a popular doubt of the judge’s impartial attitude in such a case. For that reason, I would favor a provision al­lowing the defendant in contempt proceedings to challenge the judge issuing the injunction, and to call for the designation of another judge to hear the issue. I don’t think it would seriously delay the hearing of the cause, and it would give more confidence in the impartiality of the decision. It is almost as im­portant that there should be the appearance of justice as that there should be an actual administration of it.

 

OBJECTION TO TRIAL OF CONTEMPT BY JURY

 

But now it is said, Why not have a trial by jury? The reason why this is objectionable is because of the delay and of the character of jury trial. It would greatly weaken the authority and force of an order of court if it were known that it was not to be enforced except after a verdict of jury. Never in the history of judicial procedure has such a provision intervened between the issue of an order of court and its enforcement. I am quite willing to hedge around the exercise of the power to issue the writ of injunction as many safeguards as are necessary to invite the attention of the court to the care with which he shall issue the writ; but to introduce another contest before the writ shall be enforced, with all the uncertainties and digressions and prejudices that are injected into a jury trial, would be to make the order of the court go for nothing

 

PLAINTIFF ENTITLED TO ANCIENT REMEDY OF INJUNCTION

 

What the plaintiff in such cases is asking to secure is a protection to his property and his business from a constant series of attacks. An injunction offers a remedy which is not given either by criminal prosecutions or the suit for damages. The plaintiff is not trying to punish somebody; he is trying to protect himself after the court shall have defined what his rights are. That right has been his in cases of this general character for years, and why should he be asked to give it up now?

 

LABOR UNIONS SHOULD CARRY DECISIONS THEY CONDEMN TO COURTS OF LAST RESORT

 

If, whenever a court issues an injunction that is improperly worded, that goes too far, or that ought never to have been granted, the labor union interested will take the matter up to the court of last resort, it will secure a series of decisions that will prevent the issue of injunctions such as some of those they now complain of. The labor union has a fund, and it could not be devoted to a better purpose than fixing the law exactly as it should be under the decision of the court of last resort. I should not object at all to the definition of the rights of employer and of the withdrawing employee in labor controversies by statute. I should think that an excellent way of making clear what is lawful and what is unlawful. But until that course is pursued, the rights of the parties to such controversies should be carefully defined by courts of last resort, and when this is done courts of first instance will keep within lawful bounds.

 

CONCLUSION

 

I fear I have wearied you with this long discussion. I have attempted to treat the matter from an impartial standpoint and without prejudice for or against capital, or for or against labor. There is a class- of cap­italists who look upon labor unions as per se vicious and a class of radical labor unionists who look upon capital as labor’s natural enemy. I believe, however, that the great majority of each class are gradually becoming more conciliatory in their attitude, the one toward the other. Between them is a larger class, neither capitalist nor labor unionist, who are without prejudices, and I hope I am one of those. The effects of the panic are not over. We must expect industrial depression. This may be fruitful of labor controversies. I earnestly hope that a more conservative and conciliatory attitude on both sides may avoid the destructive struggles of the past.”

 

 

APPENDIX.

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Born September 15, 1857, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Father, Alphonso Taft. Born, Townsend, Vermont, 1810. Graduate of Yale, 1833. Judge, Superior Court, Cincinnati, 1865-1871. Secretary of War, 1875-1876. Attorney-General, 1876-1877. United States Minister to Austria, 1883-1885. United States Minister to Russia, 1885-1887.

Mother, Louise M. (Torrey) Taft, daughter of Samuel D. Torrey, West India merchant, Boston. Bom in Boston, Sep­tember 11, 1827. Married, Millbury, Mass.

Educated: Public schools, Cincinnati, including Woodward High School, where he was graduated, 1874. Yale University four years, graduating June, 1878, degree Bachelor of Arts, second or salutatorian in class of 121; also elected by class, class orator. Entered Law School, Cincinnati College, 1878, graduating May, 1880, degree B.L., dividing first prize.

Admitted to bar of Supreme Court of Ohio, May, 1880. Law reporter, Cincinnati Times, and subsequently on Cincinnati Commercial, 1880. Appointed Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, January, 1881. Resigned, March, 1882, to become Collector of Internal Revenue, 1st district, Ohio, under President Arthur. Resigned Collectorship, March, 1883, to enter practice of law. Continued practice until March, 1887, holding meantime from January, 1885, office of Assistant County Solicitor, Hamilton County. March, 1887, appointed by Governor Foraker Judge Superior Court of Cincinnati, to fill vacancy caused by resignation of Judson Harmon. April, 1888, was elected to succeed himself, Judge Superior Court, for five years. Resigned in February, 1890, to become Solicitor-General United States, under appointment of President Harrison. Resigned, March, 1892, to become United States Circuit Judge for Sixth Judicial Circuit and ex-officio member Circuit Court of Appeals of Sixth Circuit. June, 1893, received honorary degree LL.D, from Yale University. In 1896, became professor and Dean of Law Department of University of Cincinnati. Resigned, March, 1900, Circuit Judgeship and Deanship, to become, by appointment of President McKinley, President United States Philippines Commission. July 4, 1901, by appointment of President McKinley, became first Civil Governor of the Philippine Islands. November 1, 1901, turned over office of Governor to Vice-Governor Wright on ac­count of illness. December 23, 1901, by order of Secretary of War, visited United States and Washington to testify before Senate Committee on Philippines and House Committee of Insular Affairs. Testified before two committees for six weeks. Feb­ruary 22, 1902, received degree LL.D, from University of Penn­sylvania. May 17, 1902, sailed from United States to Rome, by order of President Roosevelt and Secretary Root, to confer with Pope Leo XIII, concerning purchase of agricultural lands of Religious Orders in the Philippines. Held conference with Committee of Cardinals June and July, and reached general basis for agreement. Sailed, Naples, July 10th, for Philippines. Reached Philippines August 22, 1902, and resumed office Civil Governor. December 23, 1903, sailed to United States to become Secretary of war. Was appointed Secretary of War February 1, 1904.

November-December, 1904, visited Panama to confer with the Panama authorities, by direction of the President, upon ques­tions arising with reference to government of the Canal Zone.

July, August and September, 1905, visited on a tour of inspection Philippine Islands, with a party of Senators and Representatives.

September-October, 1906, visited Cuba, under the direction of the President, to confer with the people for the purpose of arranging peace. Acted for a short time as Provisional Governor of that island.

Visited Panama, Cuba and Porto Rico in March and April, 1907, by direction of the President, to attend to various pending matters and look into conditions; in September, October, November and December, 1907, visited the Philippine Islands for the purpose of opening the Philippine Assembly.

Married, June 19, 1886, Helen Herron, daughter of Honorable John W. Herron, of Cincinnati, United States District Attorney and State Senator. Have three children: Robert Alphonso, born September 8, 1889; Helen Herron, bom August 1, 1891, and Charles Phelps 2nd, born September 20, 1897.

Member of the following Societies and Clubs:

Societies: American Bar Association; National Geographical Society; President Red Cross Society.

Clubs: Metropolitan Club; University Club; Chevy Chase Club; Cosmos Club; University Club of New York.