of our people. It is urgently necessary, from the standpoint of the public interest, to elect Mr. Taft, and a Republican Congress which will support him; and they seek election on a platform which specifically pledges the party, alike in its executive and legislative branches, to continue and develop the policies which have been not merely profest but acted upon during these seven years. These policies can be successfully carried through only by the hearty cooperation of the President and the Congress in both its branches, and it is therefore peculiarly important that there should obtain such harmony between them. To fail to elect Mr. Taft would be a calamity to the country; and it would be folly, while electing him, yet at the same time to elect a Congress hostile to him, a Congress, which under the influence of partisan leadership, would be certain to thwart and baffle him on every possible occasion. To elect Mr. Taft, and at the same time to elect a Congress pledged to support him, is the only way in which to perpetuate the policy of the Government as now carried on. I feel that all the aid that can be given to this policy by every good citizen should be given; for this is far more than a merely partisan matter. Both your Committee, and the National Committee, of which Mr. Hitchcock is Chairman, are endeavoring to secure the active cooperation on the stump of Senators and Congressmen, party leaders and independent citizens generally. 1 most heartily join in urging the importance of such cooperation. I hope that every disinterested private citizen, whose sole concern in politics is to have the right kind of man carry out the right kind of policy, will join in backing up your Committee as well as the National committee in this movement. No service is as effective, as valuable, as the disinterested service given in such manner by men whose one concern is for the triumph of the principles in which they believe; and I appeal with all the strength there is in me to such men to give such support. Sincerely yours, HON. WM. B. MCKINLEY, THEODORE ROOSEVELT Chairman, Republican Congressional Committee, GROVER CLEVELAND PREDICTS WM. H. TAFT'S ELECTION. "Mr. Taft's excellence as a Federal Judge is not to be over-emphasized; his high ideals of honesty and justice are valuable and commendatory." 66 'The South has long taken a stubborn, foolish pride in its enlistment under the Democracy, and has stood like a rock in its part sanship.” [From the New York Times, August 30, 1908.] Just before his death Mr. Cleveland planned the writing of three articles on the Presidential campaign of 1908. The first article was to be a general discussion of the political field, the issues and the men; the second was to deal with the issues developed by the conflict of the two parties, to appear in September; and the third was to deal with the doubtful States, this to be published shortly before the election. The first article was finished. Whether he made a beginning on either of the other articles is doubtful, as no trace of either has been found among his papers. The first article is published by the Times today by an arrangement made between a literary agent and Mr. Frederick S. Hastings, the executor of Mr. Cleveland's estate. Copyright, 1908, by The New York Times Company. Each quadrennial campaign is a recrudescent crisis in the affairs of the American people, formative of new endeavors in our National life from the mass of the old mingled with new and untried. We are overfond of change and amendment, and at times reckless of underlying principles, which are not susceptible of change, and to antagonize which may mean disaster and at least is certain to entail stultification and impairment of the best of our past and present. The campaign on which we are entering signalizes the crystalization of more that is new than any other within forty years, and is not so important for the policies that it will fix for the next four years as for the greater changes that its results will be found to foreshadow. Over our horizon 1 lift the blunt heads of clouds of storm, and the low mutter of distant thunder is heard beneath the basic roar of our eighty millions moving on. It is the earnest wish of one whose heart has long been engrossed with his country's greatest and best in the ultimate that the men who shall take over her ward and keep shall fail not nor falter in that day more than those statesmen of the past whose giant figures loom in the vista of our history mutely monitive to emulation. For a time there were those who feared that there was an obliquity in the standard of our civic morality which marked a degeneracy not to be averted, and greed, disintegrity, and malfeasance strode unabashed through the courses of our official functions. But we have lived to realize that it was merely an excrescence of the times, that it was something transitory, like unto the slough of a wound, and that its prevalence and persistency were needed to rouse the opposition. necessary to its final obliteration. So, it seems to me, as I review the last half century, that from the mental vision I may draw this certain conclusion: We as individuals and I citizens are better, wiser, cleaner handed than we were, and are rising steadily to planes higher than we have yet known. It is true in one way that the "evil that men do lives after them and the good is too oft interred with their bones," but that survival is more in effect than in popular consciousness. We are prone to think of the past as better than the present and to forget that which was publicly discreditable in the last decade or the last generation. Considering these matters and conditions of which I have had some opportunities of being informed, no hesitancy comes in saying that the agitation in behalf of common honesty in the past few years has had a notable effect, not only in the immediate conditions that underlay the agitation, but in the broader things of our intimate life as a people. Never has a more intelligent body of voters prepared to go to the polls, and never one more thoroughly awakened to its moral responsibilities. It is unfortunate at all times of course that a rigid partisan spirit should hold certain sections of the country to whatever course of action is provided for them by the leaders of the party to which they are committed, no matter whether that principle defining the course be some innocent sophistry or some dangerous obsession of a set of blatant demagogues. To be specific, the population of some of the New England States is so inherently Republican that the fallacy would be palpable indeed that would not earn their support just so it had the approval of the leaders of the Republican Party. On the other hand, the South has long taken a stubborn, foolish pride in its enlistment under the Democracy and has stood like a rock in its partisanism at times when there are now few who would not admit that had its stand been one in the grounds of victory the consequences to the country, and particularly to the South itself, with her undeveloped industries dependent in their young growth on stable and favorable conditions at large, would have been direly unfortunate and productive of injury that cannot be estimated. There is no suggestion of a sentiment of disloyalty on my part to the older principles of Democracy under which I have striven always to do my public duty in matters large and small when I say that there is a large indication that the coming years will bring forth a new ascendency of those same principles, perhaps under a different panoply, and perhaps with a reincorporation of the decayed fragments of an organization that failed to serve its purpose. No political party in any country has ever been wrecked by continued. consistency with the principles that originally made it a power, the rocks on which it fell invariably being the errors of opportunists. The present campaign as a side feature will have a long step in the progress to the readjustment to first principles, and it is propitious indeed that there is no issue of such gravity that those principles are needed to determine it. Never has there been a safer time for the rehabilitation to proceed. When it became apparent that Mr. Taft would be the nominee of his party, that Mr. Hearst and his party would make a clean-cut effort for emplacement as a National factor and not endeavor to gain any immediate advantage for themselves by any such process as fusion, in fact would seek to destroy Bryanism, or rather Mr. Bryan's hold on the Democratic Party, not by forcing the hold to relax, but by lessening that which he had to hold, conjecture as to the result in the November conclusions could be of but one sort among sensible men. With the several other parties disorganizing, re-developing and pro-creating, the Republican party is certain, though with a considerably lessened strength, to move on to a safe victory sustained by the popular support of reforms which should not redound to its glory solely, those reforms having been the work of decent men of all parties. There is fear on my part of being misunderstood in what I am about to say, but surely the fair-minded man must realize when he considers my attitude toward my own party, all now a matter of immutable record, that it is prompted by a sense of simple fairness. Personally and officially I have had the opportunity of knowing many things concerning Mr. Taft that were not a matter of general knowledge, and with a keen interest I have watched his large share in the conduct of our National affairs in very recent years. His excellence as a Federal Judge in Cincinnati is something not to be underestimated or overemphasized, for should he come to the Presidential chair the qualities which made him a Judge of high ability, which I know him to have been, will be the most needful to him as President of the United States. His high ideals of honesty and of relative justice, his great capacity for severe labor, and his humorous wisdom in the face of the serious problem are attributes equally valuable and commendatory to a people seeking him in whom they may repose the trust of their collective interests while they turn their increased attention to their pressing individual demands. Whatever may be said as to the events of the past ten years which are alleged to have made us a world power, there remains small opportunity for controversy over the essential features of our conduct in the face of the problems brought to face us by those happenings. Now, from being self-contained and compact in our political geography and federated in our common interests wherever our dominion was established, we have become extended and have increased the span of the arch of our structure, and must undertake to equate the widely different concerns of individuals and communities antithetical as to race, traditions, and modes of life and antipodal as to location on the face of the earth. Dwelling on the unwisdom of prematurely acquiring colonies is fatuous, the National duty is neither to help those colonies for their exploitation nor to cast them off to avoid the burden of their responsibilities. The questions involved are no more |