The Nevada County picayune., 1908-11-12


 terms. He quit Cincinnati that night, and his paper never appeared again Young Taft had had his first spec tacular fight, and it was in behalf of somebody else.
 The Call to Public Office.
 Taft was harly out of his boyhood when he was called to public office, and in most of the years since then he has devoted himself to the public service. First he was assistant prose cutting attorney of Hamilton county, and helped to drive out the old Camp bell ring, whose influence long had dominated the Cincinnati court house. In 1881 he became collector of internal revenue for the First Ohio district. year later he resigned that office and went back to the practice of law, with his fathers old partner, H. P. Floyd In 1883 he became assistant county solicitor Two years later Governor Foraker appointed him judge of the Supreme Court, to succeed Judson Harmon, who had resigned to enter President Cleveland's cabinet.
 In 1886 Judge Taft married Miss Helen Heron, daughter of Hon. John w. Heron of Cincinnati. They have three children-Robert Alphohso, student at Yale, Helen, a student at Bryn Mawr, and Charles Phelps Sec ond, who attends the public schools in Washington.
 His Judicial Career Bequn. His appointment as judge of the Superior Court was the beginning of the judicial career which was Taft's ambition, and for which he was so eminently fitted.
 At the close of his appointed term he was elected for another term. He had served but two years of the five for which he had been elected when President Harrison asked him to take the post of solicitor general of the United Sates. Two of the cases which he conducted as solicitor gen eral involved questions of vital i'm portance to the entire country. The first grew out of the seal fisheries controversy with Great Britain. MT. Taft won against such eminent coun- sel as Joseph H. Choate who is widely recognized as a leader of the Ameri- can bar. The other was a tariff case in which the law was attacked on the ground that Speaker Reed had counted a Quorrm when the bill passed the house. That, too, he won. It was dur ing his term as solicitor general that Mir. Taft met Theodore Roosevelt, then civil service commissioner, and began the friendship which has con- tinued and grown ever since and which has had such far-reaching in- fluence upon the lives of both men.
 On the Federal Bench
 MT. Taft's record as solicitor gen eral so clearly proved his fitness for the bench that after three years in Washington he was sent back to Ohio as judge of the Sixth federal circuit, a post generally recognized as a pre- liminary step to the Supreme Court, which was then the goal of his am bition.
 It was during his seven years on the federal bench that Mir. Taft's qualities as judge became known throughout the country. It was in this period of his service that he rendered the labor decisions which have made him famous. One of the most import ant and far-reaching of all his judg- ments was that against the Addystone Pipe Company, in which for the first time the sherman antitrust law was made living, vital force for the curb ing and punishment of monopoly. When this case reached the Supreme Court, Mir Taft received the distin- guished and unusual honor of having his decision qouted in full and handed down as part of the opinions of the high court which sustained him at every point.
 Blazing the Philippine Trail
 Since the settlement of the recon struction question, no more delicate or fatefu problem has confronted American statesmanship than that of the Philippines. The sudden pitching of over-sea territory into our posses sion as a result of the war with Spain ! pected, but entirely without prece- dent. There was no guide for our statesmen. The path had to be hewed out new from the beginning.
 MT. Taft had been opposed to talk ing the islands, He was opposed to retaining them. More than all, he op- posed their exploitation for American IIa lyalipUpd that tho philin- pines belonged to the Fillipinos, and should be developed in the interest of their own people.
 But he saw the possibility of lift : ing a feeble. ignorant people into the light of liberty and setting them upon the path to intelligent. efficient self government, That possibility recon l. tLa q AL