Norwich bulletin., 1920-06-12

cessor. He forced his enemies to accept him with the terrifying threat: If you don't take Taft, you'll have to take me- And he had to set a watch on his own friends to keep them from stampeding the convention to him.
 Naturally, everyone assumed that we were to have a Roosevelt administration by another name, and it was expected in the campaign that the ex-president would not go farther away from the White House than Oyster Bay. Instead he plunged into the depths of Africa He might as well, when he was ranchman i have flung an eastern guest on the back of bueking broncho and abandoned him to his own resources. For Taft was an 1 utter .tenderfoot in politics. ] The fate of William Howard Taft would. have been pathetic if he himself had not met it and borne it with a smile. He did | not invite it, having no taste for political 1 life, and he was without the least desire 1 tor the presidency when Roosevelt made him his heir
 He was abler, more upright, more inde- | pendent than some far more successful | presidents. But by bent and training he l was a judge, and the White House is no l place for judge. The only other presi- 1 dent who had sat on bench was-of all
 men-Andrew Jackson, and "Old Hick- 1 ory seems not to have acquired over l much of the judicial temperament. 1 Executive force and judicial mind are the positive and negative poles of the ] battery. If a president stops to weigh l the evidence, consult precedents and pre- pare an opinion, enterprises of gre~ Ditf 1 and moment are turned awry and lo,e the l name of action. In the crises that make
 hi af,,f- I,s- i ership he must decide on his instincts, his 1 intuitions and find his reasons -afterward l Taft passed all but two of the first 2t 1 years of his manhood in courts, either as
 a law officer or a judge. As he took
 train in Ohio on certain day in the veal
 1899, he had no other wish than to spend
 his life in the same congenial atmosphere
 But on that Hateful train he fell in witt
 General Corbin of the army, until then {
 stranger to him, and the general returned
 to Washington with the enthusiastic con
 viction that he had discovered the righ
 man to give code of laws to the Philip
 pine Islands.
 Taft earnestly protested, when McKin ley sent for him, that he wished to sta!
 on the bench; but he was talked into go
 ing. Four years afterward Roosevelt of
 tered him a justiceship in the suprem,
 court of the United States, the highes
 honor to which his heart ever had as pired. But he put aside the temptation 1 from a pure sense of duty to his 'littl,
 grown brother"
 As law-giver and governor of Manila he had won the confidence of his Orienta : subjects, and rather than desert his DOS l before his task was finished he sacrificed the dearest ambition of his life. In year and a half Roosevelt had him il his cabinet as secretary of war-and soo1 , had him in his eye for the presidency. Roosevelt had the weakness of hi } strength. He thought he was stronj enough to make president But req I presidents are born, not made
 The moment Roosevelt was gone, tn
 emerged from their z 1-2 years in tn
 cyclone cellar. The moment the politica 7 broncho felt the tenderfoot on it's back
 bucked, and threw Taft from the seat 0
 leadership. The next thing the rank an } file of republicans knew, the party wa \ slipping back into the old rut from whic \ Roosevelt had jerked it when first he Tai upon it his masterful hand.
 IT But the people refused to go bacl E Eight months after Tafts inauguratio the election of 1909 sounded a clea ] warning of the disaster that -overwhelme z the party in the congressional election ( H 1910 and which all but destroyed it in tn presidential election of 1912
 According to a story that was told (