Taft Tells His Campaign Views.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 13, 1912:
Interview with a New York Times Correspondent on the Issues to be Met.
WHAT HE WILL NOT DO
"Turn Tricks" for Headlines or Make Himself "Part of the Menagerie."
THAT IS DUE TO HIS OFFICE
But He Believes His Record Good and Stands on It — Defends His Tariff Course and the Administration He Has Given.
Special to The New York Times.
    WASHINGTON, D. C, Aug. 12.— "I have been told that I ought to do this, ought to do that, ought to go the other; that I ought to say this, ought to say that, ought to say the other; that I do not keep myself in the headlines, that there is this or that trick I might turn to my advantage. I know it, but I can't do it. I couldn't if I would and I wouldn't if I could."
    When Mr. Taft was advised to-day that his political interests would be advanced if he would only adopt the tactics of his Bull Moose friend, this or something like it is what he said, and said it with an emphasis which left no doubt of his conviction that something is due to himself and to the office he holds. He is not willing to make himself a part of the menageries.
    He was overpersuaded to enter the recent ante-primary campaign. He did not fancy that sort of politics. He stands on the record of his Administration, and is willing to be judged by it, by its promise and performance, by the facts that are readily available to all anxious inquirers, but not by the misrepresentations of those who would encompass his political destruction in order that they might gain some selfish advantage, or pay off some vengeful score.
    One of the most proper of his critics who takes no pleasure, usually, in brutal or frivolous speech, protests that the President does not imitate the example of the former President and invent phrases that will stick in the common fancy and serve as rallying cries; that he does not take his stand at Armageddon to battle for the Lord; but this is a gift the President does not possess in a marked degree, and it is not a gift which has been commended in Mr. Roosevelt by those who would condemn Mr. Taft. They have said that it is cheap and vulgar, the style of the clown, the form of the taker, the adventitious speech of the barker in midway shows rather than the speech of the serious-minded statesman respectful of his service.

Says Things and Proves Them.
    Yet Mr. Taft has been known to say things about his antagonists sufficiently virile to satisfy the taste of those who affect a certain fancy for invective. For example, in his speech of acceptance he gives the people credit for the ability "to see through the fog of misrepresentation and demagogy" in which Mr. Roosevelt has endeavored to envelop them so that he might work out his plans for personal aggrandizement. He speaks of "the radical propositions of change in our form of government that are recklessly advanced to satisfy what is supposed to be popular clamor." He hopes that "the great majority of voters will be able to distinguish between the substance of performance and the fustian of promise." He declares that "the people" are not alone the unfortunate and the weak, but that they are "the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, and the many who are neither, the wage earner and the capitalist, the farmer and the professional man, the railroad manager and the manufacturer, the storekeeper and the clerk — they all make up the people, and they have not any of them given into the hands of any one the mandate to speak for them as peculiarly the people's representative." He takes courage in "the clarifying effect of a campaign of education" and "the pricking of the bubbles of demagogic promise" and the "rejection of the injurious nostrums" upon which Mr. Roosevelt relies for the success of his assault upon the established order.
    Mr. Taft does not indulge in epithets, he has called nobody liar or thief. He prefers the more decent and altogether better way of proving it. This is what he did on more than one occasion during the recent primary campaign, when over against the clamor of the clown he set out the facts so clearly that the wayfaring man, though a so-called insurgent or Progressive, could not mistake his meaning or be deceived by the "fustian" of the common enemy — the same being Mr. Roosevelt and so aptly described, as he is as much the foe of the Democratic as of the Republican Party.

The Spirit of His Fight.
    The true temper of Mr. Taft's spirit in the fight he has been making and will continue to wage until the end in November was never more clearly described than by himself. Speaking to one of his friends while the Republican Convention was in session at Chicago, and at the very moment when the news came by wire that the danger of Mr. Roosevelt's nomination had passed, he exclaimed:
    "It does not matter much what may become of me and my political fortunes. If I shall succeed in doing nothing more than to defeat Mr. Roosevelt in this convention, I shall think that I have done the people of this country a great service."
    This service will not have been completely performed, however, until he shall have defeated Mr. Roosevelt's election in November, and to this work he will devote, within proper bounds, and always with respect to his office, his best talents. In his opinion, the high-water mark of the Bull Moose movement was reached at Chicago. Hereafter it will grow small by degrees and beautifully less. It did not approach the dignity of tragedy; it was only melodrama of the ten, twent', thirt' order, and what is to follow will be anti-climax.
    Thoughtful people are beginning all over the country to ask what it was all about, and it is on the sober second thought of the people that Mr. Taft is relying for a practically united party and his success at the election m November. The worst he fears — and that would be rather good than bad — is the election of Woodrow Wilson. He does not think for a moment that Mr. Roosevelt stands the ghost of a chance to run himself in again. He still thinks that Roosevelt did not at first have any idea of being a candidate for President, although he has almost reached the point of believing that Roosevelt desired his defeat in order that he might come back four years hence, with the claim that he only could restore the Republican Party to power. Roosevelt cannot do this now since he has cut loose from the Republican Party, and will not be eligible as a Republican candidate in 1916, whatever the result of the present contest.

The Record He Stands On.
    Mr. Taft does not think that the alignments of the campaign will be fully determined probably before the first of September. He will not make a "whirlwind campaign"; he will not engage in much, if any, stump speaking. He stands on his record, and believes in his heart that he has administered, his office so fairly and so carried out his promises of a sane, safe, economical, and non-sectional discharge of his duties that he is entitled to the respectful consideration of all American voters if not to their unanimous support at the ballot box.
    Speaking to-day of some of the features of his Administration, he said:
    "I have been much censured because I did not veto the Payne-Aldrich Tariff bill. I have been told over and over again that I ought to have disapproved it and suffered the Government to go along under the old Dingley law; that we should have been no worse off than we had been under that law, and much more of the same sort. But what are the facts? The Payne-Aldrich law was not all that I wanted, nor all that I had interpreted the platform declaration of the Republican convention of 1908 to mean. The platform had not declared in specific words for a revision of the tariff downward, but I construed it to mean that, and I was not altogether pleased with the law as passed; but I regarded it as a beginning in the right direction, and that it provided the means of increasing the revenues of the Government to a point equal to the demand upon its resources.
    "The Dingley law did not produce sufficient revenue. Under its operation the Government was falling steadily behind, the deficit in revenue amounting to $58,000,000 annually at the time the Payne-Aldrich law was passed. That condition could not have been continued without imposing upon Congress the necessity of issuing bonds to raise money to pay the running expenses of the Government, and the new law, whatever its defects, and however it should be amended by further careful and intelligent revision of the tariff, has changed the whole aspect of the Government in this regard. It is now meeting its expenses, thanks to the revenue producing merits of this law, and laying by something for a rainy day.

His Tariff Redaction.
    "Under the Dingley law the average per cent. of the imports that came in free was 44.3 per cent., in value of the total importations; the average per cent. in value of the imports which have come in free under the Payne law is 51.2 per cent, of the total importations. The reduction in duties from the Dingley law to the Payne bill was 10 per cent., and, considering reductions on all imports it amounted to 21 per cent. It was not possible to continue under the Dingley law without issuing bonds to keep the Government going, and this fact of itself was sufficient to justify the approval of the new measure whatever its defects. As a matter of proof, with all its imperfections, the law has vindicated itself, as under its operation the country is gradually recovering from the panic of 1907.
    "The corporation tax feature of the Payne law was made a part of that measure upon my urgent insistence. The proposition was stoutly resisted, but by parliamentary exigencies and against the will of all the Republican Senators the corporation tax was incorporated in the law, and has proved to be of great advantage. It has the merit of an income tax without the invitation to dodging and perjury that would make an income tax ineffective for revenue purposes. It is a tax on the net business of the corporations. It is taken out before the dividends are declared to the stockholders. It is a charge upon the business of the corporations — a tax on success, not on failure. It leaves no chance of escape. It is not felt by those who are interested in the business of the corporations. It is easily collected. It yields something like $30,000,000 a year to the Government, and its collection calls for the expenditure of only a few postage stamps."
    Mr. Taft claims — and the records sustain the claims, as any one who will take the trouble to make unprejudiced inquiry may discover for himself — that his Administration has been effective and economical. There have been no lavish displays of power at the expense of the taxpayers, no expenditure of their money without authority of law, no attempt to do unlawful things in irregular ways with the expectation that Congress would make good for any acts that had been done "on a — credit." Under his Administration the several executive and administrative departments have been directed like the several branches in large business and commercial or manufacturing enterprises. There has been no firing at cross purposes, no crossing of the lines, no private conversations with subalterns in the army and navy to find out how the military arm of the Government should be managed, no orders extended through clerks affecting the business of the departments with which they are connected, no assumption of superior wisdom based on unproved data, but a well-ordered, business-like Administration of the business of the Government.
    It was not always so; it was not so in the seven strenuous years of Mr. Taft's predecessor when all the departments were in confusion, when the Executive passed over the chief administrative officers to the sub-chiefs or to such clerks as would express their views as to how the thing should be done; to an under officer of the navy, for example, who had his own opinion as to how that branch of the service should be conducted and upon whose recommendation orders were issued by the Commander in Chief; orders which, fortunately, were never carried out, but which, if carried out. would have thrown the entire service into confusion.
    Mr. Roosevelt was bent upon "doing things"; so is Mr. Taft. The difference between them is that Mr. Roosevelt, having made up his mind that a thing was right or expedient, tried to do it with or without authority of law. Mr. Taft seeks to accomplish his purposes by lawful methods. Mr. Roosevelt, had no business sense. He wanted money to do things with and without respect to cost or the state of the exchequer, and frequently without regard to the importance of the thing to be undertaken. He was in favor of commissions of all sorts — commissions for this, that, and the other, and the commissions were created and the people paid the freight. It is the difference between the ready writer, the constant shouter, and the man with a judicial temper, a sincere regard for the rights of others, the limitations of the law, the necessities of the taxpayers.

Taft and Aldrich.
    Mr. Taft has not taken part in the denunciation of the men of mark who have been selected for this purpose by the demagogues who abound on every hand. He respects Senator Aldrich for his strength of character, his ability to do big things in an unselfish way, and his work generally when he was in the Senate. In that body Aldrich wielded a tremendous influence, and even his opponents will testify to the value of his work and the unselfishness of his service. It was through his influence that the corporation tax provision was made a part of the present tariff law; it was under his management that big things were undertaken and accomplished, not things that were of any benefit to himself personally or to the interests which he was supposed to represent, but big things that were of benefit to the country in its larger life. He did not hang around the President for political favors; he was not an office broker but a statesman of broad vision who held his service to be something of larger and better quality than the pursuit of elusive appointments that would make him "strong with, his constituents."
    Mr. Taft "points with pride" to the present condition of affairs in the Philippines, where there is now good government, well adapted to the necessities of the people, and productive of most encouraging results in business and commerce. He also is well pleased with the results that have attended his treaty negotiations with other commercial nations by which the discriminations heretofore practiced against the United States have been removed. He rejoices that through his offices we have escaped entangling alliances with any other country, and have preserved the peace with all. He is certain that his prosecution of the trusts under the Sherman law will appeal to the better sense of the American people, once they understand the motives of his conduct and the success of his endeavors.
    He is looking out upon the situation with clear eyes and an approving conscience. He believes that he will not be condemned by ex-parte and lying statements for failure on his part to execute the laws in justice and equity. He does not like the circus style of campaigning for office. He admires Casabianca for his courage in standing on the burning deck; but he does not respect his common sense. He counts upon his achievements for his justification before men.
          J. C. H.