RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
mild interest in the possibility that my husband might become President of the United States. Mr. Taft himself treated all such "far-fetched speculation" with the derision which he thought it deserved, but to me it did not seem at all unreasonable. We received first a copy of the Boston Herald containing two marked articles in parallel columns, one of which, headed by a picture of Mr. Taft, stated that in Washington there had been serious suggestion of his name as a Presidential candidate and the other giving a sympathetic account of an anti-imperialistic meeting at Faneuil Hall. We thought the two articles as "news items" hardly warranted juxtaposition, and it seemed to us the editor was indulging a sort of sardonic sense of humour when he placed them so. Not that my husband was an "imperialist," but that he was generally so considered. Indeed, he was the most active anti-imperialist of them all. He was doing the work of carrying out a thoroughly anti-imperialistic policy, but he recognised the difference between abandoning the Philippines to a certain unhappy fate and guiding them to substantial independence founded on self-dependence. It took a long time to get the shouters from the house-tops to accept this interpretation of our national obligation, but there was reassurance in the fact that where our honour is involved Americanism can always be trusted to rise above purely partisan politics.
Mr. Taft's mother, who took an active and very intelligent interest in her son's work and who sent him letters by nearly every mail which were filled with entertaining and accurate comment on Philippine affairs, took the suggestion of his being a Presidential possibility quite seriously. And she did not at all approve of it. Having seen a number of press notices about it she sat down and wrote him a long letter in which she discussed with measured arguments the wisdom of his keeping out of politics. At that time the idea appealed to nothing in him except his sense of humour. He
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