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The German government put the matter into the hands of certain of her manufacturers, who sent in just as complete answers as they could procure from their books. The information reached our government during the course of the debate on the Payne-Aldrich Bill and was transmitted, for the bill by that time had reached the Senate, to the Finance Committee of the Senate.
When the lobby appeared the group that had so mangled the Wilson-Gorman bill and discredited the Payne-Aldrich Act the President issued a public statement warning the country of the "extraordinary exertions" of a body of paid agents whose object was private profit and not the good of the public.
It is my judgment that a revision of the tariff in accordance with the pledge of the platform, will be, on the whole, a substantial revision downward, though there probably will be a few exceptions in this regard." Five months after Taft's inauguration the Payne-Aldrich bill became law with his signature.
His critics and his friends alike had thrust upon them this dilemma: either he knew that the Payne-Aldrich Tariff had been arrived at by corrupt ways and was not a revision downward in spite of which he pronounced it the "best ever"; or he did not know its nature and the means used in framing it.
This was only the beginning of attempts at accommodation. The threat of tariff war had called forth in the United States loud protests against any such reversion to economic barbarism. President Taft realized that he had antagonized the growing low-tariff sentiment of the country by his support of the Payne-Aldrich tariff and was eager to set himself right.
I disapproved, and still do, of the McKinley and Payne-Aldrich tariffs; of the Spanish war most avoidable of wars with its sequel, the conquest of the Philippines; above all, of the seizure of the Panama Canal zone. But let all that pass: I am supposed to be dealing with my subject as man of letters. As such the Colonel of the Rough Riders was the high commander-in-chief of rough writers.
But this good record of things achieved was not enough to gain for Mr. Taft popular approval. Items on the other side of the ledger were pointed out. Of these the three most conspicuous were the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy, and the insurgent movement in Congress. The Republican party was returned to power in 1908, committed to a revision of the tariff.
The question whether the Payne-Aldrich act redeemed the pledge embodied in the platform of 1908 will doubtless remain a debatable question.
W.H. Taft may be studied in his Presidential Addresses and State Papers , Present Day Problems , and Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers . On the Payne-Aldrich tariff: S.W. McCall in Atlantic Monthly, vol. CIV, p. 562; G.M. Fisk in Political Science Quarterly, XXV, p. 35; H.P. Willis in Journal of Political Economy, XVII, pp. 1, 589, XVIII, 1; in addition to Tarbell and Taussig.
For several years an influential part of the Republican and Independent, as well as the Democratic press had attacked Speaker Cannon as the enemy of progressive legislation. Many of them laid much of the blame for the character of the Payne-Aldrich act at his door.