Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/210

170 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS by enlarging on the gross breach of national honor such a sale would involve. In China he was able to investigate a quarrel among the American resi dents over the conduct of an extra-territorial court there, and to explain at length the American policy of an "open door" in the orient. Soon after his retirement from the governorship of the Philippines, the republican managers had begun to consider Mr. Taft as a possibility for the presidential ticket of 1908. To all such sug gestions he made a discouraging response. For one thing, he had no aspirations in that direction; for another, he would make a poor candidate. Some of his decisions as a judge had been twisted by demagogues into evidence of his hostility to organized labor. Once, when lie visited Ohio to make an address, he had improved the occasion to denounce the most powerful boss in his own party an act which, while its boldness pleased the gen eral public, was regarded by most politicians as extinguishing his last chance of support from his home state. His defence of the president s course in dismissing from the regular army, "without honor," three companies of negro troops, because some of their members had been concerned in a riot and the rest were suspected of trying to shield them, had caused a commotion among colored voters all over the country. Nevertheless, the talk of his candidacy would