Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/211

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT 171 not subside. When the president joined with his other friends in pressing him for a direct declara tion of his position, he reluctantly prepared one for the press. "I wish to say," he wrote, "that my ambition is riot political; that I am not seeking the presidential nomination; that 1 do not expect to be the republican candidate, if for no other reason, because of what seern to me to be objections to my availability, which do not appear to lessen with the continued discharge of my official duty; but that I am not foolish enough to say that in the improbable event that the opportunity . . . were to come to me, I should decline it." lie followed this, a year later, with a speech on President Roose velt s enforcement of the interstate commerce and anti-monopoly laws, which had been widely charged with bringing on the financial panic of 1907, say ing: "The question you have ultimately to meet is riot whether we shall return to a condition of unregulated railways and unregulated trusts, but whether we shall turn the country over to the ad vocates of government ownership and state social ism. Anyone who seeks a retrograde step from the policy of the administration, on the theory that it would be a real step toward conservatism, is blind to every political sign of the times." This was intended as a warning of what his fellow citi zens must expect if they elected him to the presidency.