Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. IV.djvu/222

182 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS recommendations, immediately attached to one of the appropriation bills a rider virtually forbidding the use of the budget. The president s retort was an order to his secretary of the treasury to disre gard this prohibition and adopt the budget system forthwith. His letter conveying the order called attention to the fact that authority is granted by congress every year for the expenditure of a bil lion dollars "without any thought as to where the money is coming from," and protested against con tinuing longer "to operate the government under ninety different statutes, passed at ninety different times, which describe two hundred different forms of preparing and submitting financial data to con gress and the public." Congress was not won over by this exposure of its unbusinesslike methods, but it was silenced, and received the estimates as they were submitted. Beside his endeavor to establish reciprocity with Canada, a few noteworthy incidents in the handling of foreign affairs during Mr. Taft s presidency were the preservation of peace with Mexico, the abrogation of the oldest existing treaty with Rus sia, an effort to mate arbitration the rule of the world for the settlement of international disputes, and the inauguration of a policy currently styled "dollar diplomacy." In the spring of 1911 an in surrection in Mexico attained proportions so threat ening that the American ambassador visited Wash-