The Delta Independent

PRESIDENT TAFT SAYS EVIL FACES NATION
ACCEPTANCE SPEECH ANALYZES THE DANGERS FACING OUR NATION.

The formal announcement of his nomination was made to President Taft at the white house last Friday by Senator Elihu Root before a large assembly. Senator Root's notification was brief and formal, but he laid particular stress on the point that Taft's title to the nomination was "as clear and unimpeachable as the title of any candidate on any party since political conventions began and that he was regularly and duly nominated."

Referring to the Roosevelt bolt, he said: "For the second time in the history of the Republican party, a party of delegates has refused to be bound by the action of the convention. The reason assigned to this course is dissatisfaction with the decision of certain contests in the making up of the temporary roll of the convention. Those contests were decided by the tribunal upon which the law that has governed the Republican party for more than forty years imposed the duty of deciding such contests. So long as those decisions were made honestly and in good faith all persons were bound to accept them as conclusive in making up of the temporary roll of the convention and neither in the facts or arguments produced before the national committee, the committee on credentials and the convention itself nor otherwise, does there appear just grounds for impeaching the honesty of the committee's decisions.

"Both the making up of the temporary roll and the rights accorded to persons on that roll, whose seats were contested, were in accordance with the long established and unquestioned rules of laws governing the party, and founded upon justice and common sense."

After Mr. Root closed his presentation speech, Mr. Taft accepted the nomination by the Republican party as follows:

President's Acceptance.

"Mr. Root and gentlemen of the notification committee:

"I accept the nomination which you tender. I do so with profound gratitude to the Republican party, which has thus honored me twice. I accept it as an approval of what I have done under the mandate, and as an expression of confidence that in a second administration, I will to serve the people well. The issue presented to the convention over which your chairman presided with such a just an even hand, made a crisis in the party's life. A faction sought to force the party to violate valuable and time-honored national tradition by entrusting the power of presidency for more than two terms to one man, and that man, one whose recently avowed political views would have committed the party to radical proposals, involving dangerous changes in our present constitutional form of representative government and our independent judiciary.

"This occasion is appropriate for the expression of profound gratitude at the victory for the right won in Chicago. By that victory, the Republican party was saved for future usefulness. It has been the party through which essentially all the progress and development of our country's history in the past fifty years has been finally effected.

"The Republican party has been alive to the modern change in the view of the duty of government toward the people. Time was, when the least government was thought the best and the policy which left all to the individual unmolested and unaided by government was deemed the wisest. Now the duty of government by positive law to further equality of opportunity in the respect to the weaker classes in their dealings with the stronger and more powerful, is clearly recognized. It is in this direction that real progress toward the greater human happiness is being made. It has been suggested that under our constitution such tendency to so called paternalism was impossible. But nothing is further from the fact. The power of the federal government to tax and expend for the general welfare has long been exercised, and the admiration one feels for our constitution is increased when we perceive how readily that instrument lends itself to wider governmental functions for the promotion of the comfort of the people.

"In the work of rousing the people to the danger that threatens our civilization from the abuses of concentrated wealth and the power it was likely to exercise, the public imagination was wrought upon and a reign of sensational journalism and unjust and unprincipled muckraking has followed, in which much injustice has been done honest men. Demagogues have seized the opportunity further to inflame the public mind and have sought to turn the peculiar conditions to their advantage.

"We are living in an age in which by exaggeration of the defect of our present condition, by false charges of responsibility for it against individuals and classes, by holding up to the feverish imagination of the less fortunate and the discontented the possibilities of a millennium, a condition of popular unrest has been produced. New parties are now being formed with the proposed purpose of satisfying this unrest by a promise of a panacea. Insofar as inequality of conditions can be lessened and equality of opportunity can be promoted by the improvement of educational system, the betterment of laws to insure the quick administration of justice and by the prevention of the acquisition of privilege without just compensation, insofar as the adoption of the legislation above recited, and laws of a similar character may aid the less fortunate in their struggle with the hardships of life, all are in sympathy with a continued effort to remedy injustice and aid the weak, and I venture to say that there is no national administration in which more real steps of progress have been taken than in the present one. But insofar as the propaganda for the satisfaction of unrest involves the promise of a millennium, a condition in which the rich are to be made reasonably poor and the poor reasonably rich by law, we are chasing a phantom; we are holding out to those whose unrest we fear: a prospect and a dream; a vision of the impossible."