Show Independents Heard The which have heretofore supported the President in most now assert that Taft has arrived at the cross-roads of his career and has taken the wrong They point out that Taft was elected President as a tariff-reformer candidate on a tariff-reform and that he did not fail to offer upon the platform ample and apparently sincere pledges of his personal devotion to the tariff-reform The friends of the President were disappointed when he signed the iniquitous Payne-Aldrich tariff bill for this bill not only failed to reduce the tariff in accordance with the promises of the Republican platform and Taft's personal but in its total effect actually increased the tariff burden of the In his speech at which was supposed to sound the depths of the President's he was constrained to admit the defects of the Payne-Aldrich revision and to confess that at least one schedule as it stood was grossly predatory and morally Now comes a Congress elected in obvious rebuke of the duplicity and public betrayal that had been wrought in the Payne-Aldrich bill and this fresh from the lays upon the President's table certain mild and temperate measures of tariff These measures save for their excessive moderation are the natural and inevitable response to the well-nigh unanimous demands of the American Yet Taft has set his present will against the will of the people and of Congress and against his past whereby he got his He stands before the country forbidding the passage of the mildest measures for the easing of the strain of extortion in food and He balks the Farmers' Free which is the reasonable complement of the Reciprocity He stands unashamed as the not only of the Cotton but also of the Schedule Taft says we must wait for the report of the Tariff But no action is likely to be taken on the report of the Tariff Board on the eve of a Presidential Besides the Tariff as it is an incompetent guide to tariff reform t because of the narrow limitation of its the partisan character of its and the small-bore calibre of its None of its numbers are tariff and they are not to but to the President E The President's In vetoing the tariff bills demanded by the people Taft has vetoed the tariff-revision thereby giving aid and to Privilege and killing the hopes of the people that they are at last to be delivered from He has committed a great By his own act he has helped to confirm the belief that his party is incapable of shaking itself free from the control of special The President's Before his nomination at Taft had forced the issue of tariff revision upon his During the 1908 campaign he pledged himself and his party to honest and downward During the tariff debates of 1909 he sought to induce Republican high protectionists to acquiesce in reasonable On signing the Payne-Aldrich bill Taft was constrained by political expediency to defend the he admitted that it was a perfect tariff bill or a complete compliance with the promises strictly We said that a number of excessive tariff duties had not been Taft specifically denounced the wool schedule of the Payne-Aldrich tariff as He declared that should have been and that it was because a combination of representatives from the manufacturing and wool-growing sections of the east and west had a majority in that was In his message to the Chicago Association of Taft argued for tariff legislation schedule by schedule and emphatically are bound to promote the prompt elimination of instances of injustice in the Tariff |