Note 17 — Chapter XXVI · Congressional Legislation

It seems to me that the American people had better look to their own liberties, when they remember that in the campaign for the Republican nomination in 1912, the Roosevelt Headquarters gave out that pending the Roosevelt dictation of Mr. Taft’s nomination in 1908, the International Harvester Company furnished a floor of its Chicago building to the Taft people, this interesting fact being part of the leakage from the Roosevelt-Taft quarrel caused by the Roosevelt charge that Mr. Taft was unfit for re-election because he “meant well feebly”; and when it is recalled, on the other hand, that in the Roosevelt campaign of 1912 for the presidential nomination for a third term, Mr. George W. Perkins,17 the very personification of undue corporation influence with the Government, assumed the rôle of Warwick for an ex-President who, when President, had repudiated the advice of his counsel, Governor Harmon, that a railroad company18 be prosecuted for taking rebates because the vice-president of the company was his personal friend.19 But let us return to the Philippine rebates, and their corner-stone, the export tax, Section 13 of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff.