Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 73, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 May 1904 — SECRETARY TAFT’S SPEECH. [ARTICLE]

SECRETARY TAFT’S SPEECH.

Secretary of War Taft, in his speech nt the opening of the St. Louis world’s fair, said: •'From each of the great expositions of the world can be dated the wortd’s familiarity witli sojne marvelous invention so quickly adopted in our life that the change that it eftected lias almost passed from memory. -And while the buildings and the machines and the con-, gresses and the beauty and the glamor and the pomp of such a celebration and exposition as this shall pass into memory. and every material evidence disappear, the measurement that they make of progress, noted as it is in the history of the world, becomes a benefit to mankind, the value of which cannot be exaggerated. ‘We have nt this, the centenary of the purchase of Louisiana, entered upon another and a different kind bf expansion, which involves tiie solution of other and different problems from those presented in the Louisiana Purchase. That they may not and probably will not be solved by conferring statehood upon the new territory is probable. ‘■Augurs of ill and ruin to follow from the experience and the solution of tho problem are not wanting, but they never have been wanting in the history of this country, and they never have been allowed to control the fearless grappling of new problems by Americans. We have probably reached a period, in the great wealth and power, which we have achieved as n nation, in which we find ourselves burdened with the necessity of aiding another people to stand upon its feet and take a short cut to the freedom and the civil liberty which we and our ancestors have hammered out by the hardest blows. For the reason that this centennial of tlatf Louisiana purchase marks the lieginning of the great Philippine problem, the government of the Philippine Islands has felt justified in expending a very large sum of money to make the people who come here to commemorate the vindication of one great effort of American enterprise and expansion under the conditWus which surround the beginning of another. “Those who look forward with dark foreboding to the result of this new adventure base their prophecies of disaster on what they think is the weakness of the American people. Those who look forward to its success base their judgment on what has already been accomplished in the islands, ami on what they know the American nation can do when an emergency and an inevitable necessity present themselves. Without being blind to the difficulties or the dangers, it gives me the greatest happiness to know and to say that the President of the United States, whom I unworthily represent to-day, is glad to take his stand among those who believe in the capacity of the American people who. aroused by the call of duty, to solve any problem of government, however new, which depends solely on the clear-headedness, the honesty and the courage, the generosity and the self-restraint of the American people.”