To show my reading of the situation at the time I quote from a letter of mine to Joseph B. Bishop, then editor of the Commercial Advertiser, with whom towards the end of my term I had grown into very close relations, and who, together with two other old friends, Albert Shaw, of the Review of Reviews, and Silas McBee, now editor of the Constructive Quarterly, knew the inside of every movement, so far as I knew it myself.  The letter, which is dated April 11, 1900, runs in part as follows:  “The dangerous element as far as I am concerned comes from the corporations.  The [naming certain men] crowd and those like them have been greatly exasperated by the franchise tax.  They would like to get me out of politics for good, but at the moment they think the best thing to do is to put me into the Vice-Presidency.  Naturally I will not be opposed openly on the ground of the corporations’ grievance; but every kind of false statement will continually be made, and men like [naming the editors of certain newspapers] will attack me, not as the enemy of corporations, but as their tool!  There is no question whatever that if the leaders can they will upset me.”

One position which as Governor (and as President) I consistently took, seems to me to represent what ought to be a fundamental principle in American legislative work.  I steadfastly refused to advocate any law, no matter how admirable in theory, if there was good reason to believe that in practice it would not be executed.  I have always sympathized with the view set forth by Pelatiah Webster in 1783—­quoted by Hannis Taylor in his Genesis of the Supreme Court—­“Laws or ordinances of any kind (especially of august bodies of high dignity and consequence) which fail of execution, are much worse than none.  They weaken the government, expose it to contempt, destroy the confidence of all men, native and foreigners, in it, and expose both aggregate bodies and individuals who have placed confidence in it to many ruinous disappointments which they would have escaped had no such law or ordinance been made.”  This principle, by the way, not only applies to an internal law which cannot be executed; it applies even more to international action, such as a universal arbitration treaty which cannot and will not be kept; and most of all it applies to proposals to make such universal arbitration treaties at the very time that we are not keeping our solemn promise to execute limited arbitration treaties which we have already made.  A general arbitration treaty is merely a promise; it represents merely a debt of honorable obligation; and nothing is more discreditable, for a nation or an individual, than to cover up the repudiation of a debt which can be and ought to be paid, by recklessly promising to incur a new and insecure debt which no wise man for one moment supposes ever will be paid.

CHAPTER IX

OUTDOORS AND INDOORS