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RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS

MRS. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Recollections of Full Years

BY

MRS. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK

Dodd, Mead & Company

1914

Copyright, 1914

By THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO.

Copyright, 1914

By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

FOREWORD

I wish to express my grateful acknowledgment to Eleanor Franklin Egan and my daughter for their valued assistance in the preparation for publication of these Recollections.

Helen Herron Taft.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Cincinnati, the city of my birth and early memories, was, in the ‘sixties, about as begrimed and noisy and altogether unattractive as any place well could be; yet it possessed certain attributes which really entitled it to the proud designation of “The Queen City of the West.”

It was prosperous; it had hardly yet been surpassed in prosperity by Chicago; Cleveland was not even spoken of as a rival; and in many ways it was the most important centre west of New York and east of the Mississippi.

It owed its early development principally to its advantageous location. It lay on the great central route from the East to the West, which runs from Baltimore and Washington to Cumberland and over the Alleghenies to Pittsburg, thence by the Ohio River to Cincinnati and on west to St. Louis and south to New Orleans. It had an important trade with New Orleans and drew commerce from a large territory to the north. But whatever else may be said of it, its most devoted citizen could not claim that Cincinnati was beautiful. Its buildings were unlovely; its streets were badly paved and as badly kept; and it lay under a pall of soft coal smoke which left its sooty mark upon everything—inhabitants included.

Yet, ugly as it was, the city boasted an unusual society. During the first half of the nineteenth century many young men of good stock and great ability, drawn by the promise of rapid advancement, had moved to Cincinnati from all parts of the East and South; New Jersey, New England, Virginia and Kentucky contributing, perhaps, the greatest number. There were many families of wealth and culture which, without parade or display, maintained fine homes and dispensed a generous hospitality. The suburbs, East Walnut Hills, Mt. Auburn and Clifton, on the heights to the north and east, were famous for their beautiful country places.

Then there was a large population of the best class of Germans, many of whom were university men who left their own country after the Revolution of 1848 and came to Cincinnati to settle. Of these, Frederick Hassaurek, General Willich and Judge Stallo, who came to Cincinnati when Carl Schurz went to St. Louis, are perhaps the most prominent. The German influence upon the community was marked. It made for a more liberal Sunday; it brought the study of German into the public schools; and it developed a strong taste for good music. Indeed, the musical advantages of Cincinnati in my girlhood were better than those of any city in the United States, with the exception of New York or Boston. Theodore Thomas was president of the Conservatory of Music and he organised a symphony orchestra which he continued to direct until he went to Chicago along about 1890.

Cincinnati in those days, with her educated, wealthy and public-spirited society, was much in advance of any other city in the Mississippi Valley in culture and refinement. There was great interest in schools of all sorts and in every kind of intellectual activity. Away back in 1848 the Literary Club of Cincinnati was formed by a company of men among whom were both Mr. Taft’s father and mine, as well as Rutherford B. Hayes, Stanley Matthews, Manning F. Force and Mr. Spofford, later Librarian of Congress. This club continues to be a cherished institution and in my girlhood it was the centre of all interest in literature and intellectual pursuits.

My father, John Williamson Herron, was a graduate of Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, and was in college with Benjamin Harrison. He was for fifty years a trustee of that institution and was devoted to its interests. My husband’s father, Judge Alphonso Taft, was one of the Yale class of 1833, was for many years a member of the Yale Corporation, and had five sons who graduated at that university. My mother’s brother, Judge Isaac Clinton Collins, and one of my two brothers also graduated at Yale, while my other brother graduated at Harvard, so it will be seen that both my husband and I grew up in the midst of strong collegiate traditions.

To write about one’s childhood is not easy. Memories by the score come flocking up, but, dear as they are, upon examination they turn out to be quite commonplace and hardly worth relating. My memories are not sufficiently “early” to have any special value. The first thing that I dimly remember is sitting on the front steps of my home watching some sort of parade in which there were many soldiers, but I was too young then to know that it was a peace celebration I was witnessing at the close of the Civil War.

My father was a lawyer who came to the bar of Ohio in the ’forties. He was United States Attorney under President Harrison, was a State Senator, and twice declined appointments to the Bench because the salary attached to these positions was not enough to support his large family. I was the fourth in a family of eleven, eight girls and three boys. One boy and two girls died before I can remember.

Our house was one of a block of grey brick houses in Pike Street, at the east end of Cincinnati, which, at that time, was the fashionable residence section of the city. Pike Street runs down to the river on a rather steep incline and, as it was paved with cobblestones, my early memories are somewhat marred by an impression of the frequent clatter and clang of heavy wagons pulling their way up the hill from the river landing.

While our house was not particularly distinguished, being much like those on either side of it, across the street from us there were two very striking and imposing residences which lent distinction to the neighbourhood, and in which, as I grew up, were formed the pleasantest associations of my life. The one directly opposite was a large, square, red brick house which had an air of great dignity. It was the home of Mr. Larz Anderson. There were ten boys in the Anderson family and, though they were all much older than I and most of them had gone away before I grew up, I remember that it was a very lively household always. In my later girlhood we were specially linked to this family by the marriage of one of the boys, Charles, to my sister Jennie.

The house next to Mr. Anderson’s, on the north, I knew as the Sinton home. A low, colonial structure, well set in a garden of green lawns and finely kept shrubbery, it is still one of the most beautiful residences in Cincinnati, and, indeed, in the whole country. Its architecture suggests that of the White House and it was, as a matter of fact, designed by the same architect, an Irishman named Hoban. The Sinton house is lower than the White House, being only one story high with a basement, but it has the same classic outlines and it bears, moreover, the stamp of time, which gives it a character all its own.

It was built about 1800 by a Mr. Martin Baum, but was purchased by the first Nicholas Longworth in the early part of the century and was the home of the Longworth family for a generation. Long before I can remember, it was bought by Mr. David Sinton, one of the most successful business men in Ohio, and to me it was always the Sinton home. When I was about twelve years old, Mr. Sinton’s daughter Annie married my husband’s brother, Charles P. Taft, and as they have always lived in this old house it has come to be known, since Mr. Sinton’s death in 1901, as the Taft house. It is the only Taft house in Cincinnati now, the house where my husband was born having been sold after his father’s death, and it has been the scene of many of the most important events of my life. It was there that my husband received the announcement of his nomination for the Presidency; it was there, in front of the house, that he made his speech of acceptance; and it was there that Charles Taft gathered a large party of friends on the night of November 6, 1908, to receive with us the election returns. And it is now to this house, where my husband’s brother Charles and his wife dispense a generous hospitality, that we always go when we return to Cincinnati.

MRS. TAFT’S CHILDHOOD HOME ON PIKE STREET, IN CINCINNATI

My girlhood days were spent quite placidly in Miss Nourse’s school, which was known in Cincinnati as “The Nursery,” and where all the girls of the Herron family, as well as Mr. Taft’s only sister, Fanny, received their education. Miss Nourse was a Maine woman with a thorough New England education and with a thoroughly New England idea of imparting it. She insisted, especially, upon languages and literature. Much of my time, outside of that taken up in regular school work, I devoted to the study of music, and I practised my scales on the family piano with such persistence that I wonder the whole neighbourhood did not rebel. Music was the absorbing interest of my life in those days, the inspiration of all my dreams and ambitions.

Our house was none too large for the family, but as there was a wide difference in our ages it happened that my oldest sister was married while my youngest sister was still a baby in long clothes. Then, the boys went away to college and were gone the better part of each year, so it was not often that we were all at home together. Nevertheless, we had our share of the happy-go-lucky and somewhat crowded existence of a large family on a moderate income.

My mother was Harriet Collins, and when she was seventeen years old she came with her mother to Cincinnati, from Lowville, New York, to live with her brother, Judge Collins, who was my father’s law partner and continued to be so for more than forty years. Her father, Eli Collins, was a Member of Congress from the Lowville district of New York. My mother was in many ways a remarkable, as well as a most attractive, woman. She had an exceedingly keen wit and a mind alert to the humour in every situation. With so many children to nurse, to scold, to sew for and, sometimes, to cook for—in a word, to bring up on a small income—she would seem to have had little time for outside interests; but she was very popular in society and I remember that in her busiest years she went out a great deal. She had a stimulating personality and I do know that she made her family circle a very amusing and interesting one in which to grow up.

The only incident of my girlhood which was in any way unusual was my first visit to the White House as a guest of President and Mrs. Hayes. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes and my father and mother had been lifelong friends. Mr. Hayes was, at one time, a partner in my father’s law firm. They had been closely associated for a great many years and had a very warm regard for each other. My youngest sister was born shortly after the election of Mr. Hayes, was named Lucy Hayes Herron, after Mrs. Hayes, and was taken to the White House to be christened. My mother paid several visits to the White House and after my sister Jennie was married Mrs. Hayes invited her and Mr. Anderson to stay a week with her and, to my intense excitement, she added that she would like to have me accompany them. I was seventeen years old; I had never been to Washington and to me it was a very important event. I was not “out,” so I couldn’t spend my time in the White House as I would have liked, in going to brilliant parties and meeting all manner of charming people, but, fortunately for my peace of mind, the Hayes lived very quietly, so it was not so trying to have to devote myself to seeing the sights of the Capital like any other tourist.

I didn’t meet my husband until I was eighteen years old. We had been born and brought up in the same town; our fathers were warm friends and had practised law at the same bar for more than forty years; during that time our mothers had exchanged visits, and my sister Maria and Fanny Taft were schoolmates and close companions at Miss Nourse’s, but the Tafts lived at Mt. Auburn, a hill suburb of Cincinnati, and after Will finished Woodward High School he went for four years to Yale, so it is not at all surprising that we did not meet.

Judge Alphonso Taft was Secretary of War, and later Attorney General, in Grant’s Cabinet while his son Will was at college, but before the latter graduated, the family had returned to Cincinnati, so he came straight home and entered at once upon a law course in the Cincinnati Law School. It was at that time, when he was still a student and working as a law reporter on the Cincinnati Commercial, that I met him. It was at a coasting party one winter’s night, I remember very well, when I went with a party of young people, including the Charles Tafts, to coast down a fine steep hill in Mt. Auburn. Will Taft was there, and after being introduced to me he took me down the hill on his big bobsled. After that we met very frequently.

A small circle of us went in for amateur theatricals with much enthusiasm and great earnestness. We launched ourselves in our histrionic careers in “She Stoops to Conquer” which we gave at the house of one of the company. Then came “A Scrap of Paper” in Mrs. Charles Taft’s drawing room, in which both Will and I took part. We had become very ambitious by this time and sent all the way to New York for a professional stage-manager to help us with the production. But it turned out a most nervous occasion. We were all overtrained, I suppose. One thing after another went wrong until at the crisis of the play, where the hero is supposed to find in the barrel of a gun the scrap of paper upon which the whole plot hinges, the amateur hero looked pretty foolish when he discovered there wasn’t any gun. Another one of the company, in a fit of absentmindedness, no doubt due to overwrought nerves, had carried it off the stage, and just when the situation was getting tragic for the hero the culprit came creeping back with it and carefully put it where it belonged, for all the world as if he thought he were making himself invisible to the audience.

But our ardour was not dampened. I remember Mr. Taft especially in a burlesque of “The Sleeping Beauty,” which, in its legitimate form, had been produced for charity at Pike’s Opera House. The Unity Club, a most respectable organization of the young men of the Unitarian Church, decided to give their version of the same story, and it was a huge success. Mr. Taft played the title rôle and his brother Horace, who is six feet four in his stocking feet, shared with the Beauty the honours of the evening as a most enchanting Puck.

Then we had parties in the country, too. Many of our friends had country places that spread along the Madison Road and the Grandin Road on East Walnut Hills, and two of my closest friends lived out there in a great house, looking down over the majestic but tawny Ohio River, above the point where the sweeping curve begins that carries it by the amphitheatre in which the business part of the city is built. It was a long distance to East Walnut Hills and in my girlhood we had to go the greater part of the way in a clumsy old omnibus that clumped along over the unpaved roads at the rate of about three miles an hour. But such little inconveniences didn’t trouble us, and many were the vaudeville and charade parties that we had, there being enough “talent” among us to get up an amusing performance at a moment’s notice.

MR. AND MRS. JOHN WILLIAMSON HERRON, MRS. TAFT’S FATHER AND MOTHER

But in spite of all this gaiety, Mr. Taft was making very satisfactory progress in his career. As a law reporter he showed his growing interest in the public welfare by meeting certain elements in Cincinnati politics with vigorous denunciation. There was a man named Tom Campbell, a clever criminal lawyer, who had something more than a suspicion against him of bribery and corruption of both witnesses and juries, and he had succeeded in organising a political machine that was running the town according to his directions.

Campbell was counsel for the defence in what was known as the Hoffman case and was strongly suspected of tampering with the jury, and Mr. Taft in reporting the case, took special pains to bring out all the fine points in the lawyer’s character and methods, telling the truth as he saw it.

This brought him into association with Mr. Miller Outcalt, the Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, who represented the State in the Hoffman case, and when Mr. Outcalt succeeded by election to the position of prosecuting attorney he offered the place of assistant to Mr. Taft, although he had been at the bar not more than seven months. Mr. Taft served in this office for fourteen months and the experience he had in the rough-and-ready practice in criminal trials, in preparing cases for trial, in examining witnesses, in making arguments to the court and in summing up to the jury, was the most valuable experience he could possibly have in fitting him for trial work at the bar.

But this experience was shortened by a circumstance not of his seeking. Major Benjamin Butterworth was the Congressman from one of the Cincinnati districts in President Arthur’s administration, and the President being anxious to relieve the Collector of Internal Revenue, called on Major Butterworth to suggest the name of another man. Major Butter worth had been for a long time a warm friend of Mr. Taft, thought he had a good family name and was too young in politics to have many political enemies, so he suggested him and wrote to urge him to accept the appointment which the President immediately offered to him. He accepted the place and held it for a year, but it proved a serious interruption in his legal career. He resigned as soon as it was possible and began practice with Major H. P. Lloyd who had been his father’s partner before he went to Vienna.

Mr. Taft went abroad in the summer of 1883 to visit Judge and Mrs. Taft in Vienna, and it was about this time, when we had all spent several years in frivolities, that several of us became very serious-minded and decided that we must have something by way of occupation more satisfying than dancing and amateur theatricals. I secured a position as school teacher and taught for two years, first at Madame Fredin’s and then at White and Sykes, both private schools out on Walnut Hills. Then, with two of my intimate friends, I decided to start a “salon.” We called it a “salon” because we planned to receive a company who were to engage in what we considered brilliant discussion of topics intellectual and economic, and we decided that our gathering should include only specially invited guests. Among these were the two Taft brothers, Will and Horace, and other men common friends of us all.

In view of the fact that two marriages resulted from this salon, Mr. Taft has suggested ulterior motives on the part of those who got it up, but there was no truth in the charge. We were simply bent on “improving our minds” in the most congenial atmosphere we could create, and if our discussions at the salon usually turned upon subjects of immediate personal interest, to the neglect of the abstruse topics we had selected for debate, it was because those subjects were just then claiming the attention of the whole community.

Cincinnati, thanks to the activities of Tom Campbell and his followers, was then in a tangle of political mismanagement of a particularly vicious character, and our little circle developed a civic spirit which kept us alive to local interests to the exclusion, for the time being, of everything else. Mr. Taft was intimately connected with the reform movement, and in all its phases, through comedy and tragedy, disappointment and elation, we fought it out at our salon meetings with such high feeling and enthusiasm that its history became the history of our lives during that period.

Then came the famous Berner case. This was in 1884. Berner had committed a deliberate murder of an unusually appalling nature and with robbery as the motive, and there was great excitement about it. Campbell became his counsel and, in a trial which held the attention of the community while it lasted, he succeeded in getting the man off for manslaughter when the unanimous opinion was that he should have been hanged. Nobody could see how an honest jury could have rendered any other verdict. There was intense indignation throughout the city and a meeting was called to denounce Campbell as an embracer of juries and a suborner of perjury.

On the evening when the meeting to denounce Campbell was called we were having a session of the salon and our whole discussion was of the possible developments which might grow out of the infamous Berner trial. We were greatly excited about it. I remember the evening distinctly because of the terrible things that happened. We were disturbed by a great commotion in the street and we sallied forth in a body to see what it was all about.

The mass meeting was held at Music Hall and was presided over by Dr. Kemper, a very effective speaker. The crowd was angry and quickly passed the condemnatory resolutions which were framed. But with all the indignation and resentment everything might have been carried out quite calmly had not the match been applied to the powder. Just as the meeting was breaking up somebody shouted:

“Let’s go down to the jail and take Berner out!”

It was an appeal to the mob spirit which responds so readily in an angry crowd; they went; and of course the worst elements immediately came to the top. They attacked the jail, which was in the rear of the court house, but were held back until the militia, which had been instantly summoned, arrived. Then they went around to the front and set fire to the court house. With the streets packed with raging humanity it was not possible to fight the fire and the building was completely destroyed.

The militia charged the mob and this inspired somebody with the idea of raiding a gun store and seizing arms and ammunition with which to make a resistance. The idea caught on and spread rapidly. One place attacked was Powell’s gun shop near Fourth and Main. But Powell, either forewarned or foreseeing some such development, had quietly made preparations to meet it. He lighted up the front of the store as brightly as he could, then, with two or three other men who were expert shots, he put himself behind a barricade in the rear. The mob came on and as the ringleaders broke into the shop they were picked off by the men behind the barricade and killed in their tracks. Four or five of them went down in a heap and the crowd behind them, not expecting such a reception, instantly was brought to its senses. This was in April, 1884.

Such an outbreak was a disgrace to the city of Cincinnati, but it had the effect of bringing the Campbell controversy to a head. A bar committee of ten men, of which both my father and Mr. Taft were members, was formed to see what could be done to rid the community of the evil reputation it had acquired. This committee made a thorough investigation of Campbell’s character and record, prepared charges against him and, with my father as chairman, presented them, in June, 1884, to the district court of three judges, and asked a hearing and Campbell’s disbarment if the charges were proved.

MEMBERS OF THE SALON. MR. TAFT IN THE CENTER, WITH THE AUTHOR AT HIS RIGHT

Campbell had been indicted on a criminal charge of attempting to bribe a man called on the Berner jury and the prosecutor in this case was our intimate friend and associate, Mr. Rufus Smith, who had been in Europe with Mr. Taft the year before. The jury hung, eight to four, although the evidence was strong against the defendant. This fanned the flames of popular resentment and I don’t suppose our little salon was the only place in Cincinnati where Campbell was carefully retried and convicted. In this criminal case Mr. Foraker, who shortly afterward became Governor of Ohio, was counsel for Campbell.

The disbarment hearing was set for the following November and some six months was thus given for taking the depositions of non-resident witnesses. Mr. Kittredge and Mr. Ramsey, leaders of the bar, were retained as senior counsel for the committee, and Mr. Taft and Mr. John Holmes, a warm friend of ours, were junior counsel and were directed to prepare the evidence. In this work Mr. Taft and Mr. Holmes went all over the country taking depositions and we kept in constant touch with them. All the members of the committee expected to have their reputations assailed, being perfectly certain that Campbell would not hesitate at any measure he might be able to take to discredit them, but they went ahead nevertheless.

When the trial came on Mr. Ramsey, of the senior counsel, expected to open the case, but he became quite seriously ill and was confined to his house for days. Through his unexpected absence, the duty of making the opening statement fell to Mr. Taft. He was taken completely by surprise, but he rose to the opportunity, which was certainly a splendid one for a man so young. He had then been at the bar only four years, but having assisted throughout in the preparation of the evidence he knew the case from beginning to end and he made a speech which lasted four hours and a half. Mr. Taft thinks this was an opportunity improved which had an important influence on his career. The special part it played in his subsequent promotion I shall speak of.

The result in the Campbell case was at first disappointing because the Court which heard the disbarment charges found Campbell guilty only on minor charges and, by a vote of two to one acquitted him on those which would have required his disbarment. But the public disapproval of the Court’s decision and the moral effect of the proceedings drove Campbell from the city and the State and accomplished the purpose of the bar association.

The Campbell trial was finished in December, 1884, and in January, 1885, Mr. Rufus Smith, an old and intimate friend, entered the office of County Solicitor and tendered to Mr. Taft the place of Assistant County Solicitor. The advantage of this office was that it paid $2500 a year and that, while he acted as counsel for the county, he still was able to continue the general practice of law with his partner, Major Lloyd.

Mr. Taft and I were engaged in May, 1885, and were married in June of the following year.

In the summer of 1885 my mother, moved I think by some sentimental attachment to the scenes of her childhood, decided that she would take us all up into the Adirondacks, to a little camp near Lowville. My two older sisters were married so there were only six of us left in the family, but we were still something of a handful to move in a body. However, my mother was equal to it. We packed almost a van load of trunks and set out, and one evening we arrived, over the worst corduroy road that was ever laid down, at a little cottage beside a beautiful lake in a setting of pine-clad hills. The scenery indeed was most satisfactory, but the cottage was so small that the family more than strained its capacity. Then we took our meals at a sort of boarding house called Fenton’s, where the only thing on the bill of fare was fresh beef. I like what is known as “roughing it” as well as anybody, but even the superlative appetite produced by outdoor living demands some variety; and variety we did not get.

Mr. Taft had elected to remain in Cincinnati all summer and save money. It was a Spartan resolution and we all applauded it, but he probably found Lowville a long way from Pike Street; and I certainly thought Mother was sacrificing a good deal for the sake of renewing the memories of her youth. However, the days went on, while the fresh beef grew less and less tempting.

I had written Mr. Taft something about the Fenton fare and he, wanting very much to join us, but having no excuse for breaking his admirable resolution to remain in Cincinnati, hit upon the only plan for escaping comment on his lack of fortitude. He went down to Peeble’s, a fancy grocer, and selecting a box as big as a Saratoga trunk, ordered it filled with every kind of delicacy he could think of or have pointed out to him and brought it with him to Lowville.

We went rowing on the lake about sundown the evening he arrived, and right in the middle of a fine long stroke he suddenly dropped his oars, reached in his pocket and drew out a letter. He laughed a little when he handed it to me, then picking up his oars he rowed on without a word. The letter was from his father.

Judge Taft was at this time Minister to St. Petersburg, having been transferred from Vienna. Will had written him about his engagement and about his plan to remain in town all summer and devote himself strictly to business and the accumulation of funds; and this was the answer.

There were a lot of nice complimentary things about me, with the warmest congratulations and good wishes; then the letter closed by saying: “I am very much pleased with your decision to remain in Cincinnati this summer. I myself have found it not at all bad if you take care of yourself, and there is no doubt that during the quiet months one can make and save considerable money by staying at home. I congratulate you on your strength of character.” We really had a delightful summer at Fenton’s after that.

My father had given me a very nice lot at the end of McMillan Street on the site of an old quarry, which commanded a fine view of the Ohio River and the surrounding country, and Mr. Taft and I determined to build a house on it which should be ready for us when we got back from our wedding trip. So the winter before our marriage was filled with architects’ plans, contractors’ estimates and all the other fascinating details of building, and we thought that we had finally settled upon a design that met with every requirement of good taste and modern comfort.

For our wedding trip, we went abroad, and I had my first taste of the foreign travel of which I had always dreamed. We crossed on the City of Chester which was the oldest, and therefore the cheapest ship of the Inman line. We chose her for the simple reason that her rates accorded with our means, but we found, much to our astonishment, that we were the only people on board who had deliberately selected her. Everybody else had been forced to take her because of some emergency or some mishap. One man had to miss the Germanic in order to give his dentist time to relieve a very troublesome tooth. Another man was called to court just as he was about to board the Britannic. Those were the proud ships of the Atlantic in those days and it was not at all difficult to understand why anybody should prefer them to the City of Chester, but it amused us greatly to hear the shamefaced excuses of our fellow passengers. My husband and I were not ashamed, nor were we so particular about our comforts that we did not thoroughly enjoy ourselves. Besides, we had the gratifying consciousness of the money which the low rates had left in our pockets to be spent much more profitably abroad.

MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT AT THE TIME OF THEIR MARRIAGE

The trip was full of interest to us both. We spent the greater part of the summer in England and saw the sights of London and the cathedral towns in great detail. Our only trip on the Continent was through Holland to Paris. I remember that in Amsterdam I bought some old and rather large Delft plates. They wouldn’t go into any trunk we had, so I had them carefully packed in a wicker hamper and this article became thereafter a part of our hand luggage, and was the occasion for a decided disagreement between my husband and me as to what the true object of travel was. He used to say that he “toted that blamed thing all around Europe and after all it arrived in Cincinnati with its contents in small pieces.” Which was true. He had “toted” it all around Europe, but when we arrived in New York I entrusted it to an express company with the result that when we opened it we found its contents in such a condition that only an accomplished porcelain mender could put a sufficient number of pieces together to make what my husband always afterward referred to as “the memento of our first unpleasantness.”

Our trip from Cincinnati to Cincinnati took just one hundred days and cost us just one thousand dollars, or five dollars a day each. I venture to say that could not be done nowadays, even by as prudent a pair as we were.

During a subsequent trip abroad, two years later, I was able to indulge my desire to hear music. We went to Beyreuth, to the Wagner festival, and heard Parsifal and The Meistersingers gloriously rendered; after which we went to Munich and attended operas and concerts until Mr. Taft rebelled. He said that he enjoyed a certain amount of music just as much as anybody, but that he did want to get something more out of European travel than a nightly opera and a daily symphony.

So—we went to Italy and saw Rome and Florence in true Baedecker style. When we arrived in Rome we opened our Baedecker and read that there was almost no foundation for Rome’s awful reputation as an unhealthy place. “Rome is a very healthy place,” said Baedecker, “at all times of the year except the first two weeks in August, when a visit there is attended with risk.” We had arrived for the first two weeks in August!

When we came home from our wedding trip we found that our house was not yet completed, so we went to stay with Judge and Mrs. Taft for a month at the old house in Mt. Auburn. It was a nice old place, with about three acres of ground, but the air around it was just about as sooty as if it had been located down under the factory chimneys. Mt. Auburn is on a sort of promontory which juts out into the city; it is on a level with the tops of the smoke stacks and it catches all the soot that the air can carry that far.

Judge and Mrs. Taft had come home from their European mission in time for our wedding. Judge Taft had been ill in St. Petersburg and had given his family a great deal of anxiety, but he was now settled down to the business of quiet recuperation and the enjoyment of well-earned rest.

My husband’s father was “gentle” beyond anything I ever knew. He was a man of tremendous firmness of purpose and just as set in his views as any one well could be, but he was one of the most lovable men that ever lived because he had a wide tolerance and a strangely “understanding sympathy” for everybody. He had a great many friends, and to know him was to know why this was so.

Mr. Taft’s mother, though more formal, was also very kindly and made my visit to her home as a bride full of pleasure. The two, the father and mother, had created a family atmosphere in which the children breathed in the highest ideals, and were stimulated to sustained and strenuous intellectual and moral effort in order to conform to the family standard. There was marked serenity in the circle of which Judge and Mrs. Taft were the heads. They had an abiding confidence in the future of their children which strongly influenced the latter to justify it. They both had strong minds, intellectual tastes, wide culture and catholic sympathies.

Not long after we arrived my husband came to me one day with an air of great seriousness, not to say of conciliation and said:

“Nellie, Father has got himself into rather a difficulty and I hope I can rely on you to help him out—not make it too hard for him, you know,—make him feel as comfortable about it as you can. The truth is he used to have a messenger at the War Department in Washington whom he was very fond of. He was a bright man—colored, of course—and he was very devoted to Father. Now this man called on Father down town to-day. He’s here on a private car and Father says he’s made a great success as a porter. Father got to talking to him, and there were lots of things they wanted to talk about, and besides the man said he would like very much to see Mother,—and Father, who was just about ready to come home to lunch said—right on the spur of the moment—you understand he didn’t think anything about it—he said to this man, ‘Come on home and have lunch with us.’ He’s downstairs now. Father came to me and said he had just realised that it was something of a difficulty and that he was sorry. He said that he could take care of Mother if I could take care of you. So I hope you won’t mind.”

As soon as I could control my merriment caused by this halting and very careful explanation, I went down to luncheon. I didn’t mind and Will’s mother didn’t mind, but the expression on the face of Jackson, the negro butler, was almost too much for my gravity. I will say that the porter had excellent manners and the luncheon passed off without excitement.

We made a short visit at my mother’s on Pike Street before we moved into our new house on McMillan Street; but we began the year of 1887 under our own roof which, though it was mortgaged, was to us, for the time being, most satisfactory.

CHAPTER II
CINCINNATI AND WASHINGTON

One day after we had been married less than a year my husband came home looking so studiously unconcerned that I knew at once he had something to tell me.

“Nellie, what would you think,” he began casually, “if I should be appointed a Judge of the Superior Court?”

“Oh, don’t try to be funny,” I exclaimed. “That’s perfectly impossible.”

But it was not impossible, as he soon convinced me. My father had just refused the same appointment and it was difficult to believe that it could now be offered to my husband who was only twenty-nine years old. It was a position made vacant by the retirement from the Bench of Judge Judson Harmon who was my husband’s senior by more than a decade.

One of the most prominent and prosperous law firms in Cincinnati was that of Hoadley, Johnston and Colston, and both Mr. Hoadley and Mr. Johnston had been invited to go to New York and become partners of Mr. Edward Lauterbach who was then doing an enormous business.

They went, and the old firm in Cincinnati being broken up, Mr. Colston asked Judge Harmon, who was then on the Superior Court, to take Mr. Hoadley’s place. Mr. Harmon decided to do so, but he was anxious to resign his judgeship in such a way as to leave a long enough vacancy to attract a good man. It was an elective office and the law provided that a vacancy occurring within thirty days before election could not be filled by an election until the following year. Judge Harmon resigned so as to make the appointment for a period of fourteen months. After my father declined it, the choice lay between Mr. Taft and Mr. Bellamy Storer. Mr. Taft always thought that but for his opportunity in the Campbell case Judge Hannon would not have recommended him and Governor Foraker would not have appointed him. That is why he says he traces all his success back to that occasion. Mr. Foraker was opposing counsel in the Campbell case, but he had a lawyer’s appreciation for a lawyer’s effort.

After the first pleased surprise at the honour which came to us so unexpectedly I began to think; and my thinking led me to decide that my husband’s appointment on the Bench was not a matter for such warm congratulation after all. I saw him in close association with men not one of whom was less than fifteen years older than he, and most of whom were much more than that. He seemed to me suddenly to take on a maturity and sedateness quite out of keeping with his actual years and I dreaded to see him settled for good in the judiciary and missing all the youthful enthusiasms and exhilarating difficulties which a more general contact with the world would have given him. In other words, I began even then to fear the narrowing effects of the Bench and to prefer for him a diverse experience which would give him an all-round professional development.

He did not share this feeling in any way. His appointment on the Superior Court was to him the welcome beginning of just the career he wanted. After serving the interim of fourteen months he became a candidate for the office and was elected for a term of five years. This was the only elective office Mr. Taft ever held until he became President.

My own time and interest during that winter was largely spent on my house. We had been very particular about the plans for it and had fully intended that it should combine outward impressiveness with inward roominess and comfort. It was a frame structure, shingled all over, and with certain bay window effects which pleased me exceedingly. In fact, with our assistance, the architect had made a special effort to produce something original and, while I don’t claim that the result was a conspicuous architectural success, to my mind it was anything but a failure. And our view of the Ohio River and the surrounding country was really superb.

But I was not destined to enjoy my satisfaction with my surroundings very long. The section had been at one time a stone quarry, and the man who had levelled off the land and filled in the gulches made by the quarry operations, took as a part of his compensation two building lots which happened to be just across the street from ours. He forthwith proceeded to put up a sort of double house which looked more like a gigantic dry-goods box than anything else, and I felt that it quite robbed the neighbourhood of the “tone” which I had confidently hoped our house would give it. The double house had just one quality and that was size.

I think the owner, whose name was Jerry something, lived in one side of it, and he had a tenant in the other who hung clothes out of the front windows. But tastes in architecture differ, as we soon found out.

We were paying taxes on our house at an assessed value of $4000 and the undervaluation had been troubling my husband’s conscience for a long time, in spite of my assuring him that tax collectors ought to know their own business. Some men from the board of equalization were to call one day to make a new appraisement and I had very much hoped that my husband would not be at home. But he was; he was there to welcome them and give them every possible assistance. Without waiting for an examination of the premises, he addressed one of them, an Irishman named Ryan.

“See here, Mr. Ryan,” he said, “I understand that Jerry, my neighbour across the street, has his property assessed at $5000. Now I don’t think that’s fair. I’m assessed at only $4000 and I’m sure my house cost a good deal more than his. As a matter of fact it cost over $6000. Now I’m a Judge of the Superior Court; I get my income out of taxes and I certainly have no disposition to pay any less than my share.”

“Well, Judge, your Honour,” said Mr. Ryan, “that is a sentiment very befitting your Honour. Now I’ll just be after goin’ over and lookin’ at those houses of Jerry’s, and then I’ll come back and look at yours.”

I watched them as they went over to the other houses; then I saw them go up the street a way and down the street a way, looking us carefully over from every possible view-point. When they came in they wore a very judicial aspect and I expected to see taxes go up with one wild leap.

“Well, Judge, your Honour,” began Mr. Ryan, “I think you’re givin’ yourself unnecessary concern. We assess houses for what they’re worth and not for what they cost. While your house no doubt suits your taste, it has a peculiar architectural style that wouldn’t please very many people, and certainly it ain’t to compare with those houses of Jerry’s. There’s a modern polish about those houses that will rent, Judge, your Honour.”

My son Robert was born in this house on McMillan Street in September, 1889. In the following February an interruption occurred in our peaceful existence which was welcome at least to me. President Harrison offered the appointment of Solicitor General of the United States to Mr. Taft and he, with a few regretful glances at his beloved Bench, accepted it. I think that once again it was Major Butterworth who suggested my husband’s name to the appointing power. I was very glad because it gave Mr. Taft an opportunity for exactly the kind of work I wished him to do; work in which his own initiative and originality would be exercised and developed. I looked forward with interest, moreover, to a few years in Washington.

Mr. Taft made his first official arrival in Washington alone. My baby, Robert, was only six months old and I concluded to remain in Cincinnati until my husband could make arrangements for our comfortable reception. His description of his first day in Washington is, in the light of later events, rather amusing.

He arrived at six o’clock on a cold, gloomy February morning at the old dirty Pennsylvania station. He wandered out on the street with a heavy bag in his hand looking for a porter, but there were no porters. Then he stood for a few moments looking up at the Capitol and feeling dismally unimportant in the midst of what seemed to him to be very formidable surroundings. He wondered to himself why on earth he had come. He was sure he had made a fatal mistake in exchanging a good position and a pleasant circle at home, where everybody knew him, for a place in a strange and forbidding city where he knew practically nobody and where, he felt sure, nobody wanted to know him. He lugged his bag up to the old Ebbitt House and, after eating a lonesome breakfast, he went to the Department of Justice to be sworn in. After that ceremony was over and he had shaken hands with the Attorney General, he went up to inspect the Solicitor General’s Office, and there he met the most dismal sight of the whole dismal day. His “quarters” consisted of a single room, three flights up, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to his mental picture of what the Solicitor General’s offices would be like. The Solicitor General’s stenographer, it seemed, was a telegrapher in the chief clerk’s office and had to be sent for when his services were required. Altogether it must have been a very disheartening outlook.

As Mr. Taft sat looking over briefs and other papers, and trying to get some definite idea about his new work, a messenger brought in a card.

“Mr. Evarts, New York,” it read.

Evarts was a well-known name, of course, but it was hard for Mr. Taft to believe that the William M. Evarts, leader of the American Bar and then Senator from New York, could be calling on the Solicitor General of less than a day. He knew that Wm. M. Evarts had known his father.

Mr. Evarts entered.

“Mr. Taft,” he said, as he gave my husband’s hand a cordial grasp, “I knew your father. I was in the class of ’37 at Yale and he had graduated before I entered; but he was there as a tutor in my time and I valued his friendship very highly.”

Then the visitor came straight to the point.

“Mrs. Evarts and I are giving a dinner to-night for my former partner and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Choate. Mr. Choate is in Washington for a short time to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Now, unfortunately, one of our guests has sent word that he can’t come and I thought, perhaps, considering my long-standing friendship with your father, you might consent to waive ceremony and fill the place at our table at this short notice.”

My husband accepted the invitation with almost undue alacrity, and when his guest left started in on his new duties feeling that, after all, Washington might afford just as friendly an atmosphere as Cincinnati, once he became accustomed to it.

There is just one incident in connection with the dinner party which Mr. Taft adds to his account of that day. As he sat down to dinner the ladies on either side of him leaned hastily forward to see what was written on his place card. “The Solicitor General”—that was all. Of course neither of them knew who the new Solicitor General was and it didn’t occur to him to enlighten them until it was too late to do it gracefully. So he allowed them to go on addressing him as “Mr. Solicitor General” while he, having them at an advantage, addressed them by the names which he had surreptitiously read on their place-cards. They were Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge and Mrs. John Hay.

MRS. TAFT, WITH ROBERT AND HELEN, WHEN MR. TAFT WAS SOLICITOR GENERAL

When my husband had been in Washington two weeks I joined him and we took a small house on Dupont Circle where for two years we lived a life, sometimes amusing, sometimes quite exciting, but, on the whole, of quiet routine.

Washington society was much simpler then than it is now. Since that time a great many people of very large means have gone to Washington to live because of its unusual attractions and its innumerable advantages as a residential city. They have changed Washington, by their generous hospitality, into one of the most brilliant social centres in the world, where large dinner parties, balls, receptions, musicals and other entertainments are of daily and nightly occurrence throughout the season. The very character of the streets has changed. The small, red brick houses, closely grouped together and neighbouring, even in fashionable quarters, on negro shacks and cheap tenements, are being everywhere replaced by marble and granite residences of great beauty and luxury.

In 1890 Society in Washington still consisted, chiefly, of the “best families” of the old city, the Diplomatic Corps and the highest among the government officials. A dinner party of twelve was still considered large, and only a few people had weekly evenings At Home. There were occasional big receptions, but for nobody was society the mad rush that it is to-day. We ourselves lived very simply even for those simple days.

My daughter Helen was born in 1891, so for the last year in Washington I had two small babies to care for. In order that he might get a little much needed exercise Mr. Taft bought a horse and, fortunately, for us, he secured a most adaptable creature. He was supposed to be a riding horse, but he didn’t mind making himself generally useful. The Attorney General lent us a carriage which he was not then using—a surrey, I think it was called—and we hitched him to that; and the whole Taft family drove out of a Sunday afternoon to the Old Soldiers’ Home, which was the fashionable drive in those days, or up the aqueduct road to Cabin John’s bridge. My sister Maria who visited us used always to speak of our steed as “G’up,” a name suggested by Bobby’s interpretation of his father’s invocations to the good-natured and leisurely beast. Poor old “G’up”! I suppose with his “horse sense” he finally realised that he was leading such a double life as no respectable horse should lead; he gave up and died before we left Washington.

The Justices of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General, the men with whom Mr. Taft came most in contract, were, with their wives, very kind and attentive to us, including us in many of their delightful parties. Chief Justice Fuller was then the head of the court and I have the pleasantest memories of his and Mrs. Fuller’s hospitality. Justice Grey had married a Miss Matthews, a daughter of Mr. Justice Matthews. I had known Mrs. Grey in Cincinnati before her marriage.

During the course of my first weeks in Washington Mr. Taft had taken special pains to impress on me many times the necessity for my calling on Mrs. Grey without any delay. Much importance attached to the formality of first calls and I was the newest of newcomers who had to call on the wives of all my husband’s official superiors before they noticed me. Still, it was a full month before I had time to go to Mrs. Grey’s and I was considerably worried about it. But when, finally, I did go and had been most kindly received, I explained at once that the settling of myself and my small baby in a new house had, until then, kept me too busy for any calls. Mrs. Grey hastened to assure me that she understood my position perfectly and had not thought of blaming me.

“Indeed, my dear,” she said, “I knew that you had a small baby in the house and that you must be kept constantly occupied. As a matter of fact I should have waived ceremony and come myself to welcome you to Washington except for one thing which I could not very well overlook, and that is—that Mr. Taft has not yet called on Mr. Justice Grey.”

I think I have rarely seen anything more satisfactorily amusing than the expression on my husband’s face when I told him this.

But, in spite of the friendliness of the Justices and others, we really went out very little. On one occasion when my sister Maria had been visiting us for several weeks we went for a Sunday night supper to the house of a lady whom Maria had known very well in Cincinnati. She was living that winter in Washington and seemed to be rather well pleased with her social success. She talked loftily throughout supper, and during a good part of the evening, about the dinner parties she had attended and the grand people she had met. Then just as we were about to start home she turned to my sister and said:

“And have you been much entertained, my dear Maria?”

“Oh, I’ve been enjoying myself tremendously,” was the answer.

“Well, with whom have you dined, dear?” persisted our hostess.

“Why, we’ve dined with the Andersons, with the German Ambassador, with the Chief Justice, and with the Maurys, and with the French Ambassador,—and with, oh, a number of other people.”

Our hostess was visibly impressed.

“Why! you really have been very gay, haven’t you, dear!” she exclaimed.

When we got into our cab to go home Maria turned to my husband and said:

“I had my eye on you all the time I was talking, Will Taft. I was perfectly certain that your terrible sense of fact would overcome you and that you would blurt out that I dined with all those people on the same evening at the same dinner party!”

President Harrison, in March, 1892, appointed my husband on the Federal Circuit Bench, so once more I saw him a colleague of men almost twice his age and, I feared, fixed in a groove for the rest of his life. However, he was greatly pleased and very proud to hold such a dignified and responsible position at the age of thirty-four. I think he enjoyed the work of the following eight years more than any he has ever undertaken.

We moved back to Cincinnati. Mr. Taft’s circuit included parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Michigan—reached in fact, from Lookout Mountain to Marquette, and he was much away from home. My own life during those years in Cincinnati was very busy, for, in addition to my occupation with family and friends, I became interested in a number of civic movements.

My principal work was the organisation and management of the Cincinnati Orchestra Association. I found, at last, a practical method for expressing and making use of my love and knowledge of music.

We had not had a good symphony orchestra in the city since Theodore Thomas left, but with our music-loving population it was only necessary that somebody should take the initiative and arouse definite enthusiasm and keep it going, in order to establish and maintain such an institution. There were many public-spirited citizens, some of them true music-loving Germans, and I saw no reason why I should not get strong popular support for my project. I was not disappointed. From the first the response was general and generous and we did not have much difficulty in raising the necessary funds for financing the orchestra, although in addition to our box-office receipts, we had to secure $30,000 a year for six consecutive years. It could not have been done had it not been for such liberal friends as my brother and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Charles P. Taft, Mr. Charles Krippendorf, Mr. M. E. Ingalls, Mr. and Mrs. L. A. Ault, Mrs. Charles Fleishmann, Mr. J. G. Schmidlapp and others.

For the first year we had three different directors, Mr. Seidl, Mr. Schradick and Mr. Van der Stücken, who came to Cincinnati and led two concerts each. Then we secured Mr. Van der Stücken as a permanent leader and he remained with the orchestra ten years.

I think I regretted the Cincinnati Orchestra Association more than anything else when we left for the Philippines, but I left it in good and well-trained hands. Mrs. C. R. Holmes, who succeeded me as President of the Association, had taken a great part in the original work of organisation and management, as had my sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles P. Taft, and others. Through their efforts the orchestra has been enlarged and improved and it is still a source of great pride and satisfaction to the city of Cincinnati. Mrs. Charles Taft is now the President and through her interest, activity and generosity it has been enabled to grow in excellence.

Except for the orchestra, our life was tranquil; quite too settled, I thought, and filled with the usual homely incidents connected with housekeeping and the entertaining development of small children. My youngest child, Charles, was born in 1897, and my family was thus complete.

I come now to the years which we gave to the Philippine Islands and I must say that I wonder yet how our lot happened to be so cast.

There had never been any unusual interest in our family as to the results of the Spanish-American War. Like most patriotic Americans we had been greatly excited while the war was in progress and had discussed its every phase and event with a warmth of approval, or disapproval, as the case might be, but it did not touch us directly, except as citizens, any more than it touched the vast majority of the people of the United States. And yet, it came to mean more to us personally, than any other event in our times. The whole course of my husband’s career was destined to be changed and influenced by its results.

Mr. Taft was strongly opposed to taking the Philippines. He was not an anti-imperialist in the sense that he believed the Constitution required us to keep the boundaries of the United States within their continental limits, but he thought the Antipodes rather a far stretch for the controlling hand, and he thought the taking of the Philippines would only add to our problems and responsibilities without increasing, in any way, the effectiveness and usefulness of our government.

Oddly enough, he had expressed himself to that effect when he happened, during the Spanish War, to be dining with a number of judges including Justice Harlan who, although later an anti-imperialist, was at that time strongly upholding the policy of taking over Spanish territory in both oceans.

Mr. Taft knew just about as much about the Filipino people as the average American knew in those days. What he definitely knew was that they had been for more than three centuries under Spanish dominion and that they now wanted political independence. He was heartily in favour of giving it to them.

It was one day in January, 1900, that he came home greatly excited and placed before me a telegram.

“What do you suppose that means?” said he.

“I would like to see you in Washington on important business within the next few days. On Thursday if possible,” it read. And it was signed—William McKinley.

We didn’t know and we couldn’t think what possible business the President could have with him. I began to conjure up visions of Supreme Court appointments; though I knew well enough that Supreme Court appointments were not tendered in that fashion and besides there was no vacancy.

Mr. Taft lost no time in responding to the President’s summons and I awaited his return with as much patience as I could muster. In three days he came home with an expression so grave that I thought he must be facing impeachment. But when he broke his news to me it gave me nothing but pleasure.

“The President wants me to go to the Philippine Islands,” he said, in a tone he might have used in saying: “The President wants me to go out and jump off the court house dome.” “Want to go?” he added.

“Yes, of course,” I answered without a moment’s hesitation. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew instantly that I didn’t want to miss a big and novel experience. I have never shrunk before any obstacles when I had an opportunity to see a new country and I must say I have never regretted any adventure.

“The President and Mr. Root want to establish a civil government in the Philippines,” said Mr. Taft, “and they want me to go out at the head of a commission to do it.” It was only after I had accepted the invitation to go ten thousand miles away that I asked for an explanation.

In answer to the President’s proposal, Mr. Taft said that he didn’t approve of the acquisition of the Philippines in the first place, and that in the second place he knew nothing about colonial government and had had really no experience in executive work of any kind. But Mr. McKinley did not accept these objections as final. He called in Mr. Root, who was then Secretary of War, and who would be Mr. Taft’s chief in the proposed mission to the Philippines, and together they presented the case so strongly that my husband could not help but waver in his decision. Neither Mr. McKinley nor Mr. Root had rejoiced in the taking over of the Philippines for that matter, but that was beside the question; the Philippines were taken, and it behooved the United States to govern them until such time as their people had learned the difficult art of governing themselves.

Mr. Root said:

“The work to be done in the Philippines is as great as the work Livingston had to do in Louisiana. It is an opportunity for you to do your country a great service and achieve for yourself a reputation for the finest kind of constructive work. You have had a very fortunate career. While you are only slightly over forty you have had eight years on the Federal Bench, three years on the State Bench and two years as Solicitor General. These places you have filled well, but they have been places which involved no sacrifice on your part. Here is a field which calls for risk and sacrifice. Your country is confronted with one of the greatest problems in its history, and you, Judge Taft, are asked to take immediate charge of the solution of that problem 7,000 miles away from home. You are at the parting of the ways. Will you take the easier course, the way of least resistance, with the thought that you had an opportunity to serve your country and declined it because of its possible sacrifice, or will you take the more courageous course and, risking much, achieve much? This work in the Philippines will give you an invaluable experience in building up a government and in the study of laws needed to govern a people, and such experience cannot but make you a broader, better judge should you be called upon again to serve your country in that capacity.”

My husband promised to consult with me and with his brother Charles and give his answer in a few days. He didn’t know whether or not I would be willing to go, but that was a question soon settled.

His resignation of his judgeship was the greatest difficulty. The President told him he did not think it would be at all necessary for him to resign since the work in the Philippines would take only about six months—nine months at the longest—and that he could absent himself from his duties for that length of time, and for such a purpose, without fear of any kind of unfortunate consequences. Mr. Taft’s investigation and study of the situation immediately convinced him that Mr. McKinley was wrong in his expectation that the work could be done so quickly. Nor did Mr. Root have any such idea. Even with the meagre information which was then available, my husband at once saw that it would be years before the Philippine problem would begin to solve itself. So he resigned from the Bench; the hardest thing he ever did.

After sending in his acceptance he went immediately to Washington to discuss with Mr. McKinley and Mr. Root the whole situation and, especially, the names of four other men who were to be chosen to serve with him on the Commission. He had met Mr. Worcester, a member of the first Commission, and had got from him a great deal of valuable data. If Professor Shurman, the chairman of the first Commission, had become a member of the second, he probably would have been at its head, but he did not, and this position fell to Mr. Taft. He was thereafter known as President of the Commission, until civil government was organised in the Philippines and he became governor.

After he had gone to Washington I began at once to make hasty, and I may say, happy preparations for my adventure into a new sphere. That it was alluring to me I did not deny to anybody. I had no premonition as to what it would lead to; I did not see beyond the present attraction of a new and wholly unexplored field of work which would involve travel in far away and very interesting countries. I read with engrossing interest everything I could find on the subject of the Philippines, but a delightful vagueness with regard to them, a vagueness which was general in the United States at that time, and has not, even yet, been entirely dispelled, continued in my mind. There were few books to be found, and those I did find were not specially illuminating.

I gave up my house in Cincinnati and stored my belongings, packing for shipment to the Orient only such things as I thought would be absolutely necessary. We were to leave almost immediately and I had very little time in which to do a great many things. Mr. Taft came back to Cincinnati for a short period and we entered upon a busy season of good-bye hospitality. Everybody we knew, and we knew nearly everybody, wanted to give us a farewell dinner or entertainment of some sort. Mr. Taft, especially, was fêted in a way which proved to him how much more widely he was valued in his native town than he had ever realised. In the opinions of people then we were going, sure enough, to the ends of the earth, and many of our friends were as mournful about it as if they had private foreknowledge that it was to be a fatal adventure.

When the banquets and dinners and luncheons and receptions and teas had all been given; when the speeches had all been made, and the good-byes had all been said, Mr. Taft hastened off to Washington once more to meet his colleagues and make final arrangements, and I was not to see him again until we met in San Francisco a week before the date set for sailing.

I asked my sister Maria to go with me for the first year, and she accepted with delight. So, one morning in early April, with our world waving at us from the platform of the station, we started south to join the Southern Pacific railroad at New Orleans and to make our way from there to Los Angeles and so to San Francisco.

CHARLIE TAFT WHEN HE WENT TO THE PHILIPPINES

I had with me my three children, Robert, Helen and Charlie. Robert was ten years old, Helen eight, while Charlie, my baby, was just a little over two. It did not occur to me that it was a task to take them on such a long journey, or that they would be exposed to any danger through the experience. They were normal, healthy and very self-reliant little people and I made preparations for their going without giving the matter a moment’s unhappy consideration. But I was to receive a few shocks in this connection later on. One of these came when I learned that some members of the party had left their children at home for fear of the Philippine climate. Then one day, at the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco, I was sitting on guard over Charlie as he played up and down a wide corridor, and reading a book at intervals, when along came an odd-looking elderly gentleman who stopped to regard the boy with a smile of the kindliest amusement. Charlie was an attractive child. Even I couldn’t help but see that, and I was used to having people stop to watch him. He had big, dark eyes, soft, brown curls, very deep dimples, and a charming smile that was always in evidence. The elderly gentleman stood watching him for some little time, his face growing gradually very grave, and I wondered what he was thinking about. He didn’t keep me wondering long. After a few moments he stepped deliberately up to me and said:

“Madam, I understand you are going to the Philippine Islands. Now I want to know if you are going to take that great, big, beautiful boy out to that pest-ridden hole and expose him to certain destruction.”

I grabbed my great, big, beautiful boy and rushed off to my room, and it was a relief eventually to learn that the awful Philippine climate, at least so far as children were concerned, existed, largely, in people’s minds.

We found intense interest in our mission in California and San Francisco. If there were any anti-imperialists there, they successfully concealed themselves. The East was uncomfortably crowded with them in those days, but the evident interest and profit that the West coast would derive from a large Philippine trade may have been responsible for the favourable attitude of the Californians. However, we must not impeach their patriotism, and we ought to attribute some of their enthusiasm in reference to the Philippines, and our assuming control over them, to the natural enterprise of a people who had themselves gone so far in a land of development and hope.

Everything that could be done to make smooth the path of the new Commission was done. At their own request the powers of the Commissioners were carefully defined so that complications with the military government then in force in the islands, might be avoided. They were given equal rank with ministers plenipotentiary in the matter of naval courtesies and precedence; and Mr. Root drafted a letter of instructions, which the President signed, outlining their duties in such precise and correct detail that it was afterward adopted and ratified in its entirety in the act of Congress by which the Philippine government was established.

So—I believed we were going to have “smooth sailing” in every sense, when we started on the long voyage with which began this interesting experience.

CHAPTER III
TO THE PHILIPPINES

The United States Army Transport Hancock had been assigned to the Commission for the trip from San Francisco to Manila and it was at noon on a pleasant day in mid-April—the seventeenth—that she pulled away from the crowded dock and headed straight for the Golden Gate and the long path across the Pacific that leads to the other side of the world. There were forty-five people in our party and, although most of us had met for the first time in San Francisco, we soon became well acquainted, as people do on shipboard, and proceeded at once to prove ourselves to be a most harmonious company.

The Hancock was the old Arizona, a one-time greyhound of the Atlantic, which the Government had purchased and remodelled for service as an army transport. A considerable fleet of such vessels plied the Pacific at that time, carrying large consignments of troops to and from the Philippines and, though there are not so many now, I still read with interest of the comings and goings of ships whose old, friendly sounding names became so familiar to us in the course of our residence in the East. The Grant, the Sherman, the Sheridan, the Thomas, and others, all named for great American generals, awaken memories of interesting days. The Hancock was later given up by the Army and turned over to the Navy on account of her heavy consumption of coal. She is now used as a recruiting ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

We found her very comfortable. There were few people aboard besides the members of our party, and, as she was equipped to carry the officers and men of an entire regiment, we found ourselves commodiously quartered. Moreover, the commissary of the transport service had received instructions to give us excellent fare; this, I believe, through the thoughtful kindness of Mr. McKinley himself.

Mr. McKinley never failed to take a personal interest in the everyday welfare of all those in his administration who came under his own observation and we were made to feel this throughout our experience on the Philippine Commission, while he lived. On every appropriate occasion we were certain to receive from him some kindly compliment, a cablegram or other communication, and it made everybody who came within range of his influence anxious to serve him well and to make the work which was being done satisfactory and pleasing to him. I owe to our connection with President McKinley’s administration some of my happiest recollections.

The men who made up the second Philippine Commission were Mr. Taft, General Luke E. Wright of Memphis, Tennessee; Judge Henry C. Ide of Vermont, Professor Dean C. Worcester of the University of Michigan, and Professor Bernard Moses of the University of California. A short introduction of my husband’s colleagues and the members of their families who went with them to the Philippines will be necessary at this point, because I was destined to be constantly associated with them during four of the most interesting years of my life. Our co-operation, social and governmental, was based upon a common purpose, and our attachment to this purpose, as well as the bonds of friendship which united us, were greatly strengthened by the opposition we had to meet for some months after we reached Manila, not only from the Filipinos, but also from the military government which the Commission was sent out gradually to replace.

The men of the Commission, coming, as they did, from different parts of the United States, were widely contrasted, no less in associations than in their varied accents and family traditions.

General Wright was, and is, one of the ablest lawyers in Tennessee, and enjoyed, at the time of his appointment on the Commission, the finest practice in Memphis. He is a Democrat; and old enough to have been a lieutenant in the Civil War on the Confederate side. But perhaps his finest laurels for bravery and devotion to duty were won at the time when he exerted himself to save Memphis in the days when she was in the grip of a terrible epidemic of yellow fever. I don’t know the exact year, but the epidemic was so out of control that all who could, left the city, while General Wright remained to organise such resistance as could be made to the spread of the dread disease.

Mrs. Wright was a daughter of the famous Admiral Semmes of the Confederate Navy and for some time after the war she travelled with her father in Mexico and abroad, thereby acquiring at an early age a very cosmopolitan outlook. Admiral Semmes was a great linguist and Mrs. Wright inherited his gift. She had learned to speak Spanish in her girlhood, so when she arrived in Manila she had only to renew her knowledge of the language. General and Mrs. Wright had with them their daughter Katrina, who was then about fourteen years old, but their two sons, one a naval officer, did not join them in the Philippines until later.

General Wright had, on the whole, the most delightful social qualities of anybody on the Commission. He had a keen sense of humour and could recount a great number of interesting personal experiences with a manner and wit which made him, always, a delightful companion. He was a devotee of pinochle and he instructed the entire party in the game until it was played from one end of the ship to the other. He was slow to anger, very deliberate and kindly in his judgments, and offered at times a decided contrast to his wife who was a little more hasty and not infrequently founded judgments on what he would jocosely criticise as “a woman’s reason.”

Judge Ide was born and bred a Vermonter and had many of the rugged characteristics of the Green Mountain State, not the least among which is a certain indefinable, but peculiarly New England caution. In addition to a large and active law practice in both New Hampshire and Vermont, he had banking connections through which he had gained a better knowledge of business and finance than is possessed by the average lawyer. Moreover, a long term as Chief Justice of Samoa had given him diplomatic experience and a knowledge of the Polynesian races which were to serve him well in his work in the Philippines. As Chief Justice he exercised diplomatic and consular as well as judicial functions, and his position brought him in close relations with the English and German officials of the joint protectorate of the Samoan islands and in constant social contact with the naval officers of many countries whose ships very frequently called at Apia. He was a widower with two young daughters.

These daughters, Anne and Marjorie, or “the two Ide girls” as they were then popularly known, displayed no sign of Puritan ancestry or upbringing. They were just remarkably beautiful and altogether charming and delightful. A large part of their girlhood had been spent in Samoa; they were the product of an intermittent, but very picturesque education, and there was ingrained in them some of that happy-go-lucky attitude toward life, and that freedom from useless convention which the Occidental is not unlikely to acquire in the Orient.

These girls had, in Samoa, been great friends of Robert Louis Stevenson. Anne, the elder, was the especial favourite of the beauty-loving invalid and he willed to her his birthday, as can be learned from his Samoan letters. She was born near Christmas time and had never known what it was to have her birthday celebrated, a great deprivation in childhood. But she now celebrates as her own the birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson and it is, I believe, her most cherished possession.

Marjorie, whose career, ever since our first trip together, I have followed with the greatest affection and interest, had even more of the care-free attitude than Anne. She used to convulse us with cruelly funny accounts of her adventures with admirers, of whom there were many, and with descriptions of some of the strange acquaintances she made during her travels with her father.

Among the passengers on the Hancock was Dr. Kneedler, an army surgeon, with his wife and two little girls. These little girls were exceedingly bright and inquisitive. Young ladies and gentlemen had particular and irresistible attractions for them and the Ide young ladies kept them very much occupied. The Ide young ladies didn’t encourage their attentions and this fact engendered their hostility. They therefore referred to the Misses Ide as “them there Ides.” With their delightful sense of humour the Ides, of course, rejoiced in the designation and in all the thirteen years since then they have never met Mr. Taft or me without presenting themselves as “them there Ides.”

The Misses Ide were destined to be the unrivalled belles of Manila society for six years and then to move on to broader social spheres. Anne was married to Mr. Bourke Cochran shortly after her father left the Philippines, but Marjorie continued to be her father’s companion for several years, going with him to Madrid when he was appointed Minister to Spain and presiding over the American Legation there until she married Mr. Shane Leslie and went to London to live.

General Wright, Judge Ide and Mr. Taft were the lawyers on the Commission and it was felt that their familiarity with law and governmental matters greatly enhanced the strength and preparedness of the Commission for the work they had to do.

Mr. Worcester was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. He too was a Vermonter, with quite as much fortiter in re, but with somewhat less of the suaviter in modo than Judge Ide inherently had, or had acquired in his Samoan experience.

Mr. Worcester was the only member of the party who had ever been to the Philippines before. I think he had been there twice with scientific expeditions before the Battle of Manila Bay had thrust the guardianship of the Filipinos upon our country, and in the course of his trips, with his fluency in Spanish as it is spoken in the Philippines, he had acquired a very intimate knowledge of the people and their customs, as well as of the flora and fauna of the islands. He had written a book on the Philippines which came out at a most fortunate time, just when Dewey’s victory had turned the eyes of the country upon that never-before-thought-of corner of the world. This book led to his appointment on the first Commission and his useful, loyal, courageous and effective labours with that body led Mr. McKinley to appoint him on the second.

He is a large, forceful man with rather abrupt manners and very decided opinions and perhaps no greater contrast could be imagined than exists between him and Mrs. Worcester, who, in outward seeming, is the frailest kind of little woman, with a sweet face and engagingly gentle manners which suggest timidity. Mrs. Worcester has proved herself to possess the frailty of flexible steel. At that time we were quite concerned about her, I remember, thinking she would not be able to endure the Philippine climate even for a short period. But she has lived there from that day to this. She has been with her husband through many experiences from which the strongest woman would shrink, toiling with him over hundreds of miles of mountain and jungle trail on his frequent expeditions into the countries of the wild tribes and meeting every difficulty without comment. She is in excellent health and is a living refutation of the familiar exaggerations as to the effect of the climate. They had with them two little white haired children, one of them quite delicate, who have grown up in the Philippines strong and healthy and have received most of their education in the schools established there under American government.

The last member of the Commission was Professor Bernard Moses of the political and historical department of the University of California. He was a man of profound learning, a Connecticut Yankee, combining a very excellent knowledge of business with his unusual qualifications as an historian, economist and student of politics. He was especially familiar with all Spanish-American countries, had travelled extensively in the South American republics and had written a learned book on the constitution of Colombia. My husband always says that he thinks Mr. McKinley exercised the wisest discretion in the selection of all the members of this Commission since they possessed, among them, qualifications for every line of work in practical government and original research.

Mrs. Moses, a graduate from the University of California, was a very attractive woman. She had a gift for vivid description and for seeing the funny side of every situation. Her book, “Unofficial Letters of an Official’s Wife,” gives an interesting and accurate picture of social life in the early days of military rule, which are known in Manila history as “the days of the Empire” and of that period when American civil government was in the process of organisation. Her wit sometimes had a suggestion of the caustic in it, but she never failed to contribute her quota to the day’s amusement.

There were many other interesting members of the party, including Mr. Arthur Fergusson, the Spanish secretary, and Mrs. Fergusson, Mr. Frank A. Branagan, the disbursing officer, and Mrs. Branagan, and several private secretaries with their families.

The voyage from San Francisco to Honolulu was quite perfect. As we sailed toward the tropics the weather gradually grew warmer and the sheltered decks became the most attractive part of the ship. The promenade deck of the Hancock reaches from bow to stern. I believe there is a regular term to describe such ship construction,—“decked over all” is it?—but to me it was just a very long deck which served unusually well for exercise. The Commission held regular business sessions in a cabin which had been fitted up for the purpose, but when work was over they would start on a long march around and around the deck, covering many miles each day. My husband was especially industrious and walked one man after another “off his feet” until, finally, he was obliged to finish his long tramp alone. He set himself the task of so many miles a day, so many times around the deck being a mile, and to keep count of laps requires some concentration. His quiet persistence in this kind of exercise was calculated to make the lazy onlooker intensely nervous, and when I had done my modest little turn I was always glad to indulge in a sort of counter-concentration at a whist table, or at General Wright’s ever constant pinochle.

Altogether the days passed very pleasantly and we were a very merry and friendly party by the time we reached Honolulu.

At Honolulu I got my first glimpse of real tropics, and I was enchanted. It was a glorious sensation for me that April morning when I saw these mid-Pacific islands, for the first time, rise before me out of a white-capped sea; clear-cut in an atmosphere which seems never to be blurred by mist.

American energy, ambition and initiative have wrought great material changes in the islands and these, which were even then important, were brought to our admiring attention later on. I shall always think of Hawaii,—of the island of Oahu, rather,—as it appeared to me then when our ship steamed past Diamond Head, skirted the high breakers of Waikiki and made its way up through the bright waters of the bay into the harbour of Honolulu. Honolulu is a little, modern city lying, all in sight, against the green of a narrow, gently-sloping, peak-encircled valley.

The Punchbowl, a spent and emptied volcano, outlined in perfect form against the higher hills behind it, plainly tells the story of the spectacular construction of the islands and makes it almost possible to visualise their sudden rise from the sea. They are not very old, according to scientific measurements of time, but they are old enough, at any rate, to have clothed themselves in the most brilliant luxuriance, which is the first thing to impress the traveller as his ship sails into the harbour.

The brilliance from the ship’s deck is the brilliance of every imaginable shade of green, massed against the towering, pointed hills and picked into contrasts of high-light and shadow by a sun and atmosphere peculiar to the tropics. Once ashore, the green foliage becomes the background for a wealth of blooming flowers, flowers everywhere, of unnumbered different varieties, with the flaming hibiscus in every garden, striking the high note of colour. Until we left Honolulu laden with “leis”—long festoons of flower petals which are thrown upon the shoulders of departing friends and visitors—there were always flowers.

And with the flowers and the foliage and the tall palm trees and the warm tropic sunlight, there is music, the music of the native which greets one in welcome at the dock and contributes constantly to the spirit of festivity until the departing ship gets too far from shore to catch the strains of the farewell song “Aloha” whose closing words: “Until we meet, until we meet again,” linger long in the mind of the grateful recipient of Hawaiian hospitality.

The first thing we were to learn when our ship came up into the harbour was that the bubonic plague had been epidemic in Honolulu for a long time. It was our first encounter with this terror of the East. There had been seventy-one cases in all, and sixty-one deaths. Six Europeans had contracted the disease and of these four had died. When we dropped anchor we were at once boarded by the local health officer, Dr. Carmichael of the Marine Hospital Service, who was accompanied by United States Minister Sewell and Consul General Hayward. They wanted us to land, of course, and we were very anxious to do so, but as the quarantine was not yet raised they could not answer for the attitude of the Japanese health officers when we got to Yokohama. Our going ashore might result in a long detention in quarantine for ourselves and, aside from the discomfort of this, we could not afford the delay. There was no particular danger for us personally, since no new cases had been reported for twenty-four days, but it was all a question of being able to land later in Japan. It was really too much of a disappointment; there was not a dissenting voice on that score, and Honolulu kept getting more and more attractive as the possibility dawned on us that we might not see it at all. But it was arranged. We sent for the Japanese vice-Consul and explained matters to him and he finally agreed to hold himself responsible for our breaking the quarantine, in so far as it concerned Japan, if we would keep our ship out in the stream instead of tying up at the dock, and permit no member of the crew to go ashore during our stay. This we readily agreed to do and made our plans accordingly. We, too, were to live on board the Hancock, but there were any number of harbour launches put at our disposal.

We were received by the Americans in Honolulu with the utmost cordiality and immediately found ourselves sharing the exhilarating suspense with which the people were then awaiting the passage of the bill in Congress which was to make the Hawaiian Islands a part of the United States. The first thing the Commission did was to call on President Dole, of the provisional republican government, and with him they met the Ministers of the Treasury and the Interior, Mr. Damon and Mr. Young. Indeed, we met all the people who had the affairs of the islands in hand and were most delightfully entertained by them. We found them of one mind, just anxiously waiting to be annexed to the United States. The men, who realised the importance of our mission to the Philippines, were eager to foregather with the Commission and discuss with them, long and earnestly, this broad American venture and its possible effect upon the future prosperity of the Hawaiian Islands, but in so far as I was concerned, nothing in the way of state problems was allowed to intrude itself upon their purely social hospitality. There were dinners and luncheons and teas and receptions, and, in the intervals, sightseeing.

There are a number of entertaining things to do in Honolulu and while I do not wish to make this, in any way, a book of travel, I must record my impressions of the world as they came to me.

The Hawaiian Islands have a background of romantic history which makes the museums, the public buildings and even the cemeteries of the capital extremely interesting. Besides all of which there are some wonderful views which every one must see.

The trip to Nuuani Pali is the first thing to be undertaken in Honolulu, perhaps because it is the greatest thing on the island of Oahu. We didn’t know what the Pali was,—had no idea. It was just the place to go, so we went,—the very first day. We drove up the valley over a perfect road which wound in and out past beautiful, palm-shaded country homes, and along the bank of a noisy, crystal-clear little mountain stream, until we came to a point which looked to me like the “jumping off place.” And it is; the “jumping off place” is the Pali. The road turns sharp around the solid rock wall of the cliff and winds its way on down into the valley on the other side, but it is a distinct surprise to find that it doesn’t end right there. The Pali is the Pass of the Winds; the meeting place of all the young hurricanes of the Pacific. They say the winds in the Pali are never still. We were flattened out against the wall of the cliff, our hats were torn from our heads and we had to hold onto our coats for dear life, but before us lay one of the grandest spectacles in the whole world. Coral-tinted, purple, rose and bright blue sea; beetling, pointed, terrible cliffs, and a broad, green plain running down to a surf-washed ribbon of beach; a panorama as wide as the compass of vision. I have been back since then thinking that, on first sight, I might have overestimated the grandeur of the Pali. But I didn’t. It is one of the world’s great views. And it has its touch of savage history too. It was up these hills and over the cliffs of the Pali that King Kamehameha drove to certain death the offending hordes in arms against his sovereignty. There was no escape for them. Once in this pass they had either to go over the precipice or back against the spears of the enemy. This being history, and not myth, it adds much to the thrill of the spectacle.

After a visit to the indescribable “aquarium of the painted fishes”—painted, I suppose, by the bright sun-rays in the coral shallows of the tropic seas—we went, as guests of Mr. Carter, a prominent member of the American colony, who afterward became governor of the islands, out to Waikiki Beach for surf-bathing,—or, surf-riding, as it is more aptly called.

Surf-riding at Waikiki Beach is a great game. In the first place the surf there doesn’t look as if any human being would dare venture into it; but when you see a beautiful, slim, brown native, naked save for short swimming trunks, come gliding down a high white breaker, poised like a Mercury, erect on a single narrow plank—it looks delightfully exhilarating. It took me some time to make up my mind, but after sufficient persuasion I finally decided to risk my life with the others. Dressed in bathing suits, we were taken out beyond the line of breakers in long canoes with outriggers and, with a native at prow and stern armed with broad paddles to guide the craft, we rode in on the crest of the waves. Even this modified version of the natives’ foolhardy performance is dangerous enough. There is every likelihood of an upset and not any of us could be said to swim expertly, so there was great excitement when one member of the party after another was plunged, out of depth, into the foaming and seething water. Two members of our party, indeed, had a narrow escape, though we didn’t know it at the time. General Wright and Judge Ide were capsized in a particularly vicious breaker and Judge Ide at once began to make frantic efforts to attract attention and secure aid, but in the confusion his signs of distress were taken for indications of vast enjoyment and he would have been left to drown if he hadn’t been washed ashore by the force of the surf. General Wright, though much the better swimmer, had no less difficulty, and they were both quite white and shaken when they crawled up on the beach.

We stayed four days in this “Paradise of the Pacific,” during which we made many interesting trips, were introduced to many strange Hawaiian customs and were regaled with many feasts, not always, I may say, particularly appetizing. I have had in my time, for politeness’ sake, to eat various queer messes in all sorts of odd corners of the earth, but to me “poi” will always be “poi”—in a class by itself. It is the true Hawaiian dish and is offered to guests by the natives in the same spirit of compliment with which we offer to “break bread” with our friends. It is the custom for Americans residing in Honolulu to introduce visitors to this dish, and the native viands which go with it, in entertainments which are called “poi dinners,” and we were treated to as many of these as our time would permit. “Poi” bears an unpleasant outward resemblance to cockroach paste and, try as I would, I was never able to cultivate a taste for it. But foreigners do learn to like it, for I found Americans in Honolulu eating it with the greatest relish and dipping it up with their fingers in true Hawaiian style.

On our last evening in Honolulu, after a morning of sightseeing, a luncheon, an hour in the buffeting surf, and a large tea-party, we were given a particularly elaborate “poi dinner” where we all sat on the floor and at which all the guests appeared in native costume with “leis” around their necks and in their hair. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Mott Smith, sent the Hawaiian Band, whose leader came out from old Emperor William to King Kalakaua, and they serenaded us with most wonderful Hawaiian music, interspersed, for their own pride’s sake, with well rendered selections from the finest operas. The girls came in flaming bright “Mother-Hubbard” dresses, crowned and covered with “leis,” to dance for us the curious folk-lore dances of the old-time. It was a delightful whirl of music and lights and colour—added to fish and poi and a cramped position—but I was tired enough not to be sorry when the time came for the singing of “Aloha Oe” and our departure for the ship which lay out in the harbour ready to up-anchor at daybreak and start on its way to Japan.

On the evening of the tenth of May we reached the estuary near the head of which is Yokohama and further on is Tokyo. For at least two hours we steamed past a low-lying shore line before we came in sight of the sweep of steep cliff to the southward which forms the great outer harbour.

NIKKO. AN ANCIENT CRYPTOMERIA AVENUE AND A GLIMPSE OF THE FAMOUS TEMPLES

There was just one thing that we could really look at; one insistent, dominant point in the landscape which caught us and held us fascinated,—Fujiyama. I had seen Fujiyama on screens and fans and porcelains all my life, but I had no conception of it. For one half hour this “Queen of Mountains”—rightly called—rising thirteen thousand feet out of sheer sea-level, perfect in form, snow-capped, majestic, blazed for us against the western sky. Then a cloud curtain fell,—and the sun went down.

As we steamed up close to the breakwater in the grey light of late evening we could see nothing but the dark outlines of many ships and a long row of substantial looking buildings, under high arc lights, stretching along a wide, water-front street which I was afterward to know as The Bund.

We wanted to go ashore, but it was not possible. We had to lie outside the breakwater and wait for the doctors to come aboard. “Wait for the doctors to come aboard;” how familiar that proceeding becomes to the traveller among the ports of the East, and especially, of Japan. You arrive at Yokohama and are examined there; you go just around the bend of the coast line and arrive at Kobe and you are examined there; you go on through the Inland Sea to Nagasaki and again you are examined. Wherever you arrive in this land of much caution you must “wait for the doctors to come aboard.”

But our doctors didn’t keep us waiting long. About eight o’clock half a dozen of them, important little men with much gold lace, came smiling up the gangway. We worried, rather, about the plague we had braved,—and we did hope none of our crew would develop symptoms,—but, having faith in the Japanese Vice-Consul in Honolulu, we hoped for special leniency. We were not disappointed. They examined the ship’s company with great care, but our examination was a mere formality, a sort of apologetic enumeration as a matter of fact, and after giving us a clean bill of health the doctors bowed themselves most courteously away. But we had a narrow escape. Charlie’s nurse developed a suspicious sore throat the very next afternoon and gave us many days of anxiety for the baby and the other children. And, as I shall make plain further on, our anxiety was not without cause.

In reading over my own and my husband’s letters, written on that trip to various members of the family, I find that Charlie was very much in evidence at all times. I suppose he was spoiled because, certainly, everybody took a hand in his misguidance, but the spoiling process at least kept him in high good humour, unless it happened to take the form of secret indulgence in prohibited sweets; then I had to meet the consequences. I find my husband writing to his brother Charles: “Charlie continues to be as full of spirits and as determined to have his own way as ever. We call him ‘the tornado’; he creates such a sensation when he lands in the midst of the children on board the ship. He is very badly in need of discipline and I long for the time to come when he will be better able to appreciate it. Maria has become quite as much a slave to him as Nellie and you may tell his Aunt Annie that I am still the only hope the boy has of moral training.” This sounds so much like the average father that I thought I ought to quote it.

When Bessie, Charlie’s nurse, was taken away from him and quarantined we got for him a Japanese “amah” who filled him at first with indignation, not unmixed with fear. But she was so patient, and followed him around so much like a faithful watchdog, that he grew to be exceedingly fond of her and straightway proceeded to exchange his small English vocabulary for, to him, more useful Japanese words.

The first thing to claim our attention in Yokohama Harbour was the American cruiser Newark, the Admiral’s flagship of the Asiatic fleet, with Admiral Kempff aboard. As soon as we came inside the breakwater she fired a salute of seventeen guns, and we wondered what it was all about, until suddenly we remembered that the Commissioners had the rank of ministers plenipotentiary and decided that it was meant for us. It was the first time in my husband’s life that he had ever been saluted. In his later career he reached a point where he would have been almost willing to assume a disguise in order to escape the thunder of the twenty-one guns that roared at him whenever he approached a naval vessel of any kind, but I think he was rather elated by this first tribute to his official standing.

We found later that an old friend, Captain McCalla, was in command of the Newark. We had known Captain McCalla in Washington when my husband was Solicitor General. He had been court-martialed and suspended from the Navy for a year for striking an unruly and insubordinate sailor and at his request Mr. Taft read the record of the court-martial. Mr. Choate had been his counsel, but the case was given a great deal of unpleasant publicity. He displayed such bravery at the Battle of Guantanamo, in Cuba, that the files he had lost were restored to him. He also rendered distinguished service in the Philippines, taking over the surrender of one of Aguinaldo’s generals at Caygayan; and later on, in China, he was in the van of the allied troops that relieved Peking and was severely wounded. Being a man of broad intelligence and great enterprise he appreciated the importance of the Philippine Commission and lost no time in extending to them all the courtesies at his command.

Shortly after we landed and got ourselves comfortably settled at the Grand Hotel, an ensign from the Newark came to ask when the Commission would receive the Admiral. The hour was set for this formality and when it had been duly disposed of, Captain McCalla called on us unofficially, with much news for our hungry ears from the big world that we had known nothing about for eleven long days. That was before the wireless era when going to sea was really going to sea, and seldom has the world known a more exciting year than 1900. Grim talk about the terrible Boxer insurrection was on every tongue and Captain McCalla told us that the Newark was lying in readiness to proceed to China at an instant’s notice. The British were just then pressing the Boers northward in South Africa, and our own troubles in the Philippines were by no means over. We had nearly seventy thousand troops in the field, and we heard of decisive engagements between the division under General Young and some religious fanatic insurrectos in northern Luzon. We found ourselves feeling very much in touch with big events.

The Commission went out to the Newark to return the Admiral’s call and when they got back to the hotel they were full of valuable information and advice about sightseeing in Japan, housekeeping in the Orient and other important things. Among other bits of news they had to tell their wives was that we would all probably be received at the Japanese Court,—which was quite exciting.

My experience is that the most formal branch of the government service is the naval branch. The state department may be as formal, but I doubt it. The ceremony on board naval vessels is constant, and the severity of the penalties for any failure to follow the regulations impresses itself upon every naval officer. Therefore, every naval officer must have diplomatic training and must be alert in finding out and in carrying out the duties of polite intercourse which prevail in every country.

Captain McCalla regarded the Commissioners as pro-consuls going to an important province, quite equal to the foremost diplomatic representatives of the United States anywhere, and he thought it was incumbent upon them to make the fact of their presence in Japan known at the Imperial Court and to apply for an audience with the Emperor. It hadn’t occurred to them. Their minds were so full of the weighty problems confronting them at Manila that they had given no consideration to any possible intervening formalities, and, anyhow, Mr. Taft said he thought the Emperor wouldn’t lose much sleep if he did miss seeing them. But this was not the proper attitude at all, and Captain McCalla, expostulating with them for their too casual conduct, finally prevailed upon them to communicate with the American Minister in Tokyo and ask to have application made for the audience. They were immediately informed that their arrival had been expected and that the matter had already been attended to.

ENTRANCE TO THE IMPERIAL PALACE GARDENS IN TOKYO

The Commission had only a week in Japan and, although their purpose in stopping had been to coal ship and get some clothing suitable for the tropic heat they were going into, they naturally were anxious to see something of the country during their stay, so the days were filled with expeditions around Yokohama and Tokyo and to points of interest nearby. My sister Maria and I did not accompany them on many of these trips because we were planning to remain in Japan for the summer and wanted to view its attractions at our leisure.

The trip to Nikko was made memorable by Mr. Taft’s most triumphal progress. On account of his unusual proportions he had already been an object of tremendous interest to the Japanese.

Nikko is nearly a day’s ride from Tokyo, up in the hills to the north, and when you get there you find that the railway station is a long way from the hotel and that much of the distance is a steep incline. The only kind of conveyance available is a jinricksha, and when my husband climbed into one of these little perambulators the unfortunate coolie to whom it belonged began to utter strange sounds. He rolled his eyes and gesticulated frantically until he prevailed upon a second man to help him in propelling his unaccustomed burden. But even then his excitement did not abate. As they approached the first rise in the road some of the villagers along the way, attracted, no doubt, by the coolie’s weird cries, came out to stare and, as usual, remained to laugh. The little ’ricksha man began chattering and grimacing at all of them and kept it up until he had enlisted the services of at least half the population of the village to help him in attaining the crest of the hill.

Two days before the Hancock was to start on her way toward Manila the great event of our visit to Japan transpired. We had our audience with the Emperor and Empress.

The first thing the ladies all asked, of course, was, “What shall we wear?” It was a most important question. I supposed we should have to wear evening gowns and was congratulating myself that I had a very nice new one that would do beautifully. But only on the afternoon before the day appointed, it was decreed that we should appear in high-necked frocks with trains. That was more difficult,—especially the trains. I didn’t own an afternoon frock that I considered good enough. I was going to the tropics and had got a supply of thin white muslins and linens, but I had nothing that would do for a cold May day in Japan. Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Worcester and Mrs. Moses were as greatly concerned as I, but we finally managed. I solved the problem by having a Chinese dressmaker in Yokohama make me, overnight, a lace guimpe which I wore with my perfectly acceptable evening gown.

Judge Ide had been particularly interested in the audience and in the fact that the ladies would also be received and he was very much chagrined when he found that “the ladies” meant only the wives of the Commissioners and that he could not take with him his two beautiful daughters. He quite lost interest in the whole proceeding, and we didn’t blame him in the least.

The Palace in Tokyo is not a “Forbidden City” literally, as the old palace in Peking used to be, but it looks from the outside just as “forbidden,” or more so. It is surrounded by a wide, deep moat which is crossed at intervals by curved and gracefully balustraded bridges. On the other side of the moat is a high stone wall. There is nothing of the palace to be seen except a few low, tiled roofs which peep out from the midst of many trees. The Imperial gardens are vastly more impressive than the palaces,—there are several within the walled enclosure,—and I would have wanted to linger and really look at things if I had not been so keenly interested in the experience which awaited us. Our carriage hurried on over the beautiful drives, through the most entrancing little artificial landscapes, past lakes full of little rock islands on which were perched tiny pavilions with uptilted roofs and the most beautiful polished wood and snow-white paper windows. It was all most fascinating and much too wonderful to be merely glanced at, but it was only a few moments before we approached a low, grey building and drew up before the door. It didn’t look at all like a palace, but it seemed that we had arrived.

We were ushered into a large reception room which was neither Japanese nor European, but a curious mixture of both. The walls were of gold leaf and were decorated with beautiful Japanese paintings in exquisitely soft colourings, but the furniture was mostly of the heavy foreign type. It was unexpected to say the least and I thought what a pity it was that the Japanese had not met the European invasion in their own original and picturesquely beautiful style, instead of trying to conform to western customs, or rather, to engraft western customs upon their own unique orientalism. But so it is. They either like our ugly heaviness, or think they confer a polite compliment on us by adopting it.

We were not kept waiting long. We were separated from the men of our party and were led into another room, much like the first, where the Empress awaited us attended by three or four ladies of her court. We curtseyed very low, not without difficulty on the part of most of us in spite of much practice, and after receiving a gracious smile and bow from Her Majesty, we were able to stand erect and observe her at our leisure. Both she and her ladies-in-waiting were dressed in European costume which made them look much smaller than they would have looked in their own beautiful kimonos. Her Majesty’s face was sweet and almost timid looking, and her voice was peculiarly gentle. Our conversation, carried on through an interpreter, was commonplace in the extreme, but her manner was pleasant and cordial. I was tremendously interested because I had been reading Japanese history and was duly impressed with the hoary antiquity of this court of the Son of Heaven. The Empress addressed a few remarks to each of us, after which we curtseyed again and retired. That was all.

Our husbands were received in a similar manner by the Emperor, though His Majesty granted a separate interview to each of them. Mr. Taft entered first with the Minister of the Household in charge of the ceremony. He bowed when he entered the door, bowed again half way up the long room, and yet again when he arrived before the Emperor. The others, also bowing, followed close behind but remained just outside of the audience chamber while my husband’s audience was in progress. Mr. Nagasaki, who acted as interpreter, said that His Majesty was very much pleased to see the Commission in Japan. Mr. Taft expressed his appreciation of the audience. The Emperor asked if he had ever been in Japan before. He said he had not. The Emperor asked when he was going to leave Japan. He replied, “In two days, Your Majesty.” After which this, his first audience with the Mikado, was at an end and he left the chamber while the rest of the Commissioners, each in his turn, went through the same ceremony.

After our husbands had been received by the Empress also, they rejoined us and we were conducted through some other rooms in the palace which interested us greatly. They all showed a curious mingling of Japanese and European objects of art and nobody could see them without deciding that, in that particular setting at least, the Japanese objects were far the more beautiful.

The Japanese Court is much inclined to imitate things European and the results are sometimes astonishing. Years later, when my husband was in Japan without me, the Empress presented him with a tapestry for me which had been copied from a Gobelin piece. It represented the meeting of Columbus and Isabella, and, it shows the most exquisite workmanship, but the faces have a curiously Oriental cast.

There is a story in connection with this tapestry which I think I must tell. My husband was Secretary of War when it was presented to me; and I say me with emphasis, because thereby hangs the story. He brought it home and displayed it with great pride and satisfaction, but it was so enormous and, from my standpoint, so useless, that I rather protested and wondered why, as long as he was getting such a gorgeous present he couldn’t have managed in some way to make its size correspond with my circumstances.

“Oh, well,” said he, “never mind. I’m going to present it to the Smithsonian Institute anyway, because you know, my dear, it is against the Constitution for an official in the United States government to accept any kind of favours from foreign courts.”

This was not the first time in my life that I had met the Constitution face to face, but theretofore I had been able to accept its decrees with what I had hoped was patriotic resignation. But now that tapestry suddenly became to me a most desirable thing. It had been sent to me by the Empress of Japan and I wanted to enjoy the mere possession of it,—at least for awhile. So, as my husband would say, I took the question up with him. I tried to convince him that I was not an official of the United States government and that he, as an official, had nothing whatever to do with my present from the Empress of Japan. He stood firmly by the Constitution, as usual, and eventually I had to submit the question for arbitration to President Roosevelt, who agreed with me that I was a private citizen and had a perfect right to accept the gift. I afterward hung it in one of the big wall spaces in the state dining-room of the White House and had the pleasure of watching many a guest vainly endeavouring to locate its origin and figure out its meaning.

We concluded our first audience at the court of Japan by signing our names in the Imperial album, after which we went to the American Legation to a beautiful luncheon which the Minister had arranged in our honour. Our Minister in Tokyo then—it was some years before the Legation was raised to an Embassy—was Mr. Buck of Georgia, a most affable and agreeable gentleman. He had invited a number of his diplomatic colleagues to meet us and, among others, we met for the first time Baron and Baroness Rosen, of the Russian Legation, who were afterward with us in Washington.

I sat on the right of the Minister and next to Baron Sanomiya, the Court Chamberlain, who had conducted our audience. I was greatly interested in Baron Sanomiya’s wife. She was an Englishwoman at least twice his size.

At Mr. Taft’s request the Minister had invited an old classmate of his, Baron Tajiri Inajiro. At Yale he was known as Tajiri, and the first two letters of both their names being “Ta” he and my husband had been brought together in the classroom, seated alphabetically, and had enjoyed a pleasant association. So Mr. Taft looked forward with great pleasure to renewing the acquaintance in Japan. Baron Tajiri, like most Japanese, was a little man, and his teeth were so formed that he was never able to master the pronunciation of English in such a way as to enable one to understand him easily. But he seems to have acquired at Yale a sound knowledge of business and finance since he became Assistant Minister of Finance under Yamagata and had taken an active part in the change of the Japanese currency from the silver to the gold standard, which was a great step in Japan’s progress toward a place among the world’s powers. He had been made a life peer and sat in the Upper House. At the luncheon he wore a frock coat which Mr. Taft felt confident he recognised as an old college friend of the ‘seventies. In those days the Japanese wore their “foreign clothes” only on “foreign occasions” or at court. They kept them carefully folded up and put away, and they had not yet come to recognise the desirability of pressing them when they took them out for use. Also a silk hat once was a silk hat always; vintages didn’t trouble them, and they didn’t mind in the least which way the nap was brushed.

© Harris S. Ewing.
THE STATE DINING-ROOM OF THE WHITE HOUSE, SHOWING TAPESTRY PRESENTED TO MRS. TAFT BY THE EMPRESS OF JAPAN

Baron Tajiri wanted to be appointed Minister of Finance when Yamagata retired, but he was put, instead, at the head of the Board of Audits, a life position. Marchioness, now Princess Oyama, wife of the Field Marshal, told my husband this on the occasion of his second visit to Japan, and said that the disappointment had made Tajiri very much of a recluse. In any case, Mr. Taft has never seen him again, although he has tried to seek him out and has made inquiry about him every time he has been in Japan.

We were very much interested in our Legation at Tokyo. It was the first one we had ever seen that the American government owned. The house was not what it ought to have been, but it was surrounded by spacious and beautifully kept grounds and was so much better than the nothing that we have in other countries that we liked to dwell upon it as an honourable exception to the disgraceful and miserly policy pursued by Congress in dealing with our representatives to foreign capitals.

Mrs. Wright, with her daughter Katrina, had decided to remain with us in Yokohama for the summer, so we took a cottage together on The Bluff, a high foreign residence section of the city, and prepared to make ourselves most comfortable.

Two days later the Commissioners and the rest of the party went aboard the Hancock and we waved them good-bye from a harbour launch as they steamed away toward Manila.

CHAPTER IV
IN JAPAN

To be quarantined in a house too small for the number of its occupants, behind closed doors, each one of which bears aloft a sinister yellow placard across which is printed in large, black letters: “Diphtheria,” is no way to begin a visit to a strange and interesting country.

No sooner had Bessie, Charlie’s nurse, been released from quarantine by the doctors in Yokohama than our older boy, Robert, developed suspicious symptoms which, upon diagnosis, were pronounced to be diphtheritic. The sore throat began before Mr. Taft left for Manila, and he was loathe to go, but as the new serum treatment for diphtheria had robbed the disease of much of its terror, and as we were in the hands of an excellent American physician, Dr. Eldridge, I felt confident there was no cause for serious apprehension.

We sent Helen and the baby to be taken care of at the Grand Hotel, while Mrs. Wright, Maria and I resigned ourselves to a long and tedious period of isolation. Robert’s diphtheria did not develop to a dangerous stage, but the sore throat persisted and it was three weeks before we were released upon a none-too-welcoming world. Our long quarantine had marked us as objects to be avoided—in a social sense—even after the doctors had pronounced us safe.

Mrs. Wright and my sister and I spent that entire three weeks only wishing that we were in our own land where some friendly voice might at least shout an inquiry about us from a distance, and not in this far-away place where only strange and very foreign sounds came floating in to us from curious and crowded streets whose every nook and corner we were aching to explore.

Our house was charming. All the “foreign” houses in Japan seem to me to be charming. The solidity of Occidental construction, with the light touch of Japanese interior decoration, make a fascinating combination, especially in that environment. The Japanese landscape is—well, peculiarly Japanese, and the gardens, however “foreign” they may be, have an air quite unique and unmistakably oriental.

The Foreign Settlement in Yokohama consists of a broad business section, solidly built, on the low lands fronting the harbour, and The Bluff. The Bluff is a garden of beautiful homes. At one end it rises high above the bay and commands a wide view of harbour, town and Pacific Ocean, while the other end runs inland to meet the higher hills beyond and forms a deep valley in which has been built up a teeming native quarter full of colour, of picturesque outline and of never-ending oriental clamour. Around this village are terraced, bright-green rice paddies and high hills covered with dark, Japanese pines which grow at curious angles.

Our house, a spreading bungalow in a large and well-kept garden, was on the inland side and overlooked this valley. From a Buddhist temple on the opposite hill, a quaint structure with uptilted roof and great stone torii gateway, came the ceaseless drone of a priest repeating over and over an endless invocation to the constant, measured tum-tum accompaniment of little wooden drums, while from the narrow streets below rose the strange cries of itinerant food venders. Throughout the whole long evening sounded the long wail of the blind masseurs who, with their thumping bamboo sticks, tramp from door to door seeking patronage. At intervals the single low tong of a great temple bell set the hills to vibrating.

We rented the house from an Englishman who was “going home” on vacation, and with it we rented a complete ménage, including a most efficient little Japanese woman named Matsu who served us both as waitress and housekeeper and answered to the call of “Amah!”—meaning either nurse or maid. Besides the Amah, there was only a cook, an excellent one, but the two contrived to run the house with a smoothness and an economy which I have never seen equalled. They were so economical, in fact, that we had difficulty in getting them to serve to us enough of their well-prepared food. There were six of us in family, not including Charlie, or Baby San as he was called, and at each meal Matsu would bring in just six portions of whatever there was, six chops, six croquettes, six little fishes, always six—no more. We resorted to strategy sometimes and announced, well in advance, that there would be guests.

“How many, O Ku San?” says Matsu cautiously.

“Well, maybe two,” says we.

Whereupon we would get eight little chops, or eight little croquettes, or whatever it might be. But we couldn’t play this game very often because we were afraid that if too many guests failed to materialise the time would come when we really would be giving a party and be forced to act out the “Wolf! Wolf!” story to our own very great embarrassment. I’m glad to say this never occurred; Matsu always obeyed orders; but when an unexpected guest dropped in we had to exercise the principle of “family hold back” in real earnest.

However, while Matsu was in command none of us had any cause for complaint. She had plenty of native shrewdness and didn’t neglect her own interests to any appreciable extent, but she displayed none of the traditional oriental duplicity which we had been warned to look out for in all Japanese servants. She relieved us of all the responsibilities of housekeeping and left us free to wander around among the fascinating shops and to go off on long sightseeing expeditions at our pleasure.

While we were still in the midst of the miseries of quarantine I got my first letter from my husband, and as he had sailed away into what to me then was a very far distant and somewhat unreal world, I was exceedingly glad to hear from him.

The Hancock had stopped at Kobe and had then gone on to Nagasaki where it had to lie for two days taking on coal. The Commissioners seem to have begun by that time to chafe at delays and to long for their settled, definite employment. But they had to go to Hongkong on some business matters and it was from Hongkong that my first long letter came. They were received by the British authorities with the usual formality; pompous calls to be returned as pompously; dinners, luncheons, club privileges, launch parties and much entertaining gossip; but they were interested, principally, in meeting for the first time the genus Filipino irreconcilable.

The Filipinos, after three centuries of Christian education, which had taken the form of religious instruction only, had, with reason, risen in revolt against the Spanish system of friar domination and had demanded some measure of freedom and a voice in the control of their own affairs. This is a long and complicated story which can only be touched upon here.

They were engaged in a hopeless struggle with Spanish authority when the Spanish-American War, unexpected, undreamed of, suddenly turned the tables and placed them in an entirely new situation. They saw Spain defeated and turned from the islands she had held since Magellan’s first voyage, while another flag quickly rose above their ancient forts and strongholds. Then it was that the handful of ambitious “illustrados,” or well-to-do and educated ones, began freely to preach independence and were encouraged by not a few Americans, including some in official relation to the situation, who, in complete ignorance of real conditions, approved the so-called aspiration and gave hope of its early fulfilment.

The idea of these Americans was that our forefathers had fought for independence and that it was against our most cherished principles to hold any people against their will. But they didn’t take into consideration the fact that the Filipinos were Malays, not ten per cent. of them with even a primary education, used only to a theocratic and absolute government and without any experience in the rule of the people. Nor did they consider that our forefathers had, for a century and a half before the revolution, been carrying on what was really self-government and were better fitted by training and tradition to make self-government work than any people in the world. They indulged in sentiment to the exclusion of thought; and so the situation was created.

The idea of complete independence was never shouted from the housetops in Spanish times, but the new flag represented free speech, a free press, and such freedom generally as the Filipinos had never dreamed of in their wildest aspirations and the “illustrados” and the men who had tasted power in the insurrection against Spain were not slow to take advantage of it. An alluring conception of independence, freedom from all restraint and the enjoyment of luxurious ease, really, was sent abroad among the densely ignorant masses by the handful who had education, with the result that by the time the American government was free really to face the issue, the demand for our immediate withdrawal was unanimous, or nearly so.

But it couldn’t be done. Aguinaldo tried his hand at a government for six months and failed miserably. Corruption was rife. Chaos reigned; the country was impoverished and absolutely unprotected; and it didn’t take the Americans long to recognise the fact that “independence” meant nothing more nor less than the merciless exploitation of the many by the few and the establishment of worse conditions than any the people had ever known.

So we stayed; there was nothing else to do; and the insurrection against constituted authority was taken up where it left off when Admiral Dewey steamed up Manila Bay. It was hopeless from the start, and one after another of the leading insurrectos, as the months went by, abandoned the struggle in favour of prosperous peace and came in to Manila to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. But as pacification progressed a few of the leaders declared themselves to be “irreconcilable” and either took to the hills with marauding bands of ladrones, or went over to Hongkong and joined the little Filipino colony there. This colony in Hongkong—which still exists, by the way—was known as the “junta” and its business in life was to hatch schemes for murderous uprisings, smuggle arms and incendiary literature into the islands, raise money for carrying on hostilities and make itself useful generally.

The methods employed by these “irreconcilables” were peculiarly their own. They consisted, mainly, of coercion and threats of assassination among Filipino people who were staying at home and endeavouring to keep out of trouble. Then, too, they were reported to have made a great deal of money by compelling Filipino hemp and tobacco planters to sell to them these valuable products at prices fixed by themselves, and later disposing of them in Hongkong at the regular market price which gave them a tremendous margin of profit.

These were the conditions—merely sketched—which existed in the Philippine Islands when the second Commission was sent out, and the first Filipinos Mr. Taft ever met, he met in Hongkong. They were not members of the “junta” but were high-class, wealthy, non-combatant refugees named Cortez, who lived under a threat of assassination, who had had all their property confiscated because of their sympathy with the insurrection against Spain, had secured restitution through the government at Washington, and who came now to beg the Commission for protection against their own people and for the speedy establishment of peaceful American rule in the islands.

Then came Artacho. Artacho had been Aguinaldo’s rival in the insurrection against Spain and he very much resented the selection, by the Americans in command, of Aguinaldo as the leader of the Filipino forces when Dewey went into Manila. He was sufficiently annoyed to leave the country and take refuge in Hongkong. He professed entire ignorance of the activities of the “junta” and unqualified loyalty to the government of the United States, but, as he had with him a “secretary” who very carefully listened to all he had to say, and as he seemed to be very cautious in all his expressions, Mr. Taft decided that he was being watched and was, if not actively connected with the “junta,” at least “on the fence” and in his call only “casting an anchor to windward” in case the Americans should succeed in pacifying the Islands and establishing a government there with which it would be very nice indeed to be connected. It must have been a very diplomatic, a very soft-spoken and a most amusing meeting.

Among other things the Commission had to do in Hongkong was to secure Chinese servants. They had been told that this was absolutely necessary because the unsettled state of affairs in Manila made Filipino servants entirely undependable.

Captain McCalla, of the Newark, had given to my husband in Yokohama, a letter to one L. Charles, a Chinese who ran a sort of employment agency in Hongkong, but when L. Charles came out to the Hancock, in response to a message from Mr. Taft, he brought with him the surprising news that the servants had already arrived from Shanghai and had been waiting for several days. Mr. Taft was greatly astonished, as he was unconscious of having made any arrangements at all, but L. Charles smilingly explained to him that Admiral Dewey had attended to it. Then Mr. Taft remembered that, sure enough, Admiral Dewey had, several months before in Washington, offered to secure servants through his own Chinaman, Ah Man, but he, himself, had forgotten all about it.

However, he sent for the men and when they came aboard one of them proudly produced a note from the flag officer of the Brooklyn, enclosing a note to Ah Sing, the steward of the Brooklyn, from Ah Man, Admiral Dewey’s servant. It read:

My dear Ah Sing:

It is a new Governor-General coming up to Manila City. His name is Mr. Wm. H. Taft and he is going to sail from here first of April. The Admiral asked me to write to you and ask if you please find him some good Chinese servants for Mr. Taft. He like to have a very good cook just like myself the Admiral said and two men to wait on table a butler and second man just like you. Now would you be so kind as to try to find some very nice people that will take good care and will understand their business. The Admiral will be very much oblige to you I am

Your truly friend,

Ah Man.

This is an example of what is known in the East as “flen-pidgin,” which may be literally translated as “friend-work.” It is a Chinese system, but it has been adopted by the representatives of every country in the world to be met out there and it is by no means the least of the elements which enter into the charm of the Orient.

One of the objects for stopping in Japan was to enable the Commissioners to get white duck and linen clothes for the tropics and Mr. Taft had the worst of luck in getting anything to fit him. In the beginning we had some rather heated discussions as to the style of dress that he should adopt. He had been assured that the most comfortably dressed men were those who wore “straight button ups” as they are called. These are coats which have a high, round collar and button straight down from the chin—plain military jackets, in fact. They are worn without shirts, collars, ties or anything except underwear and trousers and are, no doubt, very nice for the tropic heat. But I did not consider that such a severe style would bring out the lines of my husband’s figure to the best advantage, so I prevailed upon him to have all his clothes made with sack coats which should be worn with the usual accessories. It was a sad experience in Yokohama, but he left for Hongkong full of hope, having been told that the tailors there were much better. He wrote in utter disgust. The tailors were not good; he had been to every shop in town looking for wearing apparel of all kinds and could find nothing large enough for him. He said he had imagined that Englishmen were, as a rule, large enough to demand men’s sizes,—but evidently not. He had to have everything, shoes, stockings, underwear, shirts, collars and hats made to order—and then they didn’t fit.

My husband’s letter, full of strange names, of assassination, of smuggled arms, of dark intrigue and unrest generally, left a vague impression in my mind that he was going into a country where he would be subjected to murderous attacks every few minutes. Then I reflected that he was not quite alone; that General MacArthur and about seventy thousand American troops were down there too, and that they could probably be depended upon to do everything in their power to protect him.

Our life in Yokohama was very placid. It was some time after our yellow placards were removed before our neighbours began to call on us, and we didn’t blame them. No doubt they felt that it would be foolish to risk getting diphtheria just for the sake of being formally polite. We were delightfully entertained, both before and after the Commission sailed, by Mr. and Mrs. T. Williams McIvor, who are among the old American residents of Yokohama. Mr. McIvor had been American Consul General, but when we met him he was engaged in a private law practice, representing the American Tobacco Company and other large foreign concerns. As Consul General he had taken care of the Chinese during the Japan-China War and had sent about eight thousand of them out of the country. He was now representing the foreign business community in its dispute with the Japanese government as to whether or not the property known as the Foreign Concession, or The Settlement, was taxable. This area had been granted by the Japanese government on perpetual lease at the time the first treaties with Japan were made, and the holding of it by foreigners was conditioned on the payment of a ground rent to the government which, it was provided, should never be increased beyond a certain amount. But now Japan was greatly in need of money, was taxing its own people in every way possible, and eventually decided to levy a tax on the houses and improvements upon this land, on the theory that improvements on land are not a part of the land itself. But by the Civil Law and the Common Law the provision in the treaties that no tax should be paid on the property greater than that fixed in ground rent would have prevented the levying of any tax on the buildings because, by such laws, improvements are considered to be a part of the land. But in Japanese law it was said they were not so regarded and the question was whether the treaties were to be construed according to Japanese law or according to the laws of foreign governments. The subject was one of endless discussion while we were there, and Minister Buck had already referred the question to the State Department at Washington.

We also dined with Mrs. Scidmore, whom I was to meet many times in after years. Mrs. Scidmore is the mother of Eliza Ramaha Scidmore, the well known writer about Far Eastern countries, and is, I suppose, the most notable foreign figure in the Orient. She had lived in Japan since the early days, not so long after the country’s doors were opened to the world. Her son was in the Legation service when I met her and she had a charming house on the Bund, in which was gathered a remarkable collection of Japanese curios and objects of art. Mrs. Scidmore was then nearly eighty years of age I think, but she was as bright and young as a woman of fifty. The last time I saw her she was nearly ninety and she entertained us at luncheon in Nagasaki, where her son was American Consul. She dresses with as much care and is as interested in fashions and fabrics as any girl, and it is a rare pleasure to see her, with her snowy hair piled up on her head and a white silk gown spread out about her, sitting in the centre of a group of people discussing, with great animation and entire comprehension, general topics of current interest. She afterward went to “keep house” for her son in Seoul, Korea, where he became Consul General, and she continues to be a sort of uncrowned queen of foreign society.

Leaving our children at the bungalow with their nurses, Mrs. Wright, Maria and I went about, to Nikko, to Kamakura, to Kyoto and other interesting places, and we spent the intervals, indeed all our time, in restraining our intense desire to purchase everything we saw in the extraordinarily attractive little shops.

About the last of July, when the heat began to be rather more than we could stand, we left Yokohama and went up into the Hakone Mountains to Miyanoshita. The trip to Miyanoshita includes a two hours’ climb in ’rickshas up a steep incline from a village on the railway, where there was then no sort of accommodation for “Europeans,”—only Japanese inns which, though they may have been excellent from a Japanese standpoint, did not seem to us to have been built for inn purposes. When we got out of the train it was seven o’clock in the evening. There were Mrs. Wright and her maid, her daughter Katrina, my sister Maria, the three children, Bessie the nurse, and I. We wanted dinner above all things else and we decided to get it. It all had to be prepared “European style” at one of the little inns, so by the time it was served and disposed of the night was upon us, and, I may say, the blackest night I ever remember seeing. We debated at length the possibility of taking the two hours’ ’ricksha ride in such darkness, but the chattering coolies, mainly by gesture and facial expression, succeeded in convincing us that it was the most desirable thing in the world to do. Incidentally, and aside from our objection to the bedless inns, we were most anxious to reach our journey’s end. So—we set out, in eight ’rickshas, six for us and two piled high with hand luggage. I put Helen and Robert together in one and took Charlie in with me, and each of us had an extra man behind to push, also two men each for the baggage ’rickshas, which made sixteen men in all. We made quite a cavalcade and I felt fairly satisfied, not to say mildly festive, until we got away from the lights of the town and discovered, to our amazement, that for some reason or other, the ’ricksha men had failed to bring lights. I believe the idea was that they could keep the road better without them. We went along for a short distance in the Stygian darkness, then Maria decided that she wouldn’t have it. Whatever we might do, she was going back for a lantern. We were not in an argumentative mood, so we let her go without a word, while we plunged on.