Taft went to the Philippines to stay there; not only forfeiting thereby the certainty of brilliant rise in his profession on the bench or at the bar here if he had stayed, but at imminent risk to his own health; because he felt that his duty as an American made him go; that, as President McKinley told me of him, he had been drafted into the service of the country and he could not honorably refuse. We have seen in consequence the Philippine Islands administered by the American official who is at the head of the government and by his colleagues in the interest primarily of their people, and seeking to obtain for the United States, for the dominant race, that spent its blood and its treasure in making firm and stable the government of those islands, the reward that comes from the consciousness of duty well done. Under Taft, by and through his efforts, not only have peace and material well-being come to those islands to a degree never before known in their recorded history, and to a degree infinitely greater than had ever been dreamed possible by those who knew them best, but more than that, a greater measure of self-government has been given to them than is now given to any other Asiatic people under alien rule, than to any other Asiatic people under their own rulers, save Japan alone. That is an achievement of the past five years which I hold to be absolutely unparalleled in history; and when the debit and credit side of our national life is finally made up a long stroke shall be put to the credit side for what has been done in the Philippines under Taft and his associates. In the same way Leonard Wood worked in Cuba. Put down there to do an absolutely new task, to take a people of a different race, a different speech, a different creed, a people just emerging from the hideous welter of a war, cruel and sanguinary beyond what we in this fortunate country can readily conceive, to take a people down in the depths of poverty and misery, just recovering from suffering which makes one shudder to think of, a people untrained utterly and absolutely in self-government, and fit them for it; and he did it. For three years he worked. He established a school system as good as the best that we have in any of our States. He cleaned cities which had never been cleaned in their existence before. He secured absolute safety for life and property. He did the kind of governmental work which should be the undying honor of our people forever. And he came home to what? He came home to be thanked by a few, to be attacked by others—not to their credit—and to have as his real reward the sense that though his work had been done at pecuniary sacrifice to him, that though the demands upon him had been such as to eat into his private means, yet he had worthily and well done his duty as an American citizen and reflected fresh honor upon the uniform of the United States Army.