Bill Taft

I know him by what he has done.

Warning is hereby expressly given to all unauthorized persons not to excavate, appropriate, injure or destroy any of the objects hereby reserved, nor to settle upon any of the lands contained within the boundaries of this reservation.

The presence of gubernatorial timber on that trip sweetens every recollection of the trip.

I am glad to renew the association and acquaintance.

I am glad to renew our old and our delightful association.

Such influence as I can bring to bear you can count on my bringing to bear in favor of the Ohio River.

All I can hope is that you shall find enough disinterested people in the country to support the Ohio improvement.

I am sure—I mean I have received assurances from those gentlemen.

It will be, I doubt not, an epoch in the history of this country.

I observe that there are a number of gentlemen who think that I cast a wet blanket over the convention yesterday by what I said there.

I am sorry I am from Ohio.

You have the present business.

The improvement of the Ohio River is not alone to improve the Ohio River and help the States along its border.

I am only a coordinate branch of this Government and the least important of those branches.

I have not looked into waterways very much.

You have six locks now completed, and where those six locks operate, the success of the system of slack water has been demonstrated.

Then when the time comes that political exigency shall prevent the appropriation of sufficient amounts from the current revenues to put the proper part of the project through the coming year or the coming two years as economy requires, the…

I recognize the gentlemen who applaud, as coming from the Columbia River district.

You may insist that a policy ought to be adopted, and you have insisted, and I do not doubt that you have—indeed I know you have—made that distinguished member of Congress, the head of the Rivers and Harbors Committee, sit up nights to…

They have not come to a definite conclusion as to the policy that ought to be adopted, but they have come to the conclusion that some policy must be adopted.

I am still a consistent advocate of that theory.

One of the things that I think we ought to do is not to decry the past.

I think that a wise platform to take.

I venture to say that in your whole experience you have never met men of a higher standard of character, of a higher devotion to public duty, and of greater skill in their profession than those same army engineers.

You are getting, as the boys and girls used to say in 'finding the button'—you are getting warm.