As soon as the change for which they had begged was inserted in the law, and the law was signed, they turned round and refused to pay the taxes; and in the lawsuit that followed, they claimed that the law was unconstitutional, because it contained the very clause which they had so clamorously demanded.

Senator David B.Hill had appeared before me on behalf of the corporations to argue for the change; and he then appeared before the courts to make the argument on the other side.

The suit was carried through to the Supreme Court of the United States, which declared the law constitutional during the time that I was President.
One of the painful duties of the chief executive in States like New York, as well as in the Nation, is the refusing of pardons.

Yet I can imagine nothing more necessary from the standpoint of good citizenship than the ability to steel one's heart in this matter of granting pardons.

The pressure is always greatest in two classes of cases: first, that where capital punishment is inflicted; second, that where the man is prominent socially and in the business world, and where in consequence his crime is apt to have been one concerned in some way with finance.
As regards capital cases, the trouble is that emotional men and women always see only the individual whose fate is up at the moment, and neither his victim nor the many millions of unknown individuals who would in the long run be harmed by what they ask.