Increase Topics

We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties.
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)

I look forward with hope to increasing the already good feeling between the South and the other sections of the country. My chief purpose is not to affect a change in the electoral vote of the Southern States. That is a secondary consideration. What I look forward to is an increase in the tolerance of political views of all kinds and their advocacy throughout the South, and the existence of a remarkable political opposition in every State, and even more than this, to an increased feeling on the part of all the people of the South that this Government is their Government, and that its officers in their States are their officers. The consideration of this question can not, however, be complete without full reference to the Negro race, its progress, and its present condition.
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

The general review of the past tends to satisfy me with my political life. No man, I suppose, ever came up to his ideal. The first half [of] my political life was first to resist the increase of slavery and secondly to destroy it.... The second half of my political life has been to rebuild, and to get rid of the despotic and corrupting tendencies and the animosities of the war, and other legacies of slavery.
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)