The William Howard Taft administration's foreign policies are of major significance in U.S. diplomatic history, because they perfectly illustrate the quest for overseas markets that were needed to deal with the requirements of the Second Industrial Revolution and show how that quest led to disorder and even revolution. Taft and Philander C. Knox tried to remove one large obstacle from the foreign affairs process in 1910 when the president shocked a New York audience by urging that matters of national honor should be referred to an arbitration court, just as were questions of property. The Taft-Knox experiences in China aptly climaxed the major thematic developments of U.S. policy during the 1865-1913 era. At times, as in China and Canada, Taft exercised exclusively economic and political power. He instead had to work with a new industrial society whose policies helped produce the dangerous nationalisms and revolutionary upheavals.