Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 185, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1912 — Fairbanks’ View on County Local Option. [ARTICLE]

Fairbanks’ View on County Local Option.

Charles Warren Fairbanks, former vice-president of the United States, replying to an inquiry as to the duty of the republican party in the matter of county local option has made the following reply: For more than a third of a century the republican party of Indiana has been responsive to advancing public sentiment on the saloon question. It has been ready and willing at all time to give to the people of the state such laws fipon the subject as public sentiment would enforce, and it should not retreat from that position now. County local option was enacted into law by a republican legislature In fulfillment of a republican platform plank. The repeal of the law by a democratic legislature was an affront to the moral sentiment of the entire state; it was a challenge as weH to the republican party. The failure of the republican state convention two years ago to accept the challenge and stand by local option resulted in republican defeat. The people believed that -the party was cowardly retreating from high ground, and for the first time in its history in Indiana ft was shot in the back instead of with its face to the foe. Home rule, has been one of the strongest tenets of the republican party. It has always stood for those policies in state and nation which tended to advance In the utmost degree the welfare of the home. County option is in the best sense an application of the principles of home rule; that is to say,.popular rule with respect to an institution as essentially county wide as city wide in its effect upon taxation, morality, law and order and police administration. It is safe to say that wherever there is sentiment enough in the county to vote saloons out of business, there is sentiment enough in that same political division and sufficient legal ma- ' chinery subject to the will of the majority in that division and responsible to all its people to insure the enforcement of the law. No careful observer will fall to be convinced that the big majority of the republicans of the state and of the people of the state favor the proposition of home rule on what is essentially a home question. The net majorities aggregated more than 70,000 against the saloons in the counties where elections were held under the republican option law. Under the law passed by the democratic legislature saloons have been forced back upon more than fifty counties in which the predominant sentiment is against them, in most cases by slender majorities in cities and towns. , There are thousands of patriotic democrats in Indiana who are interested in advancing the peace and the good order of the community and in promoting the welfare of the home, who now stand ready and willing to help, place the county local option law again on the statute books from which it wae wiped by a democratic legislature, carefully selected for the purpose by those whose interest in the liquor traffic blinded them to the larger public good which was to be subserved by the county local option law. The republican party is never stronger than when standing for a great moral issue. The county local option law presents such an issue. There is none before the people today which transcends it in importance. We'have passed through trials and tribulations for this cause, and we should not abandon the contest now. We should take up the chai- - lenge which the republican convention, through a misconception of its duty, failed to do two years ago, and continue the fight to the utmost in