Jasper County Democrat, Volume 10, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 June 1907 — A 1908 QUESTION. [ARTICLE]

A 1908 QUESTION.

In a speech at Jamestown, Va., on Decoration day, Mr. Bryan said that we make laws for the Filipinos under which oan people would not live. And that is true, shameful as it is.

When it is remembered that tie railroads have saved more money under the rate law than before its passage, one wonders if there really is any disagreement between them and President Roosevelt. Is it, after all, merely a stage tempest?

It will be a much simpler task for the Democrats to select their candidate for president than it is proving for the Republicans, because theDemocraoy knows what it wants and the g. o. p. doesn’t.— St. Louis Republic. There is a lot of truth in this. The Republican party was never in all its life, so badly' split on every proposition as it is now.

The London papers, which are mostly friendly to President Roosevelt, take different views of his Indianapolis speech, but at least two of thein appear to have “sized it up” with considerable perspicacity. For instance, the Standard thinks the speech is a “decorous retreat from the much advertised campaign against the trusts, with little flourishes, to save his face.” The Daily News is of the opinion that the president is “somewhat on the fence” and that the total effect of the speech is ‘‘rather confusing.” The opinions of the English newspapers are not usually of great importance in this country, but in the present case the Standard and Daily News have hit the nail on the head.

A Washington correspondent has discovered that * ‘after nearly five years of patient investigation, the government is about to take action to break up the anthracite coal trust.” The inquities of this combination were brought into public view during the great strike of the winter of 1902-03, and it was then that the Roosevelt administration began to sit up and take notice. For five long, weary years the government has watched the trust filch money from the people and grow richer day by day. And now, it is said, it is “about" to take action. In the meantime the trust is doing business at the old stand and in the same old way. This '‘trustbusting” administration is something real fierce once it is waked up.

The tariff is bound to out a large figure in the next campaign.

The Republican policy of fixing import duties for the special benefit of a few at the expense of the people has produced the trusts and monopolies, which are driving the people as relentlessly as any overseer ever drove slave at the end of his whiplash. No sensible person believes the Republican party will undo its own wrong. It will not reform the tariff. A tariff “reformed by its friends” for its friends (the trusts), is not reformed at all. And that is all the Republican party has ever said it would —and it would do that much “in its own good time.” With the Democratic party, however, it is different. Says the Brooklyn Citizen (Dem.) “The Democratic party has always been the party of reasonable tariff duties, and on this issue radicals and conservaties are united. It has been well said that all the controversies that now agiI tate the nation lead back to the tariff as the source of the public discontent. “The people are tired of being exploited to make a thousand multimillionaires, while the great mass of citizens find it increasingly difficult, in an age of . monopoly and extortionate prices, to make both ends meet. A readjustment of the tariff with the view of eliminating the trusts and preventing the spoliation of the American people by the beneficiaries of the high protective tariff system, should be the chief aim of the Democratic party in the next national campaign.”