Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 October 1908 — TAFT PAPERS ALMOST READY TO BOLT. [ARTICLE]

TAFT PAPERS ALMOST READY TO BOLT.

Many of the papers that have been supporting Taft are having a hard time keeping themselves in line. The Springfield Republican is putting in a good deal of time attacking the Republican party. The Chicago Inter Ocean whacks Roosevelt every day, and the Chicago News is also dissatisfied. In New York the Times criticizes Taft’s foolish speeches and the Sun finds Roosevelt' intolerable. And the Post, which started out bravely for Taft, now speaks of Taft’s tariff arguments as “vagaries” and as “silly” and “shocking.” In the course of an editorial it says: "The panic of 1907 and the hard times which followed, coming at the height of that [the Republican] party’s ascendancy and with ita tariff in full vigor, disposed at once of. the ‘workingman’s full dinner pall’ as a campaign argument, and that nothing was left except to tell the farmer, who is fortunately still prosperous, that the Republican party makes the wheat grow and the foreign markets bid for it, whereas the Democrats, with their Wilson bill in 1894, blighted the corn crop and prevented the buying of wheat. This was, perhaps, the origin of Mr. Taft’s vagaries; the talk about •the tariff bill which sent wheat below 50 cents a bushel’ is not a whit more specious/ irrelevant and altogether silly than the argument to the factory hands four and eight years ago. But it was not for Mr. Taft to drag the pitiful stuff to light again. We need not speak of the shock which his use of it has caused to people whose support of him had been based on belief tn his wisdom and good sense.**