Jasper County Democrat, Volume 17, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 August 1914 — PROGRESSIVE PARTY COLUMN. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

PROGRESSIVE PARTY COLUMN.

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The party is thoroughly organized by counties and townships, local tickets have been nominated in most subdivisions, and within two or thiee weeks all such tickets will be in the field. The spontaneity jf interest and the constant accessions to the party are reassuring of victory in the coming election. Nor is the showing made by the party, both in the character and solidarity of its organization and in the size and number of its recent public meetings, without its deep significance to those who try to judge dispassionately of political currents. For the Progressive party is sure of a vigorous and uninterrupted growth in Indiana, not less because of the kind of its opponents than because or its own program of political reforms and its masterful leadership in state and nation. This is a time when independence governs voters more than it ever did before. The Democratic and the Republican parties, overgrown with cliques and sodden in reprehensible political practices, have been so completely exposed that men no longer set store by the hollow glory of success attaching to a party name. Parties that are the personal asset of one man, or one small group of men, as both the old parties have come to be in Indiana, can not be expected to give genuine public service. Parties that are driven by the sharper exactions of the people to conceal their own recent history, or to hide the anti-social tendencies in their oligarchic leadership, start with a fatal handicap. The Progressive party is none of these. It is a free movement of the people to institute their own agency for the relief of ills and the improvement of administration for which, up to now, they have looked in vain to either of the old parties. It is not surprising that there should come, from candid workers in the old parties as well as from Progressive party members, a report of far-reaching mobility among Indiana voters this year. The people of Indiana are thinking, and their thoughts are not kind ones for the politicians who have made a reproach of old party names and methods.

_ By this spirit of determination to vote for tried men and logical measures rather than for the perpetuation of leaders whose power has all been sinister is the drift to Progressivism to be explained. In Albert J. Beveridge the Progressives have a candidate for United States senator who ranks above either of his opponents in demonstrated efficiency and in the qualities of statesmanship. In the mode of Progressive party organization and administration the individual finds a guaranty of an effective voice in party affairs. In the Progressive platforms, state and national, the people have a pledge of business reforms and social betterment. The demand is for the things that the Progressive party, and the Progressive party alone, offers. Small wonder, then, that Indiana Progressives report a continuous growth of numbers from the old parties.— Advt.

WILLIAM H. ADE Progressive Candidate for Congress Vote for the Farmer Candidate for Congress.