Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 56, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1916 — COMPLAINTS AND EVASIONS [ARTICLE]

COMPLAINTS AND EVASIONS

Judge Hughes has been going to and fro in the land and talked up and down in it for six weeks, trying to persuade the people to turn an experienced public servant out of the White House and put Charles Evans in it. Yet so far, he has offered no reason for changing Presidents that would justify a factor}- owner in hiring a new secondassistant subforman in place of the old one. He has not even challenged the value of many of the reforms secured by President Wilson; the federal reserve act, which saved the nation from chaos at the outbreak of war; the farm credits act, which gives the farmer a chance to secure capital on equal terms with other business men; the workmen’s compensation act, doing justice to federal employes injured during their service; the child labor bill which holds back the mills of avarice from grinding up the seed corn of the nation. These four reforms alone would entitle President Wilson to re-elec-tion. So ready a fault-finder as Judge Hughes has been obliged to evade mention of them because he dares not condemn them—yet he aspires to the place of the man who did the things which he is afraid even to criticise! Where Judge Hughes does venture to challenge the "Wilson record his criticism is neither constructive nor specific. It is merely monotonous complaining. He finds fault with the Underwood tariff, but carefully avoids giving details as to the sort of tariff which he favors. Perhaps, however, one can deduce this information from the names of the judge’s followers—Boise Penrose, Murray Crane, Reed Smoot and company. He condemns the way in which President Wilson averted the railroad strike, but offers no program by which he would have averted it. He denounces President Wilson for not recognizing Huerta, but dares not admit that he, Judge Hughes, would have recognized that murderous bandit. He complains of President Wilson’s note writing in foreign complications without venturing to say that he would have resorted to the bullets which are the only substitutes for notes. He repeats the imbecile chatter that President Wilson could have prevented the sinking of the Lusitania, but does not say how, neither does he say what he would have done after the Lusitania was sunk.

He accepts in equal silence the support of Roosevelt, he wanted war with Germany over the invasion of Belgium, and of the hyphenated societies which openly boast that they mean to defeat President Wilson as a punishment for his refusal to bow to the kaiser’s will. There is nothing sound, nothing worthy, nothing that looks forward or faces the music about the whole Hughes campaign. Evasion and complaint, complaint and evasion chase each other monotonously across the pages on which his speeches are reported. He talks while Wilson works—and does not even talk to the point. The American people never yet have offered the Presidency as a prize for shiftiness and scolding. They are not likely to do so in the crisis of a -world war.—Laporte Argos-Bulletin.