Life — April 7, 1910 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there is Life there's Hope VOL. LY APRIL 7, 191 No. M32 LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY JOA MITCHRLE, Prete, A MILLER, Sec'y and Treas 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York. HIS Fashion Num - ber, something ® on that ject. Is Uncle ~~ Soe Cannon now sub- out of style? Completely and hopelessly. Every- body knows it except Uncle Joe. At this writing he persists in regarding himself as the glass of Republicanism and the mould of Regularity. But he is deluded. He belongs as conclusive- ly to the past as crinoline and poke bonnets, Quakers, Shakers and vari- ous peculiar people keep on wearing poke bonnets, and there will doubtless be those who will continue to clothe themselves in the Uncle Joe political habiliments. But the only consequence will be that they will look queer and remind every one that the fashion has changed. The Insurgent cut is the proper thing for Republican spring suits in Washington. Whenever the President gets new clothes his tailor will tell him so, and though he may not care him- self to be in the height of fashion, he might as well recognize what the fash- ion is. In the Fourteenth Congres- sional District of Massachusetts, which went Republican by 14,000 last year, Foss, running as a Democrat, has beaten Buchanan, a Cannon-Repub- lican, by over 5,000 plurality. The Uncle Joe styles are back numbers in Massachusetts, and the Payne-tariff styles also. They are both out of the same old Republican fashion book, and both were much in favor in their day And at Albany the clock has struck for the Barnes-Woodruff style of Re- publican politics and the Conners- Murphy style of Democratic polities. being the* AIC ERE: Somebody said that when the bell tolled the other day for Thomas C. Platt it marked the closing of a po- litical era. HE new style in politics—what is it? Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, one of the most articulate of contemporary radi cals, quotes President Hadley as say- ing in a book that “the fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other.” The new style in poli- tics seems to be largely a fashion got- ten up by voters who think that prop- erty owners have been getting more than their share of constitutional rights, and want a fairer division. The objection to Uncle Joe has been that he was the legislative bulwark of the property owners as against the voters, when he ought, as Speal have favored neither. The objection to Mr. Aldrich is the same; to the Payne tariff of the same species; to Woodruff and Barnes very much the same; to Ballinger as against Pinchot a good deal the same so far as the facts in that issue are understood. So long as the voters want no more than their share of constitutional rights there is very little to be scared at in the new fashion. They certainly have a constitutional right to the sort of tariff they prefer as soon as they can show the necessary votes to com- mand it. Besides, almost all the voters are owners of more or less property, and almost all the property owners are voters, so the line that divides the ad- herents of the new fashion in Repub- lican politics from the backers of the old styles is not a division between Haves and Have-Nots. It is rather a split in the party of the Haves—be- tween property owners who have been getting more than they were entitled to, and like it, and property owners who think they have been getting less than they were entitled to, and don't like it. The first group feels that it is sacrilege to buck against that great rule of Scripture, “To him that hath shall be given.” But the second group retorts, “We also have. We have the votes, and to us it is going to be given, or we shall know why.” This seems a fine, healthy constitu- tional state of things. It has split the Republican party in two, and left the old style Republicans very much too weak to cope with a coali- tion of new style Republicans and Democrats. The whole Middle West is new style Republican and ready to vote Democratic whenever the choice is between that and Cannonism. Wherever the Democrats can put up candidates and put forward intentions that deserve to win they will have a chance to next fall, President Taft scems powerless to control his party. Political leadership is not in- cluded in the list of his admirable and useful accomplishments. The most he can do for his party seems to be to ad- minister the Government uprightly, recommend ‘certain details of legisla- tion, and enforce to the best of his ex- cellent ability the laws that his prede- cessor left him. LL that is very much to do, but seems not to be enough to fetch the Republican party through the pres- ent crisis. Hence the liveliness of the interest in the resumption of communi- cation between Colonel Roosevelt and mankind. There is a political magician who can pull anything that is called for out of a second-hand military hat! Wait till he gets back, and then you'll see! We shall see some Rough Riders in New York, and immense enthusiasm-— but how much more? Mr, Roosevelt sowed the crop and Mr. Taft is har- vesting it. It is a valuable crop. What is there to do but to get it in? We don’t see what Mr. Roosevelt can do about it. He might run for Governor of New York next fall and be elected; but he won't do that. We wish he might go to the Senate to succeed Mr. Depew, and stay there, if he liked it, for the next twenty years. There he might do much to help Mr. Taft and much to benefit the country, and super- vise the transformation of the Repub- lican party from Old Style to New. win comicbooks.com