Life — March 29, 1928 — page 16: what you’re looking at

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

MARCH 29, 1928 2369 “While there is Life there’s Hope” is spring now. iven in these parts things begin to come up. Some things have not waited for spri but have come up when they got ready. Wash- ington is a little south of us. Inter- esting new oil scandals have come up there, the season being earlier. They involve the movement of certain mon- eys originally proceeding from Mr. Sinclair, the oil producer, to the busi- ness managers of the Republican party. It is an interesting story, as all newspaper readers know, and s: Mr. Will Hays seems to feel a good deal disfigured about ** and it is true that the transactic attributed to him in relation to it were very curious. Senator Borah is shocked and wants the oil money to be care- fully and completely wiped out of the Republican machine and paid back to Mr. Sinclair, who has to em- ploy a good many lawyers now and may need reimbursement. Well, it is all depressing. Here are nominating conventions less than three months off and all this mess right in the middle of the party which feels itself to be the country sole hope for salvation and pros- perity. Nevertheless, right on top of these eruptions, Wall Street has been having a Bull Market. What taste! Who is the friend of Wall Street if not the G. O. P.? Seeing it distressed Wall Street has a Bull Market. Extraordinary ! NE interesting and sturdy plant has not waited till spring to come up. He has been coming up all winter. From time to time as occa- sion offered he has raised his head and lifted his voice. That plant is Dr. Murray Butler, college presi- dent and political teacher. None of the other politicians, not even Mr. Borah, has as much to say as Dr. Butler and has also the will and capacity to say it. He is concerned about the way we are being governed and with the direction in which our Government is tending. He is scandalized at the Eighteenth Amendment, not on account of rum but on account of the Constitution. He keeps rubbing it in that the spirit and purpose of the Constitution have been violated by that Amendment. That is true and it is useful to expound it, Dr. Butler would re- store to us constitutional government as it was intended to be. He would not even have us governed by the Senate, of which he says that “no public body in the world is so vain or so given to self-laudation.” He describes it as having successfully in- vaded the powers of the Executive, the powers of the House and the powers of the Judiciary. He wants to rouse a public opinion to restrain not only the Senate but the Wash ton bureaucracy which he finds in- creasingly meddlesome with private concerns. OW Dr. Butler is a faithful Re- publican who can be relied on to vote the Republican ticket on Election Day, but certainly he does not find it a part of his political duty to hold his tongue the rest of the year about topics that need discussion. The only other Republican that says much of anything is Mr. Borah. Mr. Vil- lard has been writing him up in the Nation and feels that he is not so useful as he ought to be with his very substantial abilities and gifts of discourse. Mr. Villard can't quite make out what is the matter with him, but he does say that the trouble with him is himself, and intimates that he lacks some fervor of faith or consciousness of obligation which might let loose his whole powers and make a great national figure of him, NE finds in a letter to the Times of the Rev. Edwin Knox Mitchell of the Hartford Theological Seminary these words: “The Chris- tian way to temperance is strait and narrow. If liquor maketh my brother to offend, I will drink no more liquor so long as I live.” But how about meat? St. Paul said, “It is good neither to eat flesh nor to drink wine nor anything whereby thy brother stumble.” If Bro. Mitchell's Christian way to temper- ance excludes drink, it excludes meat just as much if it disagrees with some other brother. None of the authoritative voices of the New Testament forbade wine, but none of them derived his theology from Ohio, as Bro. Mitchell did. He does wrong to base Prohibition on the New Testament. So long as drinks were left where the New 1 left them the tide against ‘het ran strong and the progress towards tem- perance was satisfactory. But when Prohibition was written into the or- ganic law where it did not belong, the tide turned and it has been run- ning against temperance ever since. That is the trouble. The Eight- eenth Amendment is contrary to the whole spirit and intention, not only of the Constitution of the United States, but of the New Testament. LOODS are over-supplied. A mountain in Santos, Brazil, slip- ping down into the city, is crowded out of the headlines by the Los An- geles dam-break with its direful list of fatalities and losses! What ails this continent, this hemi- sphere, this planet? Has Omnipo- tence concluded that our current civilization is a wash-out and might as well realize it? M4Y0R WALKER does the jack- anapes end of the Mayor's job very acceptably and the other end better at least than Hylan did. With hobbles and a curfew he might yet win a substantial reputation as a public servant. §. Martin. comicbooks.com