The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, October, 1913: Vol. LXXXVI. New Series: Vol. LXIV. May to October, 1913Various
General
The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, October, 1913: Vol. LXXXVI. New Series: Vol. LXIV. May to October, 1913
Various
Periodicals
It is difficult to understand how under these conditions
self-respecting men who in good faith uphold popular government can
continue in the party. But it is entirely obvious why those in control
of the party and its main supporters in the political, financial,
and newspaper worlds advocate the system. They do it from precisely
the same motives that actuate them in opposing direct primaries, in
opposing the initiative and the referendum, in opposing the right of
the people to control their own officials, in opposing the right of
the people as against the right of the judges to determine what the
Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, shall permit in the
way of legislation for social and industrial justice. All persons who
sincerely disbelieve in the right and the capacity of the people for
self-rule naturally, and from their point of view properly, uphold a
system of party government like that which obtains under the Republican
National Committee. For precisely similar reasons they antagonize
every proposal to give the people command of their own governmental
machinery. For precisely similar reasons they uphold the divine right
of the judiciary to determine what the people shall be permitted to
do with their own government in the way of helping the multitudes of
hard-working men and women of whose vital needs these well-meaning
judges are entirely ignorant.
THE DEMOCRATIC DIFFERENCE
From the Democratic party as at present constituted we are radically
divided both because of the utter incoherence within that party
itself, and because the doctrines to which it is at present committed
are either fundamentally false or else set forth with a rhetorical
vagueness which makes it utterly futile to attempt to reduce them to
practice. The Democratic party can accomplish nothing of good unless it
deliberately repudiates its campaign pledges--unless it deliberately
breaks the promises it solemnly made in order to acquire power. Such
repudiation necessarily means an intellectual dishonesty so great
that no skill in rhetorical dialectics can cover or atone for it.
To win power by definite promises, and then seek to retain it by the
repudiation of those promises, would show a moral unfitness such as
not to warrant further trust of any kind. Therefore we must proceed
upon the assumption that the leaders of the Democracy meant what they
said when they were seeking to obtain office. Their only performance so
far, at the time that this article is written, is in connection with
the tariff and with a discreditable impotence in foreign affairs. As
a means of helping to solve great industrial and social problems, the
tariff is merely a red herring dragged across the trail to divert our
people from the real issues. The present tariff bill has been handled
by precisely the same improper methods by which the Payne-Aldrich
law was enacted. The only safe way of treating the tariff, that of
a permanent non-partizan, expert tariff commission, providing for
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