The women of the country have forced Mr. Roosevelt into the advocacy of woman suffrage. Mr. Roosevelt used to say that Mrs. Roosevelt was “only lukewarm” toward woman suffrage, and that his interest in it was the same. After the women of California gained the ballot, and Mr. Roosevelt again became a candidate for the Presidency, he changed from “lukewarm” to very hot. From that moment, woman suffrage became not only a right, but a necessity. Of course, the fact that women vote in several western states that he hoped to carry had no part whatever in changing his opinion. Mr. Roosevelt is not that kind of a man. Mr. Roosevelt’s 1912 platform—or “contract with the people,” as he calls it—bristles with new devices and new plans for the public good. Some of Mr. Roosevelt’s plans would probably help a little—provided he could get a Congress that would put them into effect, and courts that would declare them constitutional. Mr. Lincoln probably could have helped the black slaves a little if he had made it a legal obligation upon slave owners to provide each negro, semi-annually, with a red necktie and a paste diamond. Mr. Lincoln might have gone even further and provided that each negro should be supplied, during the water-melon season, with all the melons he could eat. Instead, he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. Mr. Roosevelt’s present political program is by no means an emancipation proclamation to the American people. It unties no knots, nor cuts any. It bristles with Socialists’ phrases, but it does not bristle with Socialist remedies. “This country belongs to the people who inhabit it”—an assertion that appears in Mr. Roosevelt’s platform—is a Socialist phrase. But Mr. Roosevelt’s method of giving the people their own is not Socialistic. The Socialist method is to give it to them. Mr. Roosevelt’s method is to appoint “strong” commissions to regulate the country that the people own, but do not control or enjoy. Again and again in his platform Mr. Roosevelt fervently advocates a “strong” commission to do this or do that. If the word “strong” in a platform were sufficient to make a commission “strong” in action we might expect the commissions that Mr. Roosevelt advocates to be as strong as any commission can be that is trying to regulate other people’s property. But we do not believe the word “strong” in a platform makes a commission strong. Mr. Roosevelt, always preaching strenuosity, nevertheless appointed, during his Presidency, some exceedingly poor officials. Since Mr. Roosevelt, the originator of “strong” commissions as a cure for the poverty that is produced by robbery, failed as he did, what should we expect from such commissions if they were appointed by Presidents of the ordinary Wall Street stripe?