EDITORIALS
Let Some One Answer ON THE twenty-sixth of November, ten days before Congress convened, President Taft issued an executive order, forbidding "any bureau, office, or division chief, or subordinate...
...The American people know of no such effort...
...Standing practically alone...
...Pinchot, dismissed from office, is still an active, vital factor in national affairs...
...Will it promote the public interest...
...Johnson is cartoonist for the Philadelphia North American, an independent newspaper whose able championship of the people's cause is attracting attention far beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania...
...We still believe that striving to pay dividends on watered stock and interest on watered bonds is largely responsible for excessive transportation charges, the Wall Street Journal to the contrary, notwithstanding...
...Herbert Johnson's Cartoons THE CARTOON on the first page of this issue was drawn expressly for La Follette's by Herbert Johnson...
...As a conscientious public servant he felt that he could not overlook it...
...His bearing in the face of a committee that received him coldly and skeptically when it should have been eager to assist him and follow his every clue, created a profound impression upon all his hearers...
...He is not acting as you or I would have done under similar circumstances...
...The suspect at Santiago, Chile, admits that he is Dr...
...Ferrero on the American Unrest IN A SYMPATHETIC study of "the antiplutocratic movement in America," Guglielmo Ferrero, the distinguished Italian historian, declares that the American people have awakened to a realizing sense that many practices of finance and industry are immoral and that the apostles of the new movement are calling upon the— "Honest men of all classes to unite to cleanse the Augean stables, to purify the bourse, the banks, the railroads, the corporations maintaining public services, the life insurance companies and the political and economic life of the country, in order to destroy the power of the trusts and uproot parliamentary and administrative corruption...
...He will contribute others from time to time...
...When they have not been of use to politicians seeking weapons with which to attack their adversaries, these facts have ended by becoming the source, not of moral protest, but of intellectual criticism...
...In his official treatment of the tariff in his New York speech the President might well have found time to discuss the manner in which the Aldrich-Cannon managers discharged this obligation...
...The American masses are not yet imbued with so profound a philosophic spirit...
...His "one idea" was indeed a Great Idea,—an idea that gave him no rest as it grew upon him in all its magnitude...
...More megalomaniacs of the Glavis, Pinchot and joneS kind are needed in the public service...
...ASIDE from what the President in his Lincoln Day speech terms the "implication" that the promised revision was to be downward (and as a matter of common honesty it must be universally admitted that until after the platform was adopted no one understood "tariff revision" to mean anything but revision downward), there was another promise, which cannot be by any subtlety construed into a mere "implication.'' That was the promise that the revision was to be to a level determined by the difference between the cost of production here and that of production abroad...
...Was any attempt made to find out the cost of the do-mestic production of any commodity, save by back-office interviews with representatives of special interests, asking for favors...
...He excels at that...
...never once seeking the spotlight himself nor posing as martyr...
...And if there was none, the party pledge was violated...
...Admitting that there may be certain prejudices against money, prejudices as old as the world, he yet declares: "But the foundation of it is discernible in that simple, strong and perhaps a trifle naive idealism which seems to me a special characteristic of the America we so often accuse of materialism...
...His appeal was to hostile superiors and a public at first indifferent...
...Are there many people in America fat-witted enousrh to believe that Secretary Ballinger would have "authorized" any one to make the coal grab public...
...Their view was well expressed by Commissioner Dennett when he wrote: "Glavis has these coal cases on the brain...
...Europe is altogether mistaken when it indulges in skeptical smiles and unreasoned scorn...
...Ought not the public to be very grateful that some information was given out regarding certain coal land frauds in Alaska before the President issued his order of November twenty-sixth...
...The phrases "how it looks to us" and "not acted as you or I would have done" are indeed illuminating...
...Indeed, there is no other way of accounting for the enormous impression those revelations have made...
...This movement is the instructive reaction of a society that still remembers having lived under a simple and austere code of morals and which rebels against the moral disorder produced by a refined and complicated civilization...
...The people would like to know what he thinks as to the matter of reducing the tariff in accordance with cost of production...
...But for this reason especially Europe should attentively study what is occurring in America and strive to understand it...
...Was this a Pledge or an "Implication...
...Are not the records in all the departments public records...
...The latter cannot differentiate between patriotism and pie...
...Johnson is thus free to depict with his pen and brash the true inwardness of men and affairs...
...He asserts, against the opinion of the world, that the "implication," as he now terms it, of a promise of revision downward was made good...
...Was any honest effort made to find out what is the foreign cost of production of any commodity...
...The fact was that Glavis had stumbled upon a great discovery...
...The country which Europe believes has no soul except for business was turned upside down by a tremendous agitation when once the fundamental operations of modern commerce were brought to light...
...Let us see how the term fits Glavis...
...they seem to ask...
...Glavis WHEN L. R. GLAVIS was discharged from the government service for his "pernicious activity" in uncovering Alaska coal land frauds he was characterized by the Attorney General as laboring under a megalomania That seems to have been the head and front of his offending...
...When before in the history of thip government was it deemed necessary to keep a cabinet officer sitting tight on the lid of his department...
...Why was this order issued...
...more forceful, perhaps, in that he need no longer conform to the requirements of subordination and the regulations of red tape.—Atlanta Constitution...
...In plain English, a megalomaniac is a "swell-head," one attaching undue importance to himself...
...That settles it—it is Cook...
...The party may as well face that fact now...
...When so profound and discerning a student as Ferrero recognizes that "the ideal of democracy is still extremely potent in America" it should give heart to those soldiers of the common good struggling for better conditions and who in the darkness of the conflict may bow and then have their doubts and forget that "thrice armed is he who hatb his quarrel just...
...Let Some One Answer ON THE twenty-sixth of November, ten days before Congress convened, President Taft issued an executive order, forbidding "any bureau, office, or division chief, or subordinate in any department of the government," or "any officer of the army or navy, or marine corps, stationed in Washington, * * * "to respond to any request for information from either House of Congress or any member of Congress, except through, or authorized by, the head of his department...
...and his work—well, his cartoons speak eloquently for themselves...
...it is the protest of eternal, universal, elementary morality, whose laws are instinctively comprehended by every soul not blinded by passion or perverted by vice...
...Johnson's editorials in black and white- It gives us especial pleasure to announce that they are to be a regular feature in La Follette's...
...There is naive humor in the above...
...I have told him how it looks to us and have reminded him of everything we have done for him...
...Appointing a Congressional committee to spend months in investigating the obvious, only to report that food prices are 'rather' high, is giving a stone in reply to an appeal for bread...
...Would it not be better to issue an order making it easy instead of difficult to secure information from any of the officials who are conducting the people's government...
...Moreover, the weight of disinterested testimony supports our view...
...His grasp of conditions is sure and strong...
...it is a protest against all the special, artificial, sophisticated schemes of conduct, full of hypocricy and compromises, which civilization imposes, with its compromises, upon professions, parties, clans and social groups warring with one another...
...Europe little realizes the tragic grandeur of that conflict, for Europe is at present enjoying a truce arrived at by means of very artificial compromises...
...conscious as events developed that it perhaps meant his eventual severance from the public service, yet determined, nevertheless, to be true to his obligations to the people...
...Why be in the service and not come in on the good things...
...And finally, why is it necessary to muzzle every employee, every chief of division, every chief of bureau, every officer, civil and military in the government, excepting the cabinet officers at the head of the Departments—IN SHORT, ARE THERE ANY MORE CUNNINGHAM CLAIMS...
...Lord Bacon declared that an onlooker can judge better of the merits of a conflict than the participants, blinded as they often are by their prejudices and enthusiasms...
...On the stand, under the prolonged ordeal of a four-day cross-examination, Glavis was the incarnation of modesty,—soft-spoken, unobtrusive, unruffled...
...We are sure our readers will like Mr...
...Wall Street Journal...
...buffeted and discouraged at every turn, he yet held to the trail...
...Yet behold what a great fire his little smoking out flame has kindled now that the people are learning the truth...
...What a striking contrast is the attitude of that group of bright, clean-cut, young forestry icen, whose fine spirit of loyalty and adherence to the high ideals inspired by PINCHOT is shown in their splendid stand by Glavis, when such loyalty to a deposed official can scarcely mean anything but great sacrifice to them...
...Those who know the political and economic history of Europe during the past century are well aware that abuses not unlike the ones the leaders of the antiplutocratic movement so bitterly denounce in America were denounced a thousand times in Europe, but without giving rise to any such agitation as is now prevalent in the United States...
...his sympathies democratic...
...History, perhaps, knows nothing more tragic than this battle between elementary, eternal morality and the needs, the passions and the interests determined by the progress of a high civilization...
...Cook...
...Was any serious attempt made to learn what such differences are...
...Immediate and real tariff revision is the more direct relief...
...Have bureau and division chiefs information regarding the public business or the public records wh'ch it would be unsafe to make public until it is inspected by the member of the cabinet who happens for the time being to be the head of the department...
...The movement proves the Puritan traditions and the ideal of democracy are still extremely potent in America, and that, despite their defects, the Americans are as yet simple and upright, less sophisticated and less skeptical than the men of the Old World...
...Men of the old-fashioned public virtue of Glavis and PINCHOT are simply incomprehensible to the political traders that are so untiringly seeking to take over our governmental machinery...
...unshaken in his simple recital of the truth...
...It looks as if he was returning our favors by not standing by us as he ought to...
Vol. 2 • March 1910 • No. 10
