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?
Simmered down, Mr. Roosevelt’s Progressive Party stands simply for this: We are still to have trusts and tariffs, but only such trusts and tariffs as Mr. Roosevelt wants. We are still to have a master class who own all of the industries and a servant class who do all of the work, but masters and servants must conduct themselves as Mr. Roosevelt provides. Masters may still hold out for profits and servants may die for lack of opportunity to work, but so long as Mr. Roosevelt, at Armageddon, is “fighting for the Lord,” what of it?
Such is not Mr. Roosevelt’s reasoning, but it might as well be. Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson, like all other “radical” politicians, are incapable of rendering any great service to the American people for the simple reason that they do not strike at the great wrong. The great wrong is the ownership, by a small class, of the great class’s means of life. A people who cannot support themselves without asking the permission of others are little more than slaves. We are such a people.
“Radicals” who promise, if given power, to free us, only mock us. Such gentlemen are not radicals at all. The word “radical” is derived from a Greek word meaning “root.” A real radical is one who goes to the roots of things. But radicals like Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wilson go to the roots of nothing.
The only way to go to the root of anything is to go to it.