The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-10-01
THE nrpoCnisY or rr.

 It is cheeky. to put it mildly. for Mir. Roosevelt to be continually excoriating others for real or alleged dealings with the great corporations. According to the highest form of legal ethics the man who goes into court to seek jus tice should be prepared to do justice. Also. the preacher of righteousness and morality should have a clean record of his own. MT. Roosevelt's letter to My history. for it was written only about four years ago when he was in the midst of a hot campaign for his own election, and when money was badly needed to corrupt the electorate in fa- vor of the Republican national ticket.
 The country should not and will not forget the enormous campaign fund of four years ago when Roosevelt's managers received thousan nds. hundreds of thousands. if not millions of dollars from these same trusts and corpora tions against which he afterwards de- claim d so loudly. To say that Roose-. welt was ignorant of all these corrupt ing proceedings would be as much libel on his knowl- edge and intelligence. eas it would be to argue that he was so blind and
 dull -witted that he had no knowledge of what was being done in his inter- | est.
 Yet this same Roosevelt is now
 loud mouthed preacher of civil right eousness, of moral ethics and of clean politics. the same Roosevelt who owes
 his present position to money poured into his campaign chest by the trusts.
 "who Is he," asks The Pittsburg Sun.
 'to come preaching morality in pol
 itics to others? What has he done to
 punish indicators beyond making grandstand plays by scolding. while they, knowing the secret relations which subsist between them and the men who elected him. can wink while the harangues. Let him that is without sin
 do the stonc- throwing. It takes clean hands and pure heart to play the role
 he is posing In. Let him remove the foul spots from his own record before he essays to attack others. Preachers
 who have so much to say invariably are impelled to this by conscious de- ficiencies in their living and practice"
 An, who Is he and what is he but the beneficiary of trust money handed in freely and willingly by the great corporations because thev knew that their continued prosperity depended on the continuance In power of the party in season and out of season. he rails against the corporations that did so much to make him what he is, and new CT loses an opportunity to assail Dem- ocrats for real or alleged dealings with the trusts that his own party fos- l tered and protected until they have be- come a mighty power in the land. In the days of ancient Rome there existed a cult calling themselves au- gurs. who made fame and fortune by foreteiIing future events. It was said by some writer that two of these au-
 kurs could never look each other in the face without laughing. Each knew the other to be a fraud. and each knew
 that they had a good thing .n their business of deceiving the people. So we should think that Taft and Roose-
 welt would find it difficult to keep a broad grin off their faces when they talk to each other about Democratic
 corruption funds. But they keep 1t up because they think they are deceiving
 the people and helping the Republi- can cause. We don't see how the
 President can look himself in the face in a mirror when he thinks of what
 campaign of false reasoning and hy pocrisy he is carrying on. And Taft
 Is his docile candidate. How can intel ligent and self-respecting Americans
 endorse such a campaign by their votes?