Arizona republican., 1912-09-27
A New Recruit

The most surprising development of the presidential campaign is the dec Iaration of Judge Peter s. Grosscup of Chicago, lately retired from the bench of the United States circuit court, in favor of the progressive party. The accession of Judge Cross cup is of doubtful value to the party and will almost certainly be an em bafrassment to the leading news papers which are now supporting pro gressive principles.
 Of all the federal judges who have been assailed as d corruptionist. as a tool of the corporations, and an enemy of labor, Judge Grosscup for years has been the principal target. He has been held up especially as the strong est argument in favor of a recall of the Judiciary and of the recall of judi cial decisions.
 Judge Grosscup, it will be remem- bered. wrote the opinion of the cir cult court reversing the judgment of Judge Landis in the Standard Oil case, and in this connection, it may be re- called, MT. Roosevelt in a recent speech, alluding to that decision, criti- cfsed the reversal
 The demand for the resignation of Judge Grosscup came almost eX- clusively from the newspapers which are now progressive and when he finally resigned, they printed the news with glee and more than hinted that he had retired to avoid impeach 1nent: that he could well afford to retire, having grown rich with the gifts of the corporations which he had i favored while on the bench.
 1 The Republican is in receipt of a copy of long statement by Judge l Grosscup giving his reasons, or, rather, his one reason, for espousing the cause of the progressives. for he deals alone with the policies of the three parties with respect to cor porations.
 l In this he misrepresents the re- publican policy as enunciated in the national platform which he says means the old-time kind of compe- tition" of the period of our fathers, contemporary with the talloW candle and the stage coach.
 | What Judge Grosscup means is, he 1 is not opposed to the trust plank of the republican platform; not to any public utterance by MT. Taft, but to prosecuting and dissolving trusts whose existence is a violation of the antitrust law. Judge Grosscup's ob- l jection to the democratic platform is still stronger for he says it proposes the smashing of every business sue cessful enough to have succeeded"
 The progressive platform with res pect to corporations is in full accord with Judge Grosscup's long main- tained views There should be no hard and fast rules laid down for I0eT cOn0ucI. 1Hey SHOulu IlOb bC regulated but supervised. No line of inherent right and wrong can be laid down. The trust problem, he believes, is one of relative right and wrong He would preserve the Sherman law as a general but not a specific rule of conduct, to be applied according to the judgment of the supervisOraI power The law would thus, be al
 times effective and at other times 8
 dead letter as an industrial commits
 sion such as is proposed in the pro-
 gressive platform, should decide.
 The statement of Judge GrosscuI
 is curiously inconsistent for in two
 paragraphs he declares that the pro-
 posed republican and democratic poli-
 cies would paralyze business. In an
 other para graph he declares that the
 policies mean nothing and that there
 fore the trusts favor them.
 We shall await with interest th'
 welcome which the progressive lead CTS will extend to this new and dis
 tinguished recruit, whose name a
 late as a year ago was linked witt the oppression of labor and the com . |