Imperial Valley press., 1912-07-29

complete the formalities of electing a
president.
Republican National conventions
since the close of the Civil war have
been machine conventions, each one
in all essentials like the preceding
one. The Republican national commit
tee really has been the convention, for,
owing to the enormous power it has
in making the temporary roll, it, in
fact, is chief factor in the selection of
the nominee. The course of the
national committee at Chicago was ira
ditionally accurate. 1t was antagOnis-
tic TO one leading candidate and favor
ed another, not because OF personal
loyalty or because the committees ma
iority thought him the stronger candi-
date, but for purely selfish narsonal,
political, machine reasons. There was
no patriotic or party consideration in
the alignment for Taft by the commit
tee, or large majority of it. That
alignment came because the old guard
politicians, the followers of the old
system, the members of the old ma
chine, driven to their last stand. de-
termined to hold all they could, to keep
their individual grips on as much of
the organization as they could save,
and the only way they could hold any
thing was to use Taft as their medium.
Not a man wanted TO nominate Taft,
but their kind of politics made Taft's S
nomination imperative, for the nOmi-
nation of Roosevelt spelled ruin for
them personally and politically, and
they knew it. They preferred to name
Taft and take the chances of defeat,
rather than to name Roosevelt and
take the chances of party victory but
personal elimination.
Reduced to it's simplest terms, the
Chicago convention was a contest be-
tween the men who controlled the ma
chinery on the one hand and the peO-
pie on the other. The machine won
won by narrow margin, and won
nevertheless. In four years the people
will have their forces-as put into op-
Grafton by the extension of the pri-
mary system that is inevitable-suf-
ficiently powerful in scope to make
another national convention on the old
lines an impossibilty. The machine
can never win again, for there never
will be another machine.
No convention of the future will al
low national committee to decide
contests or make up temporary roll
No convention of the future will give
the national committee the power to
say who shall and who shall not sit
in the convention, thus making the
committee virtually the president
maker instead of the delegates chosen
by the people. All that is over, gone.
But-and here is the point superficial
or eXcitable observers OF political af-
fairs in this country did not consider
fully-this Taft and Sherman result
was inevitable from the first, not be-
cause of any popular demand for Taft
and Sherman, but because not suf-
ficient states had primary laws to end
the domination of the machine Pri-
mary laws in two or three more states
than those that had them would have
made the nomination of Roosevelt
sure, but those primary laws did not
exist. Hence the machine retained
control and all the machine methods
were invoked, as it was certain they
would be from the first and as | point
ed out in these columns some months
ago.
The southern delegates were utiliZ-
ed In reality Taft was nominated by
delegates from states where no Repub-
lican majority ever has been obtained,
and where in many instances there is
no Republican vote worth mentioning
He was nominated by the force and
power of federal patronage, by the