Omaha daily bee., 1912-06-26
Cause Of the People Damaged by
Spectacle at Chicago.
SHOWS T. RS LUST OF POWER
Admitted the Wisdom of Time
Tried Custom.
DANGER APPARENTLY PASSED
ton, jefferson and Their Sue
cessors Preserved by Sem
timent of VOTERS

in his address as temporary chairman ol
the democratic national committee said
I'VE meet while the hills yet echo the
wild cries of liar, thief and traitor ant
furious walls of fraud. bribery, treachery
and corruption; and our ears weary witt
the din of articulate shrieking and pas
sionate vilification of the most shame
full brawl of our political history.
"Our candidates, however, are, with
out exception, men of such lofty mien thai
we meet immune from the distempel
which seized the Chicago convention, and
privileged to discharge a solemn duty
calmly, deliberately, seriously. ..
1.-THE cause of government by the peo-
pie. the world over has been materially
checked by the disgraceful brawl which
terminated in the bedlam Of Chicago.
Every good citizen has been put to shame
by the brutality and the abuse which
characterized this wrangle between a
president and an eX-president Gratitude,
friendship. party loyalty, patriotism and
common decency were forgotten in the
trouble The assault upon the unwrit-
tcu plOiADiiOit dSdiboI o. thiiu hSAiiA
made in the wild scramble for the re-
publican nomination, warns ps of the
vital necessity of Incorporating in our
constitution a safeguard against repeated
terrns.
In the beginning Of our constitution
making it was urged by delegates partici-
pating that safety required constitutional
limitation of the period of years one man
might hold the office of president. His
tory warned them of the coming of a
man whose Unsuitable lust of power would
be as consuming as Caesars, towering
high above his love of country. The dan
ger seemed, even to the pessimists, to
have passed with the establishment of a
precedent by Washington, jefferson and
their successors. Indeed, where lives the
man who has not either heard or said
that an unwritten law forbids more than
two terms. and il anyone could be SO
foolhardy as to seek further he would he
crushed by the wrath Of patriotic and
intelligent people.
Quotation from Roosevelt.
The man who split his party at Chi
cago. once recognized the third term
tradition and once acknowledged its ap-
plication to his situation. On the eve Of
his triumph in 1904, he said: b..
The wise custom which limits the
president to two terms regards the sub
stance and not the fern, and under no
circumstances will I be a candidate for
or accept another nomination.
Wrong in this year of grace, he was
right in that. Peradventure he was
honest with his soul and he may have
confessed to it that even president nay
be tempted to resort to sordid devices
and shameless opportunities to gain his
ambition. If so he was in mental condi
tion to realize to the full the danger to
the republic involved in setting aside a
custom constituting the only hulwark
against the assaults of men whose ambi-
ton chokes their patriotism and whose
selfish desire for personal victory and
power throttles those moral scruples with
which they may once have been en-
dowed.
would the man who threw his hat in
the ring and sought to slug his opponent
over the ropes in his fight for a third
term rest satisfied with its achievement?
Clearly his lust of power would have
brooked no such limitation. A third term
would but have whetted his desire for
more, and as the terms slipped away each
renewal would discover greater injury to
our constitution, to the form of govern
ment established under it, and to every
legal curb on his impeIious will. This IS
the man who menaced us with an increase
of federal power by usurpation of state
rights and without authority of constitu,
tional amendment; the man who took the
Jsthmus of Panama and let congress de-
bate about it afterward. the man who
having enough money to send the fleet
1t without sanction of congress, leaving II
TO appropriate the money for the return
when congress deemed that necessary.
This is the man who advocated federal
Incorporation for the increase of power
at Washington and the Tightening of legal
burdens on the corporations; the man
who authorized the absorption of the Ten
nessee Coal and Iron company by the
Steel trust; the man who by many such
drastic acts and by unnumbered words
has sought to batter down our statutory
and constitutional safeguards.
Talks About Tariff,