New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1915-08-02
MURDOCH SURE
OF 1915 VICTORY
FOR BULL MOOSE
Committee Chairman'S
Canvass Responsible for
Optimistic Forecast.
PERSONAL POLITICS
TO HAVE NO WEIGHT
Candidates. To Be Subsidiary to
Platform Planks in Progress
Sive Party's Convention.

Mount Pleasant, Iowa, Aug. 1.-Vic-
tor Murdoch, of Kansas, chairman of
the Progressive National Committee,
made the following statement to-day
u have just completed a three
months personal canvass of the stu
alton with the Progressives in the
Central West and on the Pacific Coast,
and after making it am ready TO say
1atfootedly that We Progressives are
going into the 1916 fight as a party and
to win.
Moreover, q meeting of represent
alive Progressives held this month in
New York City reported the same con
ditions in the East that / have found
in the West, and they are lining up
for the next battle. This also is the
sentiment of the Progressive National
Committee. We will hold our ma
tional convention early and nominate a
ticket.
Platform the Crucial Issue.
"The great convention battles Of
will be over platforms. The storm
will rage not in the committee on
credentials, but in the committee on
resolutions. The Bourbon Republi-
can leadership will not only insist on
a standpat candidate, but will fight for
an unstinted and unequivocal indorse-
ment of the administration of William
II. Taft including the Payne-Aldrich
tariff bill.
THE Democratic leadership likewise
will point with pride to the equally la
mentable Simmons-U Underwood tariff
bill, and against a Bryan insurrection
of the first magnitude will cancel the
one-term Presidential pledge and other
Bryan propaganda, and the Progress
sives will reiterate and re-emphasize
their Chicago platform of 1912. That
platform remains the most nearly per
feet uttersnce of the principles Of
Abraham Lincoln of modern times.
Both in its protest against the in
roads Of privilege fattening on an era
of gross materialism and in its practi-
cal programme Of concrete economic
remedies, the Progressive platform has
become to hundreds of thousands of
aggressive Americans the Ark of the
Covenant, and there is not q township
anywhere without its group of Hittites
devoted wholly and solely to its preser-
walton.
"The Progressives have the right
plan for the tariff and other economic
issues, including the trust problem.
Tariff Law Failure.
"The Democratic leadership, after
two and half years trial, has signslly
failed in solving the nations economic
questions. It's tariff law, slammed to-
gether under the old log-rolling lead
ership, is utterly unproductive of any
of the results previously claimed for
il. Its trust legislation founders, its
attempts at the development of Ameri-
can an-going craft have fzzled.
THAT this is the judgment Of the
voter is ample evidence of the ire
mendous anti-Democratic sentiment
that has developed at the polls at
virtually every election in the last two
years. At many Of these elections the
voter cast a Republican ballot because
he believed that the Republican lead
ership had learned its lesson and would
hereafter take the Progressive path.
"But now the voters know for GER
tainty that when the Republican lead
ership has been restored to power. it
has shown more, net less. reactionary
tendencies. as is notably evidenced by