The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1916-08-11

better than President Wilson. He is peculiarly in position to know tHfs better than anybody else. He has unquestionably weighed the chances of success and defeat from every pos ,sible angle, and has decided to steer the country clear of war if there is a possibility of doing so without the sacrifice of national honor and dig nity And with the small array of tools which we have for war pur- poses he has done mighty we'll to accomplish as much as he has Those who look up to country before they do to party are sure to agree with this argument. It is well enough to fight If necessity demand, if you have the machinery to light with, but 1t Is poor policy to pick fight if you have nothing to back up your fighting arr gument but wind.
 Judging by MT. Hughes acceptance speech, he would have gone to war with one or more countries had he been in MT. Wilson's place during the past two years. What would he have fought the enemy with in this event? Where would he have obtained the arms and equipment with which to
 
 he had made demands which were scornfuIly rejected? Private cprpor- lations have been stretching every nerve and devoting every energy in order to i'll foreign munitions orders ever since the opening of the present great war. and they are only at the brink of deliveries today. and those
 deliveries are small ones up to the present time.
 { Every channel of transportation has been clogged and congested in an ef- fort to deliver machinery. tools. ma 1terial and stock to munitions manu- lecturers all over the eastern part of the country for the past two years. and all deliveries have not been made yet. Factories throughout the union have striven day and night, working to their fullest capacity to i'll orders in order that the munitions concerns might have the necessary machinery with which to get out their orders, and the demands for machinery are almost as pressing today as they were two years ago. Railroads have been congested beyond their carrying ca pac5ty to such an extent that 1t has been necessary to place embargo after embargo upon deliveries for many months, and yet not enough arms have been turned out with which to arm and equip a modern army for either aggressive or defensive pur- poses, yet MT. Hughes has the au- dacity to intimtee that President Will son should have backed up the de-
 mands moro strenuously than he did against the countries with which we have been at loggerheads at various times since the European war and the Mexican troubles began. Again II arise to ask, in the event that Mir Hughes had been in Mr. Wilson's place and had made stronger demands than the President, and in the event that those demands had been scorned,
 would he have declared war against the country or countries which lscorned him? Had he declared war, or been tnstrumental in such a dec- 1aration, what would his troops have fought with. their bare hands? <
 The whole yum and substance of the
 Hughes acceptance speech is that it is composed moro of bluff than of sub stance It is weak in it's every line and paragraph. for the reason that it appeals more to prejudice than it does to reason. It Is bread and meat for those who were born, have lived and who will die Republicans. For Ameri- can thinkers, however. those who prize IAmericanism more than they do par
 tisanship it Is the weakest kind of an largument That's the reason why the
 rank and file of the Progressive party will not vote for MT. Hughes, but for MT. Wilson instead The other reason
 why thousands of Progressives will vote for Mir VVHlsny, fr barau.a <t,a,y
 refuse absolutely to be used as a mere
 football and do not propose to be kicked into any party-not even by IT. R.
 1 WILLIAM H. AVIS. Of the Progressive State Central committee.
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