New Britain herald., 1916-12-02
THE GRAND INQUISITOR

General so there should be an Inquisi- tor-General of the United States ; Lest anyone hasten to advance the suggestion before the Presidents in augural in March next year and thus steal d march we hereby nominate for the new position in the Cabinet the
 Oracle of Oyster Bay. There is no nobler, no greater, no grander inquisi- tor in the United States today than the Colonel. He has just completed,
 unoft1cially, a judicial inquiry into the recent national election, impanel- ling himself as jury and presiding over the inquest as judge. His yer dict is rendered in the current number of The Metropolitan It is to the ef- feet that the American people, for the most part, are made up of a strain of humanity somewhat akin to that which exists in China. He fears for the Chinafication of the United States. It is d high compliment the Colonel pays his fellow citizens. Hap oily, there were some who did not hit
 
 the sawdust trail, who did not vote for Wilson, who remained elegant to the last and held cut for Hughes and Roosevelt. But for these there is no telling what might eventually hap pen to the nation.
 The Colonel in his inquisition finds that the result of the election is more easy to explain than it had been to foretoll Then he goes on to explain. He explains that the people of the nation were too busy to delve into the great problems that beset them on all sides and so they responded to the appea. that "He kept us out of war" and that we were prosperous. The average man" did not possess the 'VlsIon' to disregard such an appeal says the Colonel It would have been to the credit of the average man" if he had disregarded this appeal, but the fact that he did not disregard it merely means that we were not able to make the issue clear to his eyes," Otherwise, thinks the Colonel, the mained morally obtuse." That is a terrible indictment of the leverage man but incomparable to the slander cast at "the people, whom the Colonel believes tend to look at such crimes as the invasion of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusitania as anal ogous to disasters such as earthouakes and fires, catastrophes that should properly excite a discreet sympathy, out which do not call for "any action hat would jeOpardize the comfort and we'll being of those not immediately Insofar as our people preserve this attitude, says the Colonel, they will steadily tend to the Chinese level And then the Colonel goes further and shows how the Hughes candidacy was and why. Hear him.
 Moreover, there was a real blurr- ing of the issues because for the first three years of Mir. Wilson's term the leaders among his nominal party op- ponents either feared to criticise him at all, or else split, half of them as- sailing him because on some given policy he had gone too far and the other half because he had not gone far enough.
 "When a public man who had for three years praised each of MT. Will sons acts separately, turned around and during the campaign condemned them all collectively, he did not carry conviction. Nor was 1t possible to exert the full opposition strength against him when the leadership for three years had been such that until the campaign opened it was not pos slble to foretell exactly what ground the opposition would be asked to take.'
 The paragraph immediately pre- examination of someone's conscience and the medita ion thereafter. In flourish of rhetoric the Colonel very skillfully hides the identity of the public man" who had for three years praised each of Mr. Wilson's public acts and then turned around and con- demned them collectively. Surely it was not the Colonel who did this. Was it Mr. Hughes? Was it Mr. Taft |? There is no answer. The Colonel re- fuses to tell. What he does tell is how MT. Hughes was defeated; yet he does not tell that completely. He fails to mention the Old Guard of the Republican party that was repudiated by the Progressives and how those Progressives refused to let the Colonel back into the fold to the mystic music of rustling leaves from a check book