Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1916-10-27

eoh OF 0foVer cleveland mad been FRESH
dent. The futility inhered solely in Mr..
Wilson himself. If President Wilson had,
stood by the honor and the interests of
the United States in this matter; if he
had insisted upon a full investigation be-
fore action; if he had insisted upon arbi-
tration and had announced that If there
was any attempt to tie up the traffic of
the United States he would use the entire.
power of the United States to keep the ar
teries of traffic open, l would have ap-t
plauded him and supported him. But, to
take such action needed courage. It need,
ed disinterestedness 1t was necessary that
the man taking it should put duty to
the nation first and political and personal
considerations last. What President Will
son did was to permit the overriding Of
justice by appeals to brute force.
He says that it would have been "fu-i
tile" to show courage and stand up for
the right. From the standpoint of the ma
ton, the worst type of futility in a Presi-
dent is to fail to stand up for the right.
President Wilson felt it was futile to op-
pose these men, exactly as President Bu-
chanan, his spiritual forbear, felt in 1850,
that it was futile, to oppose secession. That,
type of futility gives the real measure Of
the man who practices it. What Blu
chanan considered futile Lincoln made
heroic.
l champion Mr.. Hughes as against Mr..
Wilson because in every such crisis Mr..
Wilson, by his public acts, has shown that
he will yield to fear, that he will not yield
to justice; whereas the public acts of
MI. Hughes have proved him to be in
capable of yielding in such a crisis to any
threat, whether made by politicians, cor
porations or labor leaders.
I have always stood for the rights Of
labor. You miners before me know that.
! stood for you, and l incurred the hostil-
ity of the greatest financial powers of the
land by SO doing, and l have felt that hos
tility in public life ever since. But ] did
not care, because I knew that my course
was right. I stood by you because I be-
lieved you were right. If I had been the
type of man who was willing to stand by
you when you were wrong, l would never
have dared to stand by you when you were
right, against such opposition as at that
time l encountered. / have stood for short
er hours of labor. I have stood for a bet
ter wage for the laborer, for better housing
conditions; for giving the laboring wage
worker better living conditions and better
and safer working conditions. | have stood
to give him and his wife and children the
chance to make of themselves all that
American citizens should make of them
selves. l have stood, and always shall
stand, for everything in the interest Of
justice for the laboring man. But ! have
always stood, and always shall stand,
against yielding anything through fear or
because of threats. I believe in the great
principle of arbitration. / believe in in
voking the action of the government to
help labor; but I also believe to invoke
such action will in the end be %ruinous to
labor, as well as to the country, if it is
not exercised with wisdom and fearless
ness and the spirit of exact justice to all
the parties concerned. If these questions
are not settled right, then some time they
will nave to be unsettled, and infinite trou-
Bile is thereby laid up for us in the future.
The only way we can settle them right is
by deliberation, after all the facts have
been put before a disinterested and COM
petent body, and the Judgment of that
body obtained thereon. This is the course
that even now ought to be pursued as re-
CARDS the Adamson bill. It's operation has
been deferred until after Congress assem-
bles. Congress should hold it up until a
proper commission shall investigate the en-
tire subject; and then the Adamson bill
should be enacted either unchanged, or
with whatever changes and additions
the report of such dispassionate COM
mission may show to be desirable and
necessary.
Labor leaders who are shortsighted may
at the moment get from a man in public
az - IL - 80 l. - ---z
than from a man who is actuated by JUS
tice. But the laboring people as a whole
cannot afford to accept such gains. If I'M
just legislation is given them for improper
reasons, then unjust legislation against
them may be enacted for improper reasons.
More than any other people in the country
the wage workers should insist on just and
fair action. There is grave reason to be-
lieve that in the course President Wilson
has followed he did violence to his own
real convictions. Until he became a can
didate for Office, he was a bitter, ungen-
erous and often unjust critic of labor
unions. I nave before me speeches and
letters of his made and written in 1905,
1907 and 1909, in which Mr.. Wilson says
among other things hat Tabor unions
drag the highest man down to the level
VI Tile lOWtsI, dnQ III spCdhluS u Tile cap
i~talistic class, he says that "there is an
other equally formidable enemy and it is
that class formed by the labor leaders of
this country" and again "I am a fierce
partisan of the open shop" and again "The
usual standard of the employee in our day
is to give as little as he can for his wages.
Labor is standardized by trade unions and
this is the standard to which it is made
to conform. I need not point out how
economically disastrous such regulation of
labor is. Our economic supremacy may be
lost because the country grows more and
more full of improbable servants" These
were the utterances of Mr.. Wilson when
he was president of a university and had
neither fear of nor desire to profit by the
labor vote. In Mr.. Wilson's History of
the American People" he explicitly stated
that the Chinese ought not to be excluded
from this country because it is better to
have them here than it is to have the i'm