THE EDITORIAL

The Hoover League wished to submit this editorial to the CRIMSON in the form of a comment or communication, but, as space did not permit the CRIMSON to print it, the League has had it published in this form for circulation.

Because of the editorial's clear and accurate statement of the issues involved in the campaign for Herbert Hoover, the League is reprinting it entire. It is significant that the New York World, a Democratic paper, comes out for Hoover regardless of what party may nominate him.

In the judgment of The World the best equipped and best qualified man to succeed Woodrow Wilson as President of the United States is Herbert C. Hoover.

We should be glad to support Mr. Hoover as the Democratic candidate for President on a platform that represented the historical principles of the Democratic Party. We should be glad to support him as an independent candidate on a platform of progressive liberalism. We should not hesitate to support him as the Republican candidate on a platform representing the kind of government which Mr. Hoover has exemplified in his public career.

Among the Democratic politicians the chief objection to Mr. Hoover is that he has been successively a Republican and a Progressive, but has never affilated with the Democratic organization, although he was appointed to office by President Wilson and was the most distinguished of all the President's lieutenants during the war.

Among Republican politicians the chief objection to Mr. Hoover is that he never was an organization Republican and that in the fall of 1918 he had the independence and courage to urge the election of a Congress that would work harmoniously with President Wilson. If the country had followed Mr. Hoover's wise and practical advice it would not today be the victim of a deadlocked Government which is virtually unable to function.

The partisan objections to Mr. Hoover are arguments in his favor. The American people are tired of professional politicians and disgusted with party politics. The old party lines have broken down so far as the rank and file of voters are concerned, and in respect to principles both parties are bankrupt. Although the spirit of partisanship has rarely been more bitter or more brutal, and never since Secession has it been more inimical to the welfare of the country, the battle of these warring politicians is a fictitious conflict.

Party Lines Have Broken Down.

Mr. Taft was Mr. Wilson's opponent for the Presidency in 1912; yet in so far as fundamental questions of government are concerned it would be difficult to detect any important differences between Mr. Taft and Mr. Wilson. Mr. Hughes was Mr. Wilson's opponent in 1916, and it would be equally difficult to detect any important differences between Mr. Hughes and Mr. Wilson. They might disagree about this policy or that policy; but in so far as their public utterances of the last three years are an index to their political principles, these differences would be personal rather than partisan in any true sense.

And if one wished to carry the parallel further he might well ask what there is to distinguish a Democrat like Attorney General Palmer from a Republican like Speaker Sweet of the New York Assembly. Both of them have set forth to establish a new doctrine of Prussianism which is a veritable crucifixion of the spirit of American institutions.

Abraham Lincoln declared in his First Inaugural that--

This country, with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it.

The Palmers and the Sweets are seeking to set up a wholly opposite theory, which is that the Government no longer belongs to the people, but that the people belong to the Government, and have acquired a subject status under which their most elementary rights and liberties can be denied whenever the Government itself undertakes to regard those rights and liberties as seditious or inimical.

It is needless to say that when Democrats and Republicans can unite in the advocacy of such a construction of the powers of government under free institutions and when Democrats and Republicans can unite in resisting such an invasion of American traditions, party lines have become artificial and party adherence has degenerated into a more matter of prejudice, habit, self-interest and cynicism.

Present Cleavage in Opinion Not Parallel With Parties.

This is not a year for partisan candidates in any sense in which that term has previously been employed in politics. Party labels there must be, because the party label has been established by law; but when the Republican National Committee is forced to offer a prize for a platform, it is ridiculous to pretend that there is anything which resembles a genuine cleavage of public opinion along party lines on the questions that confront the country. What is going on is merely the maneuvering of ambitious politicians who are waiting to see which issues are expedient and which are not.

Although the two parties are destitute of principle, they still retain some of their former characteristics, and Mr. Hoover combines the best of these characteristics in both parties. The Republicans boast, and not without reason (if the record of the Sixty-sixth Congress can be ignored for the time being), that they represent efficiency in the administration of government. Mr. Hoover has proved himself one of the greatest administrators of all time. His achievements are among the miracles of the war, and when Europe speaks of efficiency it no longer speaks of it in terms of Germany, but in terms of Hoover.

If the Democrats cannot successfully challenge the Republican claim to superior administrative ability, they can honestly claim that except for the brief period when the party organization had become a chattel of the slave-holding oligarchy the Democratic Party has been the great champion of individual rights and of the liberties of the people. It is essentially the party of the Bill of Rights and of the constitutional guarantees of freedom, the uncompromising assertion of which was never more needed than it is today.

In spite of the Southern Prohibitionists and the reactionary practices of Attorney General Palmer and Postmaster General Burleson, the individual Democrat, who is a Democrat on principle, has not lost these characteristics. The instincts of the great mass of Democracy still tend to keep it a party of the common people, not in the sense of the demagogue, but in the sense of Thomas Jefferson. They are still struggling whenever the opportunity offers and a free play of Democratic sentiment is permitted by party organization against those centralizing tendencies that are turning the Government of the United States into an autocracy of bureaucrats.

If Mr. Hoover is a Republican in respect to administrative capacity, he is a Democrat in respect to decentralization and human rights.

Hoover's Qualifications.

The argument for his nomination does not stop there. One of the great organs of British Liberalism, the London Nation, recently declared that Mr. Hoover was the ablest man that the war had produced. Of the men who were without high reputation when the conflict began, there can be no question that he is the most commanding figure that emerged out of this welter of the nations. Such ability is not to be held lightly at a time like this. The American people are going to need it, and need it badly.

Most of the candidates who have thus far announced themselves, Democrats and Republicans alike, estimable gentlemen though they may be, are so inadequate, in view of the issues that the next President must meet, that their aspirations are little short of ridiculous. Men who have no conception whatever of what is going on in the world and no understanding of the problems that must be met are boldly offering themselves for an office for which even the best mind and the strongest talents are hardly adequate.

Of all the men whose names have been mentioned, The World believes that Mr. Hoover alone measures up to the Presidency in the fullest sense.

Both Parties Are Weak.

It is not a happy state of affairs in which the American people find themselves, but it is an inevitable state of affairs in view of the political practices which they have tolerated during the last twenty years. They allowed Mr. Bryan to club every Democrat into submission who was not at heart a Populist, and they allowed Mr. Roosevelt to put the Wall Street brand on every Republican who would not meekly indorse "My Policies." The result of it is that the blood of both of the political parties has been impoverished, and in the course of the contests between the right wings and left wings of both organizations, men of ability who might well have aspired to a political career have sought some other means of service.

Woodrow Wilson, of course, was a political accident. He obtained the Democratic nomination in consequence of the bitter conflict between the Bryan Democrats and the Ryan Democrats, and slipped into the White House because Theodore Roosevelt was determined to destroy William Howard Taft for the offense of insubordination. He has maintained himself not because of the love and affection in which he is held, but by the politicians of the Democratic Party, but by the sheer power of the most penetrating and dominant intellect ever known in the White House. When a venomous partisanship that could not deal with him on a plane of mental equality succeeded in breaking him down, nervously and physically, the American people suddenly discovered that they were without leadership and that their Government had ceased to operate.

The Man of the Hour.

Unless his successor is equally capable of achieving the leadership of the country by force of ability, character and conviction there will be no leadership, and throughout the period of reconstruction we shall have nothing better than an imitation Government manipulated by the managing politicians of the party that happens to carry the elections.

The fundamental rights and liberties of the American people are menaced today as they have never been menaced before. On the one hand radicalism is pushing its theories to the very verge of anarchy, and on the other hand conservatism has joined hands with Bourbonism to destroy liberty in order to maintain the extreme individualistic theory of property rights. Between these two greedy groups of fools and fanatics, there is a great middle ground which is held by the vast majority of Americans and which they will continue to hold under competent leadership, but competent leadership there must be, and no man better embodies it than Herbert C. Hoover.

He has worked with his hands, and he knows from personal experience the point of view of the man who works with his hands. He has been a director of labor in great enterprises and he knows from personal experience the responsibilities and difficulties of the director of labor. He knows the economic condition of the world better, perhaps, than any other American, and economic understanding is now a vital element in government. He knows the diplomacy and the politics of Europe as few Americans have ever known them. Moreover, he knows them at first hand, as he knows conditions in the Far East at first hand, and such a knowledge has become essential to any intelligent direction of the foreign affairs of the United States.

Those Americans who want a business man for President can find him in Mr. Hoover, who has brilliantly managed one of the most successful business undertakings known to history. Those who want a progressive in the White House will find in him an instinctively democratic progressive. Those who want administrative ability will find in him administrative ability of the highest order which has proved itself on three continents. Those who want an unyielding champion of human rights and a responsible government under law will find in him a candidate about whom they need have no misgivings.

Man, Not Party, Counts.

The Presidency of the United States is a varying office. Its constitutional qualifications are fixed and rigidly defined, but its other qualifications change with circumstances. After this war it can never again be safely made a refuge for a parochial politician of negative character who owes his nomination to the fact that the managing politicians of his party think well of him as a dispenser of patronage and that so far as the rest of the country is concerned, there is nothing to be said against him.

In point of ability, in point of experience, in point of capacity to deal comprehensively with the new problems of reconstruction, Mr. Hoover towers above all the candidates who have been brought into the contest. There are no arguments against him except the arguments that are spawned out of the stagnant waters of professional politics. For itself, The World does not care whether Mr. Hoover calls himself a Democrat or a Republican or a Progressive or an Independent. He is the kind of man that ought to be President of the United States, and he is the man The World intends to support for President of the United States regardless of all the artificial barriers of a debased and discredited partisanship.