The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1908. THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 146, 19 June 1908, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 1908. THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

For the cause that lacks assistance. For the wrong that needs resistance. For the future in the distance. And the good that we can do.

The most important fact brought out at the meeting of the Republican Convention is this, that President Roosevelt's determination to refuse another term of office is " final and irrevocable." The President has all along declared that he would not and could not occupy the presidential chair for another four years, and there is no doubt that his acceptance of another term would be so direct a defiance of American political precedents and traditions that it

■would go far to ruin his popularity and destroy tho personal influence that he now wields throughout the States. Yet cynics and professional politicians have not been slow to remind the electors that Roosevelt at first emphatically refused to stand lor a second term, and that his objections were overruled. At the same time his most ardent supporters have used every possible means of persuasion to induce him to reconsider his decision; and some of his extreme partisans have even suggested that he should be made President for life. However, there can no longer be any' doubt that Roosevelt will retire from office at the end of this year; but the enthusiasm that his personal qualities and his policy have evoked should be enough to secure the triumph of his paxt> At the polls, and the election of his nominee, Mr. W. H. Taft, to the Presidential chair.

When Senator Lodge described President Roosevelt to the Republican Convention as "the best abused and the most popular man in the United States to-day," he was speaking with literal accuracy. But the abuse has mostly come from one section of the people— the great financiers and trust organisers, whose illegitimate and unprincipled methods the President has never failed to denounce, and against whom he has strained every nerve to enforce the law of the land. The great body of the American nation believes in Roosevelt, and is prepared to give whole-hearted support to his policy of upholding the dignity of the law and working for "the greatest good of the greatest possible number." The trust magnates are practically all Republicans, yet when the Chicago "Tribune" recently completed a poll of over 4400 Republican editors, congressmen, and politicians, who had been asked if they would support the Roosevelt "policies," over 4000 declared in writing their approval of the President and the course that he has pursued. A striking proof of the dominant influence that Roosevelt exercises throughout the country is the enthusiasm with which his last message to Congress was received. We might fill columns with laudations of the mesage from Democratic as well a's Republican organs. But it is highly significant that Governor Hughes of New York, the man whom

Roosevelt has striven hardest to keep out of the Presidential chair, and Mr. W. J. Bryan, the Democratic champion, should both praise the message and eulogise the courage and honesty that it displays. Indeed, so strongly does Roosevelt appeal to Democratic convictions that a leading Democratic paper has suggested that the Democrats should head the party "ticket" with Roosevelt's name for the next campaign. Few statesmen in modern times have secured such impressive tributes of confidence and approval from their political oppon. ents, and even though he has retired from the contest, the personal ascendancy of Roosevelt will be an immensely powerful ally to the Republicans in the coming struggle.

So far as can be gathered from what has happened at the Republican Convention, the party will throw its whole weight into the scale in favour of Taft. One important argument in Taft's favour is, of course, that he is Roosevelt's nominee. But even this would not be enough to carry the election if Taft himself were not a man whom the party and the nation had good reason to trust. Nobody in America appears seriously to question Taft's honesty, his disinterestedness, his ability, and his

capacity to handle what American journalists are fond of describing as "big tasks." His success as an administrator in the Philippines, in Cuba, and at Panama, have inspired general confidence that if elected as Roosevelt's successor he will give a good account of himself under all circumstances. The people admire him for his physical strength and energy, and his frank and fearless methods of speech. The Republican party, as a whole, is strongty prejudiced in his favour because he is Roosevelt's faithful friend and ally; and even those who feared Roosevelt's Radical tendencies are content to hope that the President's "policies" will be carried out by a man as courageous and incorruptible, but perhaps more tactful and less precipitate than Roosevelt himself. In any case the vote of the convention is usually a safe indication of the line the party will take, and we may take it for granted that if the Republicans can secure his election, W. H. Taft will be the next President.

Of course all this assumes that the Democrats are not strong enough either to carry the country with them or to defeat the Republican nomination for the Presidency. On the whole, there do not seem to be any serious indications of a reaction in favour of the Democrats; for the Republicans have forestalled their rivals by adopting the one "plank" of the Democratic platform that was likely to rouse popular enthusiasm—the demand for a revision of the tariff. But largely because of the indirect method of election it is never possible to prophesy the result of the contest for the Presidency. And this year the Republicans have to deal once more with the elusive and enigmatic personality, of Mr. W. J. Bryan, who twice before has fought a desperate losing battle against them. Mr. Bryan is an eloquent speaker of the "spell-binder" type, but he must be a great deal more than this to maintain so long his ascendancy over the Democrats, more especially after two successive defeats. This time he depends not only upon the traditional opposition of the South and West to the Republican policy, but upon the malcontent Republicans, who fear Roosevelt and his "policies" far more than they hate the Democrats. As to Bryan himself, the Mew York "Evening Post" has recently warned the Republicans that they are living in a fool's paradise if they think that it will be a holiday task to beat him. "The forces which make Mr- Bryan's candidacy formidable are not hidden. He has a vast and idolising personal following. As a campaigner he has inexhaustible physical energy and endless -resources of agitation;" and this Republican organ concludes that "no one but a Republican drunk with success would deny that the coming campaign will test this party to the utmost." To give an idea of the narrowness of the margin that may separate success from failure, it is only necessary to point out that the negro vote, if cast for the Democrats, would carry enough of the Northern States to give Bryan the Presidency. It is difficult to believe that the negroes would ever vote against the Republican party, which set them free; but there is very bitter feeling among them against the Roosevelt administration, on account of the dismissal of certain negro soldiers from the army, and it is currently believed that they intend to vote the Democratic ticket in revenge. If they do this, anything may happen; and the hare possibility of such a contingency is enough to show how rash it would be to predict the results of the November , election before the polls are declared.