I have sometimes wondered whether that great, obstructing "standpat" dam was not erected to restrain the release of watered stock. You must let it out sooner or later; and the sooner the better, because if we do it soon, we will do it in good temper, and if late, there is danger it may be done in ill-temper. What is the alternative, gentlemen? You have heard the rising tide of Socialism referred to here to-night. Socialism is not growing in influence in this country as a programme. It is merely that the ranks of protestants are being recruited. Socialism is not a programme but a protest against the present state of affairs in the United States. If it becomes a programme, then we shall have to be very careful how we purpose a competing programme. I do not believe in the programme of Socialism. If any man can say he knows anything from the past, perhaps he can say that the programme of Socialism would not work; but there is no use saying what won't work unless you can say what will work. 66 A splendid sermon was once preached by Dr. Chalmers on The Expulsive Power of a New Affection." If you want to oust Socialism, you have got to propose something better. It is a case, if you will allow me to fall into the language of the vulgar, of "put up or shut up." You cannot oppose hopeful programmes by negations. Every statesman who ever won anything great in any selfgoverning country was a man whose programme would stand criticism and had the energy behind it to move forward against opposition. It is by constructive purpose that you are going to govern and save the United States, and therefore a man ought to welcome the high privilege of addressing an audience like this. You can analyze, you can form purposes. Many of you do know what is going on. You know what part is wrong and what is right, if you have not lost your moral perspective, and you know how the wrong can be stopped. Very well, then, let us get together and form a constructive programme, and then let us be happy in the prospect that in some distant day men shall look back to our time and say that the chief glory of America was not that she was successfully set up in a simple age when mankind came to begin a new life in a new land, but that, after the age had ceased to be simple, when the forces of society had come into hot contact, when there was bred more heat than light, there were men of serene enough intelligence, of steady enough self-command, of indomitable enough power of will and purpose to stand up once again and say: "Fellow-citizens, we have come into a great heritage of liberty; our heritage is not wealth; our distinction is not that we are rich in power; our boast is, rather, that we can transmute gold into the life blood of a free people." Then it will be recorded of us that we found out again what seemed the lost secret of mankind-how to translate power into freedom, how to make men glad that they were rich, how to take the envy out of men's hearts that others were rich and they for a little while poor, by opening the gates of opportunity to every man and letting a flood of gracious guiding light illuminate the path of every man that is born into the world. SPEECH MADE BY HON. JOHN W. WESCOTT, OF CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, BEFORE THE NEW JERSEY, once bound, but, by the moral energy and intellectual greatness of a single soul, now free, comes to this historic convention, in the glory of her emancipation, to participate in your deliberations, aid in formulating your judgments, and assist in executing your decrees. The New Jersey delegation is not empowered to exercise the attributes of proprietorship, but is commissioned to represent the great cause of Democracy and to offer you, as its militant and triumphant leader, a scholar, not a charlatan; a statesman, not a doctrinaire; a profound lawyer, not a splitter of legal hairs; a political economist, not an egotistical theorist; a practical politician, who constructs, modifies, restrains without disturbance and destruction; a resistless debater and consummate master of statement, not a mere sophist; a humanitarian, not a defamer of characters and 216 lives; a man whose mind is at once cosmopolitan and composite of America; a gentleman of unpretentious habits, with the fear of God in his heart and the love of mankind exhibited in every act of his life; above all a public servant who has been tried to the uttermost and never found wanting-peerless, matchless, unconquerable, the ultimate Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. New Jersey has reasons for her course. Let us not be deceived in our premises. Campaigns of vilification, corruption, and false pretense have lost their usefulness. The evolution of national energy is towards a more intelligent morality in politics and in all other relations. The line of cleavage is between those who treat politics as a game and those who regard it as the serious business of Government. The realignment of political parties will be on this principle. The situation admits of no compromise. The temper and purpose of the American public will tolerate no other view. The indifference of the American people to politics has disappeared. Any platform and any candidate not conforming to this vast social and commercial behest will go down to ignominious defeat at the polls. Platforms are too often mere historic rubbish heaps of broken promises. Candidates are too frequently the unfortunate creatures of arrangements and calculations. Exigencies, conditions, national needs |