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gentlemen would have the ghost of matic relations. What hope would

a show of being elected.

Democrats may as well face the prospect now. Governor Smith will not do, and Mr. McAdoo is impossible.

I have spoken frequently against the Klan organization in my own State, from the time it began operations there, took over the Republican party, and became a mischievous power. The meek submission of the Republicans to Klan domination has been a costly thing for the people of Indiana, resulting in constant political scandal, and with a deterring effect, not negligible, upon the prosperous course of business.

The intrusion upon our politics of religious issues is deplorable, in great affairs or small. But a spasm of intolerance is afflicting the country, nor is it confined to the manifestations of the Klan. The battles between fundamentalists and modernists in Protestantism offer phenomena equally discouraging. But we are obliged to deal with realities; and it is folly to pretend that at this time the nomination of any member of the Roman Catholic Church for the presidency, no matter how well fitted by intellect, character, or administrative experience he might be, could fail to precipitate bitter controversy. This is a humiliating confession. We of America should of course be greater than this. But political issues would inevitably be blended with religious questions without advantage to either. It is easy to imagine a national campaign not only strident with religious debate but likely to be profoundly disturbing in other directions, as for instance in our diplo

there be, the anti-Catholics would demand, for a fair handling of any difficulty with a Catholic country if the head of the American government were a Catholic? The lofty heights of bigotry and vulgarity attainable in such a controversy have recently been happily indicated by the Hon. J. Thomas Heflin, a Democratic senator from Alabama.

Mr.

Governor Smith is wet. McAdoo is dry. Mr. McAdoo's Toledo speech, evidently prepared with care to launch his campaign for the nomination, failed to arouse any great enthusiasm in Democratic quarters. He certainly erred gravely in thinking that his idea of a federal constabulary to enforce prohibition would meet with favor among old-fashioned States' rights Democrats. A number of the leading newspapers of the South were quick to rebuke him for so flagrant an assault upon traditional Democratic principles. It is obvious that this idea of a broad extension of the federal police power to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment would suggest at once to many minds that the long-neglected Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments are equally worthy of attention. I seem to recall a time when "No Force Bill!" was the rallying-cry of Southern Democrats. Just how large an army would be required to stop the importation or the domestic manufacture of alcoholic beverages is an interesting question. Speculation on this point would be sure to figure prominently in any campaign that concentrated upon the Eighteenth Amendment if Mr. McAdoo were the nominee. The Bill of Rights

contains certain guarantees which can hardly be trampled underfoot to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment unless we are ready to begin uprooting the most precious safeguards and guarantees of our freedom.

Prohibition is bound to be discussed in the Democratic convention of 1928, but it cannot be sanely considered if the two candidates who deadlocked the convention three years ago stand as the protagonists of the two sides of the question. What loyal Democrats everywhere demand is harmony. The morale of the party must be restored. To permit either a religious question or a moral question (if prohibition may be called a moral question) to become the paramount issue is an alternative that cannot be viewed with equanimity. Governor Smith, by combining both issues in his own person, would arouse a bitter hostility never encountered by any other presidential candidate. If nominated, Mr. McAdoo, with enforcement of the Volstead Law the chief issue in his campaign, would find himself leading an enfeebled legion to certain slaughter.

It is for the good of the nation that the Democratic party be maintained as a vigorous fighting body. It has, to be sure, trifled at times with its fundamental principles and been false to its own traditions; but surviving many defeats it offers the people their only hope of resistance to growing Republican rapacity and arrogance. Its perpetuation as an effective organization is not only desirable but essential if the people

to have watchful critics in Washington to detect and publish

the increasing intimacies and alliances between the Republican party and Big Business.

The present political apathy is due largely to a feeling of helplessness in the electorate. There is a growing cynicism as to our politics by reason of the seeming impossibility of correcting abuses. Political corruption, of which there are constant evidences; the sale of senatorships to the highest bidder; privilege steadily broadening its domain; the lack of a courageous handling of such a problem as, for example, that presented by the plight of the farmers; the multiplication of political jobs; the marked bureaucratic tendency fostered by Republicanism all blaze the path of Democratic responsibility and duty.

There was never any such body of faithful earnest partizans as the membership of the Democratic party. It is a splendid fellowship of patriotic Americans. With the business of keeping up local organizations in the face of repeated defeats, with few newspapers of influence to assist by enlightening the people as to the issues, the earnest loyal members have a right to demand sanity of its national conventions.

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Deliver us from any more of that Madison Square stuff! This is the prayer of the rank and file of the party, and it might easily be turned into a threat. into a threat. If the Democratic party must die, let it perish on the firing-line and not by inglorious suicide.

It may be said that in the Middle West, at least, the Democratic party workers, men and women, have no great interest in either Governor

Smith or Mr. McAdoo. Mr. McAdoo. These gentlemen, with all their fine qualities, make no great appeal to the corn belt. The next campaign could not be a repetition of the ClevelandBlaine fight. No such body of independent-thinking Republicans is in sight to support Governor Smith as rallied around Mr. Cleveland. The Republican party has rejoiced in the fat of the fleshpots too contentedly to encourage any such hope. Where the tall corn grows, the strains of "The Sidewalks of New York" would hardly thrill the Democratic voter on the farm and in the small town. And Mr. McAdoo, with familiar provincial philosophy, sees in the cities only sin and the bitter fruit thereof.

There are many Democrats between the Alleghenies and the Missouri River who do not even know from what State Mr. McAdoo hails. In the popular mind he is only a gentleman who once filled admirably the office of secretary of the treasury. His Toledo speech was like an exasperating interference on the radio.

Those dreary hours in Madison Square Garden during which the home-keeping Democrats waited and despaired caused a heartache that still hurts. There must be a new deal!

It would be a splendid manifestation of patriotism for both Governor

Smith and Mr. McAdoo to announce immediately that in no circumstances and under no compulsion will they permit the use of their names in next year's convention.

KEEP OFF THE GRASS!

The sign is written large and requires the interpretation of no soothsayer or medicine-man. It is not I alone who would plant this warning firmly on the Democratic reservation. There are a good many thousands of us fried-meat-eaters, as well as Democrats of the paler academic type, who would like a chance to win next year. And it can't be done if the party is again to make a fool of itself. Our prolonged captivity has become a weariness. We cannot sit forever thrumming our muted harps by the rivers of Babylon!

With Messrs. Smith and McAdoo renewing their battle, or with either nominated, we should be exactly where we found ourselves when the gavel fell finally in Madison Square Garden. It would be ruinous to open the next convention with that same calamitous deadlock clearly in prospect before the ordering of the first roll-call of the States.

The eyes of the country are upon Governor Smith and William G. McAdoo. By eliminating themselves before the trumpet sounds for action, they would kindle hope in the hearts of Democrats everywhere.

I'

MUSSOLINI, THE POPE AND THE KING

From What Quarter Will Disaster Come?

GAETANO SALVEMINI

F THE majority of Italians are not satisfied with the Fascist régime, why do they tolerate it? Why do they not rid themselves of it, as the population of any other civilized country would do?

When an Englishman or a citizen of the United States asks, "Why do the Italians not resist Fascism?" resist means for him to vote against, or get up meetings of protest, to write to the papers, or to demonstrate on the street-corner. He thinks that, should any one hamper him in the expression of these rights, the police would intervene to protect him, and the bench would vindicate him, if necessary, even against the police. He is so secure in the enjoyment of his free institutions that he cannot conceive a civilized country in which these no longer exist. He does not realize that in Italy all legal means of expressing one's will are forbidden. Associations are dissolved; the right of assembly no longer exists; elections are suppressed or falsified; the press is silenced; anti-Fascists are spied upon, their correspondence intercepted, their houses searched; a section of the police, that which bears the name of militia, actually commits the worst outrages against every personal and political liberty; the other

section, the police proper, is paralyzed by the militia or its accomplice; the magistrates do not awake when men belonging to the party in power are involved in a political crime; anti-Fascists, if they are suspected of being politically active, are imprisoned, banished, interned, bludgeoned, or killed.

What could a liberal-minded Italian, averse to violence, actually do to "resist" the Fascist dictatorship? What avails moral strength against a party whose boast it is that it got into power by force and intends to stay there by force?

The words resist, oppose, revolt, in Italy to-day, can have but one meaning, to meet force with force.

But the problem of setting force against force is not an easy one.

Instances of individual revolt and revenge occur sporadically. But individual acts of despair are of no avail against a dictatorship which can rapidly concentrate powerful military forces. When some desperate outburst occurs in a town, Fascists often disappear for some hours, fearing a general uprising. But the militia is rapidly summoned by telephone from the neighboring cities, and reprisals reduce the place to a state of terror more suffocating than before. In purely local revolts

the Fascists will always be the vicThe dictatorship can be fought only by a general movement throughout the whole country, so that the Fascists, attacked everywhere at once, have no chance to concentrate their forces.

But formidable technical difficulties stand in the way of a general uprising. Only school-boy romanticism could plan a revolutionary organization to include the whole of Italy, distribute arms, hold itself ready for simultaneous attacks under the orders of a central committee. A big centralized organization involves large expense, and the anti-Fascists are not backed by the bankers, industrialists, and big landowners. Moreover the police would speedily discover it and hand over its members to Fascist reprisals. History shows that no revolution ever came about through a big organization with a central committee. Large secret societies serve merely to earn money for spies.

Revolution in a large country can only break out if two circumstances conjoin: desperate unrest among large sections of the population; and some national event which stirs the people to its depths, sets the spur to its hatreds and hopes, and drives it everywhere to action, while, on the other hand, it discomposes and paralyzes the dominant party and makes it incapable of resisting.

The first condition is being prepared during these years by the work of the Fascists themselves. All the experiences of these years showed that each effort at legal opposition unchained a fresh murderous offensive and gave a new turn to the thumb-screw of "normalizing" laws.

As a result the opponents of the dictatorship are forced to recognize that they must either give in, like animals at bay, or abandon the legal and resort to the revolutionary struggle.

The worst of all Mussolini's crimes against the Italian nation is that by destroying all belief in the integrity of the bench and by demolishing all free and representative institutions, he has choked the safety-valves by which discontent can let off steam in time of stress. People who claim that Mussolini has checked the revolutionary peril in Italy claim the reverse of the truth. In 1922, when Mussolini seized the government, the revolutionary peril was over, and he was able to seize the government because the revolutionary peril was over. The Fascist dictatorship has created a new revolutionary peril far greater than any that existed before its triumph.

But irritation, however desperate, cannot bring about a revolution, if the second condition is still lacking; that is, the incident which sets in. motion the whole mass of the opponents throughout the whole country.

The murder of Matteotti in June, 1924, might have been the signal for such a revolt. But the public mind was unprepared.

Will such another moment ever occur?

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That the Fascist dictatorship will fall through internal dissensions. among the Fascists, is a vain hope.

Fascism is indeed seething with violent dissensions; among the wouldbe "Samurai" the more skilful are already comfortably seated in the

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