Words Versus Facts
It was just as we suspected when we read them—those were weasel words with which Mr. Hughes announced his acceptance of the Republican nomination for the presidency. Some of the newspapers that have been clamoring for Americanism and preparedness and denouncing the German American Alliance and all its works say the candidate has adopted their policy, while the alliance issues a statement claiming the Hughes nomination as a triumph of its leadership and declaring that its 3,000,000 members will be urged and expected to support him.
Somebody is wrong. Colonel Roosevelt has told all those who stand with him—or stood with him—that the efforts to transform this country's neutrality into German partisanship were blows at free institutions and verged on treason. His views have had wide endorsement, not only from his own followers, but from hundreds of thousands of American citizens who agreed with him in nothing else.
Yet we find those he attacked giving enthusiastic endorsement to the Hughes candidacy. If the Colonel can make himself comfortable in such company, it will afford another illustration of that mental alacrity, not to say slipperiness, which has been, and continues to be, the object of such universal admiration.
The facts of the matter are that Mr. Hughes did not offer any specific criticism of any phase or outcome of the President's European policy. He indulged in some general and therefore meaningless words, that had a robustness sound, but no real content. 