Review and Prospect
ministry in a year and more zigzagging than straightforward progress. Under our system it might not cause changes of cabinets, but it would conduce to all manner of “deals” among the various factions, would diffuse instead of centering responsibility and would make public affairs the subject of dicker and bargain.
The thoughtful American citizen will therefore affiliate himself with one or the other of the two great parties which have survived the births and deaths of scores of ephemeral organizations, the two great parties to which must be credited all the good and against which must be charged all the evil in our government for the last two-thirds of a century.
It is our hope and expectation that this brief account of the Republican party, of what it has stood for and what it stands for today, will assist in convincing an impressive majority of the new voters of the United States that it is the party which on the whole record is the more worthy of their choice. “I have,” said Patrick Henry, “but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” If that wise rule be followed by the voters of 1920 and the subsequent years, they will prudently judge from the past record of the Republican party that it is the party to which the future interests of the nation are most safely o be committed. They will affiliate themselves with it, with a serene assurance that so long as its principles and practices prevail, “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
125
