Tuesday, September 12, 1916 — Editorial Comments

Maine/New Hampshire, 1916

Alice B. Glines, editor

All who ran were elected.

The spellbinders are gone; peace to them.

What is so rare as a day in June? A September day, not infrequently.

We common people get the little end; and deserve it, by voting against ourselves.

The plan to annex South Portland to Portland and raise the Portland tax rate another jog is now on foot again.

Sometimes you can tell what a thing is by taking notice of what something else isn't. The Boston Transcript says there has been "no pussyfooting" by Judge Hughes on the Adamson bill, and declares this to be "the supreme sensation of the campaign."

A woman in Portland who has married the same man three times and been divorced from him twice now wants to be divorced again. Next time she better get someone who does not get drunk to marry her, unless there is some incongruity in that program.

Our present governor's repeated disregard of the nicer things of life, the non-essentials perhaps, had much to do with calling out the huge "stay-at-home vote" which can not he reached by appeals based on the real problems of government. Governor-elect Milliken is his exact opposite in these regards.

Belknap County Pomona last week argued the question whether summer boarders and bungalow residents are more conducive to the prosperity of a town, or good roads and good markets. One trouble with this question is that it is mixed; if a town can get good roads they will not lead to markets or trains, but be laid out to suit that same summer travel. As for good markets, we in northern New England must first decide whether commerce is a good or a bad thing. Markets mean trade.

It was unhandsome of Mr. Samuel Untermeyer to put it in print, but he had no less an authority than the late Thomas Brackett Reed to back up his statement of the abilities of Maine people (Query: Are we different from, the people where he comes from?) to untangle mixed political conditions. Mr. Reed always said that it was foolish to try to discuss public questions on their merits before a mixed audience; and all he ever tried to do in his campaign speeches was to appeal to our sympathies, or prejudices, and make us laugh at his funny stories and witty hits.

President Gompers of the Labor Unions was not fair in his Portland statement of the attitude of the train men, which he said was not at all a threat. He said they merely said to the roads that if they wanted men to work on the present terms of employment they must get other men to do it. But this was in truth not in the least the attitude or the intentions of the trainmen. On the contrary, if an average of one in a hundred per week of the trainmen should really throw up their jobs for some other employment, the railroad agents would voluntarily shorten the hours, or raise the pay, whichever the men seemed to prefer.

Judge Hughes at Rockland on Saturday said, speaking of the Eight-Hour law enacted by Congress under threat of a strike by the train crews:

"This issue transcends every other issue before the American people, because it is the fundamental issue, whether or not we have a Government; and an Administration that yields to force is not an administration at all. It is being driven. It is not government in accordance with the principles of American institutions."

From which the thoughtful reader cannot escape the inference that if the railroad men had not threatened to strike, in that case there would not been any issue of the highest degree of importance for the Republican party to base its canvass on.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 12, 1916, p. 6.