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THE PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY OF JAMES M. COX
by Charles E. Morris
Secretary to Governor Cox
CHAPTER I
THE NEED FOR A DOER
There come times in the affairs of men which call for "not a
forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work." Such a time is at
hand. A great war, the most devastating in history, has been
concluded. Its moral lesson has been taught by its master minds
and learned in penitence, we may hope, by the erring and wrongly
willful. But the fruits of victory are ungathered and the
beneficence of peace is not yet attained. The call arises for a
"doer of the work."
Two great political parties in the United States, both with
splendid accomplishments behind them and both with grave
mistakes as well, have attempted to respond to this call, and
America, whose proudest boast is that it has always found a man
for every great occasion, chooses between them. It is a solemn
and serious hour. For it has been America's special fortune that
its great teachers and leaders and doers have been found at just
the proper time.
This knowledge of the certain right decision of our country is,
we might almost say, a part of its very fiber abiding with the
persistency of a fixed idea, a part of the heritage of the
nation, scarcely needing to be taught in the schools, obvious
even to the casual student from an alien land. For our
historical records glow with the stories of the appearance of
_the_ man; and the thought of a friendly destiny seems not easy
to banish. Time has given so often either the inspired teacher
of the word or the doer of the work that there is more than a
faith and a hope, nay almost a conviction, that it cannot fail
now when the agonized appeal of the world beckons America to
complete her high mission to humanity upon which she embarked
when she threw her power and might on the scales in war.
Those who insist that the fulfillment of that mission lies in
keeping the solemn promises make in France, accepted by friend
and foe alike, for a League of Nations to end war, to see that
retribution becomes not blind vengeance, to set the tribes of
the earth again on their forward journey, present as their
leader James Monroe Cox, Governor of Ohio.
A party of traditions, a party that has directed in every
critical period save one since the Republic began, has said that
he meets the requirements of the time. That party chose him
because of his record for doing, because there was an inner
conviction that he could enter upon a still larger field with a
growing, an ever-expanding capacity.
This, too, furnishes a fitter chapter in the history of country
and party. For the wise selection of men, even obscure men, has
been the tower of our national strength. America had her Thomas
Jefferson to expound for all the world the real underlying truth
of her Revolution. The equality of rights and duties spread from
a dream of philosophers to be the doctrine of warriors for
freedom. There was her George Washington to hold together the
tenuous bands of freedom. She found her James Monroe to lay the
foundations of the doctrine that stern moral precepts forbid the
violation of sovereign rights of the nations. She brought forth
her Andrew Jackson to make the country in his time safe for
democracy, and to establish for all time that no single money
baron, nor yet any collection of them, is superior to the power
of all the people.
In later time she had her Abraham Lincoln, now in the judgment
of the succeeding generations but little beneath the Savior of
men, preserver of the Union for its larger duties. She had in
this day her Woodrow Wilson, builder of the newer policy of
world union and recognized spokesman of freedom in the death
struggle with military autocracy. It is of history that Lincoln
and Wilson both were stricken down with their work incomplete.
After Lincoln there was no doer of the work to finish his task
and the evil of those who perverted the exalted purpose of the
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