The Milwaukee Leader

PLATFORM TWADDLE

President Harding, driven into a corner by the anti-league and anti-world-court forces in his own camp, seeks shelter in the preamble of the United States constitution, which like the Declaration of Independence has often served outwitted old party statesmen as a cyclone cellar.

As the paytriot waves the flag into the eyes of the voters, in order to conceal his profit plots behind the Stars and Stripes, so the cornered Republican president throws a handful of phrases from the constitutional preamble into the faces of his Republican pursuers.

The "Fathers" claimed to write the American constitution "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity." This is a good enough platform for any American, says Harding. It would be, if these fine words were backed by honest efforts to realize their object. But the whole history of the United States from George Washington to Warren Gamaliel Harding is here to prove that such phrases have been only words, words, words in the mouths of old party statesmen, never practiced, but rather denied and fought whenever the mass of the people took them seriously and made an effort to carry them into effect without or against the old parties.

The intelligent voters of the United States have long learned that a good man cannot achieve any good on a rotten platform, and a rotten man cannot and will not do any good on the finest platform in the world. It isn't the words in a platform that count, but the performance of the platform makers. And history proves that the old party statesmen of all shades have always used, never defended the common citizens of this republic.

The preamble to the American constitution is certainly stating objects which are good enough for any American to achieve, but they are too good to be forever used as camouflage for dirty political games by a lot of self-seeking and hard-boiled gents who never intend to live up to them. They are too good to be used as a cloak for Harding's effort to drag the United States into a European league for the benefit of international bankers that betray not only the nations of the world but even one another by continuous sleight of hand tricks with the world's gold reserve and fictitious credits on bank books.

Harding himself is one of the last men who have a right to quote the constitutional preamble in their own defense.

Ever since he took office, he and the principal members of his cabinet have made every effort to nullify the alleged objects of that preamble by secret diplomacy, subserviency to predatory interests, and wholesale deception of voters.

Harding's department of justice has prostituted justice by shielding crooked bankers. He appointed Taft to the position of chief supreme court justice when he knew that Taft is receiving a salary from the steel trust. Harding has a department of commerce and a department of the treasury that have been caught several times in the act of helping the looters of the public. There is not a high office in the land that has not at one time or another been similarly prostituted to the service of enemies of the general welfare by old party presidents.

The only way to achieve the stated objects of the constitutional preamble is to bury the old parties and their capitalist system.