The Greenville Journal

Comment In Washington Shows Hughes' Speeches Have Concrete Effect.

From Washington correspondence New York Evening Post:

It is idle even for the Democrats to claim that Mr. Hughes' speeches have not been effective. Whether or not they have seemed so to the voters in the west and northwest is something very difficult to judge at this distance, but it is not to be denied that right here in Washington Mr. Hughes' utterances have had a very concrete effect.

It is an ill wind that blows no good. The rumpus that Mr. Hughes has stirred up about civil service reform has really got under the skin of the administration. It is something which the president and his political advisers carelessly ignored. So it is with a portion of Mr. Hughes' criticism of the Mexican policy. When he argues that the paramount duty of the United States is to protect its citizens abroad in their lives and property he is standing on unimpeachable ground. And the administration knows it. The effect certainly of Mr. Hughes' remarks will be to stiffen the hand of the administration in dealing with a question of protection for Americans abroad.

HUGHES' LABOR RECORD.

When Mr. Gompers, remembering only that he is a Democrat and forgetting that he is a leader of organized labor, ventured to assert that Mr. Hughes is unfriendly to labor because he concurred in the unanimous decision in the Danbury hatters' case, he ventured on very thin ice. The Chicago Tribune promptly reminds him that an honest judge must apply the law as he thinks it is, not as he thinks it ought to be, and asks him to tell those who look to him for political advice something about the record of Mr. Hughes as governor. Read what the Legislative Labor News, the official organ of the New York Federation of Labor, said editorially when Mr. Hughes left the governor's chair at Albany for his place on the supreme court. Here it is:

"Now that Governor Hughes has retired from politics and ascended to a place on the highest judicial tribunal in the world, the fact can be acknowledged without hurting anybody's political corns that he was the greatest friend of labor laws that ever occupied the governor's chair at Albany. During his two terms he has signed fifty-six labor laws, including among them the best labor laws ever enacted in this or any state.

"He also urged the enactment of labor laws in his messages to the legislature, even going so far as to place the demand for a labor law in one of his messages to an extra session of the legislature.

"Only 162 labor laws have been enacted in this state since its erection in 1777-in 133 years. One-third of these, exceeding in quality all of the others, have been enacted and signed during Governor Hughes' term of three years and nine months."

Let organized labor take to heart what the Chicago Tribune says on this point: "Mr. Hughes is no demagogue and no visionary. He is a man of courage and conscience, and if labor cannot confide its cause to his rock bottom Americanism there is something wrong with its cause."-Boston Herald.

What Josephus Daniels, the well known nautical militarist, can't understand is why men should waste time Plattsburging at sea when they might just as well learn how to become sailors in three lessons in any good, reliable correspondence school.

President Wilson appears to have been keenly alive to the expediency of accepting several invitations to make speeches in the West. Nobody knows any better than he that it will take considerable shoveling to fill up the holes that have been dug in that locality by Justice Hughes.

It was John P. St. John of Kansas, one time Prohibitionist candidate for president of the United States, who said that Americans vote as they cheer. If so, there is mighty little consolation for the Democratic party in this campaign, for the Democratic administration in three years has given us nothing to cheer over. On the contrary, as Mr. Hughes has said, these last three years have been years of humiliation and embarrassment.