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Show THE CITIZEN 4 editorial was based on the assumption that the The church of which President Grant is the head had barred high church dignitaries from seeking political preferment. In commendation of this supposed new policy we said : It is a reform which should take all churchmen out of politics and which shoiild keep politics free from ecclesiastical influence. It ought to be of inestimable help in the chief work of the church which should be the saving of souls. If it becomes a settled policy it is certain that the minds and hearts of those called to ecclesiastical duties will be wrapped lip in the work of the church and that a limitless field for doing good will open out before them. There will be a golden era of good will that can redound only to the spiritual and moral benefit of our commonwealth. In the other editorial we said that The Citizen hopes and intends to support Senator Smoot for Ergo, our monitors hastened to warn us, you are inconsistent. How can you support Apostle Smoot for senator and yet claim to be consistent when you commend the church for barring apostles from politics ? By way of preliminary extenuation we beg to call the attention of our criticis to the fact that we gave our reasons for advocating the We employed these words : senators of Senator Smoot The Citizen has been, and is, for the to the United States Senate because it believes that his is necessary from both an economic and a business viewpoint. His services to the state have been of inestimable value and his services to the country at large of even greater value. Growing bolder, we dare maintain that there is quite a difference between supporting an apostle who has made so good in the United States Senate as the result of sixteen years of service that he is almost indispensible and supporting any one of many apostles who seek, as it were, to plunge from the pulpit into a political berth. But to return to the domain of logic nowhere in the editorial, Apostles Barred did we assert that an apostle had no right to run for office. He shares that right with every other American who happens to be outside the penitentiary. We were discussing a church policy and we looked at it from two viewpoints the viewpoint of the churchs welfare and the viewpoint of the states or the publics welfare. And from either viewpoint we found it commendable and an earnest of an era of good will. Henceforth, we said, churchmen holding high office in the L. D. S. organization will be debarred from seeking political office. Whether it was wise that an apostle should have sought the office of United States senator sixteen years ago was not in question. It may or may not have been a mistaken policy at that time. If we were to conjecture from what we know of conditions today and then we should say that it was just as much a mistake then as it is now. But, in the case of Senator Smoot we are dealing with a fact and not a theory. Senator Smoot, as the diplomatists would say, is fait accompli. Any discussion of his status of sixteen years ago is futile. Today he is United States Senator Reed Smoot. He is a national figure. He is recognized as the states most valuable representative by the very fact of his national prominence and his extraordinary efficiency. True, he is an apostle, but he has lived that down. And, in making this sprightly remark, we mean no offense. His position, in our estimation, is quite different from that of an apostle who would now aspire to the toga. The new aspirant might be a very good apostle, a very excellent good apostle, and yet might make a damnably bad senator. Moreover, he would set in motion once again all those animosities and misunderstandings which beset the early political career of Senator Smoot, animosities and misunderstandings which injured the church and the state. Not many wish to invite such discord in an era of reconstruction. The times are too critical for all of us. ... first-nam- ed re-electi- re-electi- on. on. re-elect- ion re-electi- on GIVE POST A HEARING Indubitably there is much speculation as to just what manner of man is Louis F. Post, assistant secretary of labor, whose impeachment is demanded by some of our solicitous solons. Have we been harboring in high federal place one of those saturnine, impish conspirators who draw their intellectual nourishment from the cesspools of European anarchy? Those unacquainted with the career and writings for he is a writer of Louis F.Post, might be led to suspect some sinister things of him, because of the lenity he hav' displayed toward aliens ordered deported from our shores. Louis F. Post has long been a radical, but hardly in the European sense. Unless he has changed mightily in the last few years, the author of Ethics of Democracy, and editor of The Public of Chicago, is simply a devout follower of Henry George, of whom he has written much and reverently. For so many, years has he looked at politics and economics from the Georgian angle that he is very apt to take an unusual view of any issue that may arise. If he has shown mistaken sympathy for aliens ordered out of the country it is not because he shares the opinions of but because he is a chronic critic of established institutions and.j perhaps, because his mind has been narrowed by his single-ta-- bomb-thrower- s, x' hobby. In Chicago, where he and Raymond Robins and a few of that sort before Bolshevism was heard ilk, were radicals of a of, he has been regarded as sincere highbrow. He has been that way almost since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, for he is old now and, maphap, somewhat Born in 1849, at Vienna, New Jersey, he obtained a good education and went in for the law. In 1873 he was a United States attorney in New York. More than forty years passed before he was again called to a federal office. Abandoning the law he took up journalism and reform, both of which are dangerous and delightful. Early in his career he came under the spell of Henry George and ever since has been pleased to rank himself as one who sees every flaw in government and can provide the panacea the single tax. One can imagine that he is almost as Wilsonian as he is Georgian, that he would twaddle about placing humanity first, meaning by humanity, anybody who believes in the single tax, or communism. We are tempted to think that it is a knowledge of his career and opinions that has made our anxious congressmen suspect that d he may be a traitor who does not turn the country over the Lenine simply because the opportunity has not presented itself. Probably it would be hitting nearer the truth to describe him as one of those sincere, but narrow, radicals, who has a fellow feeling for all political rebels and fancies that he is doing a service to humanity by protecting them from the czars of government. Nothing could be more enlightening than to have Mr. Post testify in his own behalf; his caste of mind and unique way of looking at things would be most illuminating. It was a blunder to deny him this privilege and it is to be hoped that he soon may have a chance of explaining just why he released undesirable aliens almost as fast as they could be ordered deported. kid-glo- ve pig-heade- d. black-hearte- WHO DESERTED? League opponents of the resolution to proclaim peace with Gei-many insist that a separate peace would dishonor the United States because it would be a desertion of our allies. Technically, we had no allies during the war. For reasons of his own President Wilson did not urge any alliances and the American people, influenced no doubt by historic sentiment and conviction, were content to avoid alliances. Thus the United States came to be known as an associated power. Unlike the allies the United States did not bind itself not to make a separate peace and it did not declare war against all the enemies of- the entente alliance. Consequently the United States is in a different relationship to Germany and Austria , than is any of the members of the alliance. It will be, in fact it is, contended that morally and in honor the United States is bound not to make a separate peace and especially a peace which would in any way handicap the allies. The truth is that the allies have deserted the United States and not the United States the allies. The United States was deserted when the allies repudiated those principles which President Wilson J - . |