OCR Text |
Show THE VICE PRESIDENCY. I The results of primaries and state conventions I fo far held seem to leave small doubt as to who will I be nominated for the presidency by the Republicans I in Chicago and the Democrats in Denver. The I claims for Taft and Bryan are that they will be ' named on the first ballot, if not by acclamation. ! Granting that there wiil be no hitch in the pro- grams as -outlined by the campaign managers of I these two men, and that the pre-conveution favor- iies will win, though there is nothing in the his- I tory of political conventions to indicate a certainty I s to the result as outlined, interest naturally grows I s to the vice presidential candidates. Who they I will be is a problem, to solve which nobody has even I hazarded a guess. There is. indeed, a popular no- tion that the office of vice president is one of honor ito be conferred upon aspiring statesmen of the second sec-ond class, to get them out of the way of other party I leaders; an office to be elected to which insures eter- tial political oblivion tn the candidate. That the candidate for second place must necessarily pos- soss plenty of this world's goods to finance the campaign is regarded as an essential T.f availability. Ict why the vice presidency should be regarded as position of small importance or an office un- worthy of the best men of the land, to be. lightly 1 turned away from, is inexplicable. There is nothing I I in the history of the nation to suggest thaf the posi- I tion is not one of honor and trust; nothing to in- I dieate that men of small caliber can satisfactorily ' nil it. IThat fight of the twenty-six men who have been elected to ihe vice presidency subsequently became ... ' . president of the nation effectually refutes the no- I lion 1 hat political oblivion is the portion of the vice president. Adams, Jefferson. Van Buren and Roose- ' velt were elected president after they had been chosen vice president, although Roosevelt succeeded to the office with the death of McKinley. The others who became president through the fortuitous circumstance cir-cumstance of the death of their predecessors were Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson and Arthur. Of the oth- i -r : . . ! . ers whose names are not on the roll of presidents, all, or nearly all, were men of ability, and there is probably only one whose name is recalled with any fepling that he was unworthy the trust reposed in him. With such men as Jefferson, Calhoun, Breckinridge, Breck-inridge, Colfax, Hendricks and others eminent in statecraft as exemplars, all profound stude'nts of the principles of representative government and of the rights and duties of the citizen,, all men of prominence in the political history of their day, -there need be no feeling among those considered eligible eli-gible for the office at the coming conventions that the office is unworthy of them. The vice presidency is second in importance only to the presidency, even if there is a disposition to belittle the office. And the fact that nearly a third of thrvvice presidents elected succeeded to the presidency makes the selection se-lection of candidates for that office one of the really important features of the national conventions. |