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Show THE HEART OF AMERICA IS SOUND The candidates for President and Vice-President chosen by the opposing national political parties represent the flowering of an ideal in government aiming at an equality of opportunity for every citizen. They illustrate the working work-ing out of a constitutional form of government which for 152 years has encouraged private initiative and enterprise instead of crushing individual ambition with the iron hand of officialism seeking to enforce paternalistic control over the lives of a people. No matter what ticket is elected in November it will be a victory for those principles of equality and democracy, without class or privilege, which are the basis on which our Constitution rests. The people will choose between men who are of the people in the truest sense of the term, and have the deep understanding of the national heart that makes for progress and good government. Underlying the battle for the Presidency of our coun- , try are two types of leadership in both parties leaders like Hoover, sprung from the small country communities, and leaders like Smith who struggled up from the multitudes multi-tudes in a great city. The inception of the United States of America marked the end of that popular stupidity of the "Divine Right of Kings" and established the first successful government in history where a man was judged solely on his own merits and not by his blood. When Herbert Hoover worked his way through college by driving a laundry wagon, and Alfred Smith sold papers on New York's "East Side" to help support a widowed mother, they were developing the character and proving the ability that was to place one of them in the most important impor-tant executive position in the world. And they were given their opportunities to succeed by a principle of government that recognized that such men, in whom apparent misfortune misfor-tune had created qualities of greatness and sympathy, might be indefinitely more capable of ruling a nation than the guarded first son of some favored monarch. It is in the high honors paid such men that America is seen as the land of opportunity. The people rule, through the sovereignty of the ballot, by selecting to official authority authori-ty men of simplicity and strength, men who have made their own climb from poverty and obscurity to positions of power and responsibility, men who appreciate our constitutional consti-tutional rights and privileges. |