Ogden Daily Standard | 1910-05-16 | Page 4 | Secretary Ballinger Should Go

SECRETARY BALLINGER SHOULD GO. The disclosures in the Ballinger-Pinchot investigation must impress im-press the average man with the weakness of Secretary Ballinger as a cabinet officer. Instead of measuring up to the qualifications of a big, broad-gauged, open-minded leader of men, he has fallen short in all the essentials of greatness as conceived by those who look for something above the ordinary in members of a President's official family. The one thing that has impressed the reader of the investigation is the evasiveness of Mr. Ballinger, and now that Lawlcr and Kerby have exposed the method by which Ballinger was "clear listed" in the President's letter of September 13, the conviction is growing that the Secretary of the Interior has been not only evasive, but deliberately de-liberately deceptive. He could have acknowledged with manly frankness that he had supplied the President with much of the material ma-terial for the letter of exoneration, and that open avowal would have brought upon him no severely adverse criticism, but, seemingly, he lacked the courage of a man of high mindedness and preferred to resort re-sort to the screening power of the administration and a packed committee. com-mittee. Absolute honesty, after all, is the best policy, however much one may be tempted to dissemble and trust to trickery to save him from an embarrassing position. Our advice to President Taft is to allow Secretary Ballinger to resign. Circumstantial evidence points to the head of the Interior department as a very close, sympathetic friend of "the interests." Perhaps not as much should be expected of Ballinger as Caesar demanded de-manded of his wife, but a cabinet officer, if not above suspicion, should be above the degree of reproach 'which all his acts in connection connec-tion with the Cunningham claims have warranted.