THE CAMPAIGN: Seagirt

To make his second major speech of the campaign, John W. Davis traveled from his Manhattan headquarters down to Seagirt, N. J., as a guest of Governor Silzer of that State. He spoke first of Wilson, then of the Oil and Veterans' Bureau scandals, of the Fordney-McCumber tariff, of Foreign Affairs, of the Ku Klux Klan.

A Previous Visit. "This is my second appearance at Seagirt. You will not be surprised if I find my memory turning at this time to the circumstances of my earlier visit. It happened on a hot July day, twelve years ago. I was one of a party of 200 or more who tramped in the dust from the station to the Governor's house at Seagirt. At our head marched that grand old Roman, Champ Clark, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives. We were calling on a Governor of New Jersey who had just received the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. Most of that company, including myself, had never made his personal acquaintance. It was our errand to assure him of our hearty support and to place ourselves at his service. The impressions of the day were summed up for me by one of my colleagues as we tramped back to the waiting train. Said he: 'When that man comes to Washington there will be a leader in the White House.'"

Corruption. "In 1913, the lobby was scourged from Washington; in 1921, like a flock of unclean birds hastening to the feast, it gathered from the four winds and descended upon the city. The Little Green House in K Street was set up for sinister purposes but partly disclosed. Its occupants and their friends soon proved that they lacked neither zeal nor appetite.

"First of all came oil. At the head of the buccaneers as they marched along rode the Secretary of the Interior. And after oil, the veterans. Here was a rare field for enterprise. A year and a half after Congress had appropriated $33,000,000 for building purposes, only 200 hospital beds had been added to the Bureau's equipment, and those in a hospital purchased readymade. If it be true that public interest in these things has waned, is it not a public duty to see that it is revived before the day of judgment comes ?

"If the fact is that the public resources have been squandered, is it any answer to say that a budget system has been installed? If unfit and corrupt men have been put and kept in office and left to their devices, is it a sufficient defense that the Administration was not actually desirous of dishonesty? If the wounded veteran has been defrauded of the care that was his due, is there any comfort to him in the fact that Congress made lavish appropriations?"

Tariff. "The tariff afforded an opening to hosts of privilege for an assault less direct but far more devastating to the public pocketbook. We are told that America in 1921 was threatened from abroad by an 'impending avalanche of suddenly cheapened merchandise' from which it was narrowly saved by the beneficent action of the Fordney-McCumber tariff.