Admire Planks Of Progressivism.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 11, 1912:
London Weekly Press Thinks the Bull Moose Programme Is Epochmaking
BUT DOUBT ROOSEVELT ZEAL
The Nation Calls It a Great Sign That Wide Social Reforms Are Made Campaign Issues.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Aug. 10.— British views of the new Rooseveltian programme generally agree that whatever may be the result of the Colonel's attempt to reach the Presidency, the Progressive Convention marks an important date in American politics.
    "Mr, Roosevelt," says The Spectator "is challenging the machine, and we may be sure that he will not rest till he has spent every ounce of his strength in an attempt to displace it by new machinery. If he falls, it will still be found that he has knocked the old-fashioned gear about a good deal."
    "There is at last an American party that means something," says The Weekly Nation, which adds:
    ''For the first time in our generation a party has arisen with a comprehensive platform and with resources that will enable it to contest every State in the Union, and with a candidate who is incomparably the most forceful and compelling American of his day. That is a combination of circumstances from which, in our judgment, nothing but good can come to American public life." After declaring that the Republican and Democratic Parties are at bottom nothing but two hostile electioneering bodies, two immense guilds or fraternities of politicians, who keep up an outward show of hostility and flaunt the customary insignia of battle, though it is neither magnificent nor war, but simply a game, played out by professionals at the expense of the befuddled public, The Nation continues:
    "There is no need to dwell on the various political expedients which Mr. Roosevelt recommends for curbing machine rule and restoring to the people the liberties that the politicians have filched from them. Really the important planks in his platform are those in which he outlines and emphasizes the need of a thorough-going programme of social and industrial reform.
    "For the first time in American history, what Carlyle used to call the 'condition of the people question,' has been made a Presidential issue. It has been brought on to the carpet of popular discussion, moreover, in the shape of specific proposals and to remedy specific ills.
    "That is a most auspicious development. When a Presidential candidate announces that he is in favor of woman suffrage, of insurance against sickness, invalidity, accident, and old age; of a fixed standard of sanitation, and safety in all industries; of the appointment of commissions to determine the living and minimum wage in specified trades, of prohibition of tenements, of curtailment of the hours of labor, of workingmen's compensation, of special protection of women and child employes, of mine and factory inspection
and of a legal holiday every seven days — when this happens, one may be sure that a new America with a new social conscience is by the way of being born.
    "It is the first clear sign we have had that the deplorable leeway which the United States has to make up in matters of social and industrial legislation is no longer to be ignored by the National Congress or left to the haphazard, ill-regulated and disjointed activities of the separate States; it is the first sign that the National sentiment is to be organized against the dehumanized wage system tyranny of capitalists and employers that has already gone so far to blight the promise of American life, and convert the richest country in the world from a potential paradise into an actual inferno for the workingman.
    "That Roosevelt will carry the country with him on any such platform we do not assert. That if he were chosen to be the next President his zeal for reform would survive the election is equally doubtful.
    "His Presidential career, though full of sound and fury, did little to promote the causes which he now tells us he has so much at heart. But we must give him credit for having founded a party which, even if called into existence by his own personal ambition, may in the future be an instrument of real reform."