onferences are decisive. On them depends the educational value of
a campaign, and the men who participate in them, being in a position to
state the issues and point them, determine the political interests of the
people for a considerable period of time. To-day in America, for example,
no candidate can escape entirely that underlying irritation which
socialists call poverty and some call the high cost of living. But the
conspicuous candidates do decide what direction thought shall take about
this condition. They can center it upon the tariff or the trusts or even
the currency.

Thus Mr. Roosevelt has always had a remarkable power of diverting the
country from the tariff to the control of the trusts. His Democratic
opponents, especially Woodrow Wilson, are, as I write, in the midst of
the Presidential campaign of 1912, trying to focus attention on the
tariff. In a way the battle resembles a tug-of-war in which each of the
two leading candidates is trying to pull the nation over to his favorite
issue. On the side you can see the Prohibitionists endeavoring to make
the country see drink as a central problem; the emerging socialists
insisting that not the tariff, or liquor, or the control of trusts, but
the ownership of capital should be the heart of the discussion. Electoral
campaigns do not resemble debates so much as they do competing amusement
shows where, with bright lights, gaudy posters and persuasive, insistent
voices, each booth is trying to collect a crowd; The victory in a
campaign is far more likely to go to the most plausible diagnosis than to
the most convincing method of cure. Once a party can induce the country
to see its issue as supreme the greater part of its task is done.

The clever choice of issues influences all politics from the petty
manoeuvers of a ward leader to the most brilliant creative
statesmanship. I remember an instance that happened at the beginning of
the first socialist administration in Schenectady: The officials had out
of the goodness of their hearts suspended a city ordinance which forbade
coasting with bob-sleds on the hills of the city. A few days later one of
the sleds ran into a wagon and a little girl was killed. The opposition
papers put the accident into scareheads with the result that public
opinion became very bitter. It looked like a bad crisis at the very
beginning and the old ring politicians made the most of it. But they had
reckoned without the political shrewdness of th