The American Presidency N O matter how favourable the signs may
appear to be in an American presidential campaign, it is never wise to predict the election of a Democratic candidate. The Republicans are the majority party. They have merely to keep together in order to hold the Presidency with several million votes to spare. But by almost universal agreement 1932 is a Democratic year. The Democrats cannot fail to secure a large majority in Congress, and the Republicans have recognized, since the Maine elections in September, that the defeat of President Hoover must be regarded as a high probability. Nor has there been anything in Mr. Hoover's personal experience to make any material change in the outlook. It is not deemed advisable or proper for the President to take the field in person. He should conduct operations from the White House, make only a limited number of speeches, and leave the rough work of the campaign to his Cabinet colleagues and the local leaders. This rule of political warfare Mr. Hoover would undoubtedly have preferred, for he is not at home on the platform and has no liking at all for the party arena. But no choice was left to him. The battle required his presence, and he has shown an energy that few of his supporters had looked for in meeting his opponents and defending his policies. The results of this departure from custom cannot be forecast. More than fifty million people may vote on November 8th. An electorate of that magnitude is mainly silent and unknown. Its verdict must involve the unexpected, and the ballots of November 8th may contain the greatest surprise in the history of modern America.
Until the closing stage, which has been extraordinarily violent and confused, the contest could be described in simple terms as a frontal attack upon the Republican Administration for its failure to grapple with the facts of the depression and a contest between the two chief candi- dates. But at the eleventh hour Mr. Hoover sought, with a wildness of utterance most unusual with him, to make the election a conflict between "two philosophies of government." The Democrats, he affirmed, were urging changes and offering new ideals which would destroy the very foundations of the American system. We may assume that this alarmist declaration must have sounded exceedingly strange to the Democratic candidate, who is a Roosevelt and a State Governor, who was a member of the Wilson Administration, and must depend for the solid basis of his position upon the votes of the conservative South. There is, manifestly, no such clash of philo- sophies. The conspicuous feature of the present election is its negative character. In the presence of an appalling economic crisis, the familiar American issue of the protec- tive tariff is the single great question over which a genuine conflict of policy and principle is to be discerned. And as a matter of fact that is what Mr. Hoover was mean- ing, for, in his New York speech he indulged in a rhetorical flight which, more perhaps than anything else in a dis- tressing campaign, reveals the length of extravagance into which a political leader may be tempted in defiance of his customary restraints. The President had a mental vision of grass growing in the streets of a hundred cities and a thousand towns, and weeds over the fields of a million farms, if the American electorate were so reckless as to put into power a Democratic Administration pledged to replace the protective tariff with what is called "a com- petitive tariff for revenue." Mr. Hoover's rhetoric was obviously damaging to his cause, but it is important to take note of the fact that, called upon to resist a tremen- dous onslaught, he should have decided to meet it with the most uncompromising assertion of the tariff position that America has known since the days of McKinley thirty years ago.
Such tactics are not easy to harmonize with the position taken up by the President at intervals since 1929. He was understood to have been opposed to the excessive schedules of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, and to have • refrained from vetoing the Bill only because of his wish to avoid an ugly clash with Congress. More than once he has offered suggestions for dealing with the problem of War Debts in relation to markets for American products overseas, suggestions which could have no meaning except as involving certain reasonable adjust- ments of the 1930 Tariff Act. He is aware that the economists of the United States arc almost solid in protesting against the rigours of the Act, and he is certainly not unaware that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff is responsible for a good deal of the anti-Hoover sentiment in the industrial States as well as for a large part of the resentment against the Republican Administration which, since the failure of its farm-relief measures, has swept . over the agrarian States, nearly all Republican by . political and social tradition. Mr. Hoover, however, has made his choice. His speeches show that he is under no illusion about the election itself. It cannot turn upon anything but the depression and the total of the unemployed—now put by the most conservative authorities at the terrifying figure of 12,000,000.
What of America's future foreign policy ? Congress will have a large Democratic majority. This would give to a Democratic President an authority in international affairs similar to that enjoyed by Woodrow Wilson in his fortunate first term. It would tend to uphold the Presi- dent in a Disarmament policy, and in the Stimson stand on Manchuria, as also the later attitude of the State Department towards consultation under the Kellogg Pact. But on the other hand, we must recognize that a strong Democratic party in Congress will be a reflection of the nationalistic anti-Europe sentiment which has un- questionably revived during the past year or two through- out the States of the interior. American public opinion to-day is no more disposed towards co-operation with 'Europe than it was during the Coolidge regime, but if possible less so ; and it should be clearly understood in -this country that the frequent references of this year, in many countries, to a renewed discussion of War Debts after the presidential election have acted, unfortunately, in a decidedly prejudicial fashion. Not in this manner, it is quite certain, can we look for the opening of a new chapter in economic co-operation between Europe and America ; but rather through a general realization, which may not be long delayed, that the United States, like Great Britain, has far more to gain by the restoration of world trade than by the painful effort to liquidate the liabilities of the War epoch,
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