“About three months ago a well-meaning Republican business man was driving through Clark county.  His soldier boy was at the wheel, and he looked over into a field and saw a hundred trucks lying there; and he seized upon the circumstance to attack the Administration at Washington.  The son had heard enough of it, and he stopped the car and said:  ’Father, you have got to stop talking that way.  When we were in the front trench we had warm food, no matter whether we were in the midst of hell’s fire or not.  We had all the ammunition we needed.  It was ten times better to have more trucks than we needed than to have fewer trucks than we needed.’  And then there is another reason for it all.  Need we be reminded that the opposition said that it would require Secretary Baker and President Wilson eighteen months to take 600,000 soldiers over seas, and, recognizing that it would require in all probability more than 2,000,000 soldiers to win the war, that the war would then last, under this Democratic Administration, four times eighteen months.  Any child in this country can have the facts presented to him and he will have the mentality to grasp these outstanding circumstances:  President Wilson and Secretary Baker, at the head of the military forces of the nation did not send 600,000 soldiers over in eighteen months’ time.  They sent 2,000,000 soldiers over in eighteen months’ time, and won the war without the loss of a single troop ship.”

CHAPTER V

HOW HE HAS DEALT WITH LABOR TROUBLES

No subject furnishes so good an index to the entire record of an executive as the manner in which he has handled the affairs growing out of industrial disputes.  Touching, as they often do, a zone of disputed claims, and involving, as they often do, the social rights of workers no less than the rights of property, and entailing, as they frequently have, the duty of maintaining public order, the conflicts between capital and labor test to the utmost the abilities of the Executive Officer of a great industrial state like Ohio.  Within its borders are toilers from every land and every clime.  In her cities dwell as laborers men and women from every known country and representative of every race—­a modern Babel of tongues with a greater variety, were it possible, than those upon whom fell confusion of speech in the ages gone.

And the period during which Governor Cox has held away has been one of profound upheavals.  There have been strikes brought forth by “hard times,” strikes occasioned by efforts at organization of workers, and strikes whose distant origin lay in the economic overturn incident to war inflation with its topsy-turvy of values and its jumble of the normal status.  These conditions, then, supply a complete and ample test of the effectiveness of the policy which has been followed.  The results of this policy are told in a brief statement by Mr. Oscar W. Newman, Associate Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court.  He said:  “Not a soldier was brought to the scene of a single strike (although they were in readiness for emergency); person and property were preserved; and above all, the dignity of the law was maintained.”