OIL CANS

The powers that be in the Republican party must be cursing their fate that the first stages of a presidential campaign year should be featured by such revelations as the Senate committee is bringing to light in regard to the oil deals that took place in 1920. There no longer seems to be any doubt that graft was rampant in more fields than this one during the Harding regime, but here particularly lies the threat to a Republican victory in November. Dishonesty that took place eight years ago is not likely to arouse much public indignation now, especially if the guilt can be attributed to politically dead men. Thus the fact that the Secretary of the interior and the Attorney General then in office had been accused of receiving bribes for favors rendered was of no great concern to the present leaders of the party's destines, but corruption does not exist in isolated instances and successive revelations are bringing the guilt nearer home.

Already Will Hays, Chairman of the National Committee in 1920, has been ingulfed by the rising tide to graft, and the waters have even beat menacingly, if ineffectively at the feet of Secretary Mellon, while the spray has carried even as far as the Chairman of the present Committee William M. Butler. The only hope the G. O. P. heads can have is to prove that no men now of rank in the party as it now stands were involved in any of the ramifications of the Teapot Dome affair, and if this fails, their prospects of a third successive period of office will be damaged almost beyond repair.