Mr. Roosevelt's Newest Issue 

Making the Grocer's Pass-book an appendix to the Eighth Commandment

By A. Maurice Low, Harper's Weekly, July 20, 1912, p. 8

The new decalogue is to be written not on a tablet of stone, but in a grocer's pass-book! The great moral issue, which was Armageddon and the battle of the Lord, has now become the cost of living!

It was a great moral issue, you will remember, that drove the Colonel to abandon the seclusion of Long Island to invoke Jehovah in Chicago. Morality was at stake, and no sacrifice was too great to defend it. Such a trivial thing as a nomination was not of consequence; but no man not a weakling could resist the appeal when morality was in danger. Therefore to Chicago went Mr. Roosevelt with his bosses and his sub-bosses and their check-books. The moral issue was so great that it justified his bolting the Republican party and attempting the destruction of the party that had redeemed him from obscurity and placed him on a pedestal. And having accomplished, as he believes, what he set out to do -- the defeat of the Republican party so that the cause of morality may be served -- Mr. Roosevelt has now discovered that the great "moral" issue of the campaign is the cost of living.