Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 September 1877 — A RESTLESS CONSCIENCE. [ARTICLE]

A RESTLESS CONSCIENCE.

The Fraudulent President Cannot Sit Still in His Stolen Chair. [From the Cleveland Plaindealer.] What can be the meaning of this restlessness ? How is it that an incumbent of the White House, with the evidence furnished by the administrations of his predecessor that the American public reprehend nothing more in an Executive than a spirit of gadding as a warning, can have the effrontery to make an everlasting itinerant of himself for the edification of small boys, loafers, idlers and street crowds generally ? Why does he not put on a becoming modesty ? Why does ho not seek to withdraw himself from the public eye? If he lias good works to perform, why does he not execute them quietly, and try to distract public attention from himself and the perennial contemplation of the machinery of Returning Boards ? It is easy enough to understand the cause of Hayes’ unrest. The demon of discontent is gnawing at his vitals and pricking him into motion, forbidding him to be still, ever suggesting the hope that contact with crowds, and the absorption of a meaningless flattery may banish for a brief instant the thought that he is a fraud. Hayes appreciates the estimation in which he is held by a great majority of the people. He knows that lie came within a liair’s-breadth of 1 being the cause of a civil war, compared with which the rebellion of ’6l-’65 was child’s play; that a preponderance of the thinking and voting people of this country came to the calm, deliberate conclusion that “ the great fraud of 1876,” as Mr. Black aptly terms it, deserved to be resisted with arms as much as any assault on the constitutional rights of a free people ever did. He knows that he wifi go down to history as the figurehead of the most repulsive political crime ever perpetrated, in that the guiltiest actors therein wore the ermine of the Supreme Court. He knows all these things, and yet the demon of discontent drives him forth into the highways to exhibit his fraudulent person before the gaze of the idle mob, the better to make his mental disquietude the more poignant when thrown in upon himself again. To sit down quietly in the White House, which is the part of propriety and decency, is impossible; for to sit down is to bring a self-consciousness that is intolerable. The province of the tramp is the only thing that can divert him. He and his retinue get aboard of the train. Tney travel like a menagerie from town to town. Hayes goes out on the platform. The crowd of rustics yell and swing their hats and handkerchiefs. The children cry. The cows and the pigs scamper behind the bam in affright. The scene is repeated everywhere. When a big town is reached, the hacks and the lickspittles get out a band and a four-horse carriage, and there is a “procession,” with more yells and hat-swingings.