Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1880 — HENRY WATTERSON’S `OPINION. [ARTICLE]

HENRY WATTERSON’S `OPINION.

[From the Louisville Courier-Journal.] With New York and Pennsylvania in the East, and Illinois in the West, the Grant people have possession of the keys to the position, and neither Blaine nor Sherman has given any proof of a diverting strength sufficient to stand against a perfectly-drilled body of re so lute and expert managers, who know what they are about and mean to hare what they are after. *. * * Just as,

in 1876, there was, long in advance of the Republican nomination, a tolerably well-defined conspiracy to bring in the Republican nominee at any cost, have we already formed a conspiracy to bring in Gen. Grant, no matter how the election may go. Ho is the one man, the only man, under whom the revolutionists for such they are—think they can succeed. Their idea is to make a hot canvass for a solid North against a solid South. If, by stirring up the war-like passions of the North, they sucoeed, why, well and good. But, if they fail, the leadership of Grant furnishes them still another chance. The two houses of Congress are Democratic. The South furnishes the Democratic majority in both. They think that, after the election, they wiil only need to muddla the returns that they may secure a pretext for overriding Congress, on the ground that Congress is a mere body of pardoned rebels, who are about to turn the Government over to the disloyal South, and practically to put the Confederacy above the Union —a thing not to be brooked by loyal men. Thus, with Grant, the hero of the late war for the suppression of the rebellion, in the saddle, and the Grand Army of the Republic ready to take the field, they expect to accomplish in 1881 by force what in 1877 they accomplished by fraud. * * * In a grand game of bluff the Republicans have every advantage—in position, in organization, in leadership, and, as a last resort, in actual resources. Thus do the revolutionists who proposo a third term, as the precursor of a life tenure, calculate, and, considering the situation of public affairs and the state of the country, it must be allowed that they do not wholly reckon without their host. * * * Democrats may as well begin to consider how they shall proceed against ail this, for not merely the nomination of Gen. Grant, but the programme we have hastily sketched, seems now the inevitable.