Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 August 1880 — Mr. English and Our Foreign Born Citizens. [ARTICLE]

Mr. English and Our Foreign Born Citizens.

[Cincinnati Enquirer, August 12, 1880.] Citizens of foreign-birth have particular reason to be proud of Mr. English, and to give him their support. It is to him hardly less than to any other man in the country that they owe the full and final recogition of their equal rights with native-born citizens to all the blessings of our institutions. It was ■he who was foremost in the struggle against that worst and narrowest of ideas, Know-Nothingism. He was the friend of the foreign-born citizen when prejudice and passion were strongest against him—when they were lashed into fury by scheming demagogues, and when the idea had taken a hold upon the people of the country, the strength of grip of which has never been equaled by any other idea. Men who wore liberal in other matters were bigoted in their treatment of foreigner. They professed to see in the rapid peopling of the country from foreign shores latent and terrible dangers, and in their zeal they were carried to the most extreme lengths. Voters of this generation can hardly understand t£ie intensity of the opposition to foreigners which raged from 1862 to 1858. Public men surrendered to it and essayed to lead it for their own advancement. Whole States threw off their allegiance to the old Whig party to give in their adhesion to this most pernicious of ideas. In Indiana, especially, this sentiment became most fierce. The secret, oath-bound organization was everywhere. It pervaded every town and ward and voting precinct. It formed mobs to inflict the wont personal violence upon unoffending men, whose only crime was birth in a foreign land. It burned down dwellings over the heads of innocent women and children. Its frenzy did not even stop short of wanton, unprovoked murder. Foreigners were assaulted when quietly at work, on the highway, or in the shop—or manufactory. They were denied work for no other reason than that they first saw the light in Ireland, or Germany, or Franco, or some land beyond the seas. It was this condition of affairs into which Mr. English was projected soon after his entrance into public life. And he met it as he has always met every public question, boldly, manfully, and without evincing the slightest desire to dodge or equivocate on this question. He attacked it as a dangerous, damnable heresy. He denounced it as utterly un-American in inception and idea, and as unworthy of any true man. He did this, too, in the face of the almost universal success of this doctrine in every section of Indiana. He made the canvass against KnowNothingism when to do so was dangerous. It required physical bravery of the highest order. He went into the canvass, carrying his life in his hands in this much-vaudent, peace-loving Noi#. But it required a higher order of bravery; that moral courage which dares to face a mob, to meet the advocates of public ideas, and, meeting them, to tear down their every argument, to present public questions upon their merits and to battle for a principle. And he made the contest strong and fierce, and he made it to win. When every other Democratic member of Congress in Indiana, save one, was subjected to defeat by the adherents of this heresy, Mr. English was re-elected again and again by increased majorities. His constituents appreciated the fact that he had fought boldly against the most dangerous idea which had ever acquired a hold upon American soil. It was his bold fight over this question which first drew attention to him as a strong, hold, well-balanced man, who never surrendered to a pestilent idea-—a man who possessed that conservative spirit, and yet that devotion to the principles which underlie our form ol government, which go to make the statesman. It is well that our people should bs reminded again of the struggle he made for an idea in the past. It is but a promise, an earnest of what the man will do in the future.