Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 May 1882 — BLAINE’S RUFFIANISM. [ARTICLE]

BLAINE’S RUFFIANISM.

[From the New York Sun.] This is a strange and humiliating exhibition of ruffianism and clap-trap which Mr. James G. Blaine has been permitted to make in Washington. Strange, indeed, it seems that a man who in the lottery of politics has drawn a good many prizes, and has even been suffered for a time to occupy the position of a Secretary of State, should have not outgrown or learned the expediency of disguising the tricks of the charlatan and the demagogue. And humiliating it is to the people of this country that a committee representing a branch of the Federal legislature should, with one or two exceptions, have been too doltish or too craven to resent the derision heaped upon them by a self-invited witness, but should have watched with eyes agog the shufflings and the swaggerings of a bumptious mountebank. If the. House Committee on Foreign Affairs had been pipked out by Robeson’s tool for the express purpose of whitewashing his master’s pal they would have adopted tho same course in dealing with Mr. Blaine which has actuilly been taken by a majority of the o jmmittee. What passed for an examination on Monday was a farce, the witness being relieved from the annoyance of interrogatories, and invited to deliver a stump speech, which ho had been for some weeks engaged in concocting, aud which was delivered to the familiar accompaniment of guffaws and catcalls, in which some of the committee seemed inclined to join. This extraordinary performance being over, a recess was taken o recruit the energies of the committee; out when that body reassembled it appeared that, although nothing positively lefiuite or coherent had been elicited from the witness, there was a general Imposition to let the investigation go by default, and nobody but Mr. Belmont seemed willing to take Mr. Blaine in tajid. Then ensued a wrangle which asted for two days, and as to which wo may say at once that all the fairness, detorum aud dignity were on the side of die youth, while all the quibbling, vulgarity and indecent provocation came from the man with the white hair.

It would not be easy to approach an inquiry of this intricate and unpleasant nature in a more straightforward and large-minded way than that chosen by the examiner. He passed over as a matter of quite secondarj moment the relations which Mr. Blaine is alleged to iave sustained toward the Peruvian Company, although a lawyer might have liscerned in the glib statement of the witness on that head material for some galling catechizing. But the examiner judiciously preferred to confine himself ixclusively to the two main points at is•ue, viz., what led Mr. Blaine to press io vehemently and persistently the LanIreau claim upon Peru, and, secondly, whether the truculent attitude assumed oward Chili was not adopted solely on Mr. Blaine’s personal responsibility. To hese points the examiner strove with m exemplary patience and steadiuess to loid the witness, who on his part dodged and squirmed and wriggled with the slipperiness aud agility of an eel tinier the probe of Mr. Belmont’s reiterated questions. In his effort to elude the dull thud of a persistent query which, as none knew better than the witness, struck it the core of his deceit, Mr. Blaine iiad recourse to every trick and device which had served him at a pinch in some awkward conjunctures of his Congressional career. Now he would sneer, then bluster ; now taunt the examiner vith an inadvertence, and assume to enlighten him from the height of his misspent years and undesirable experience; now he would puff himself up with a pompous allusion to his brief occupancy of the State Department, and anon be would fall back to the more congenial role of a barroom politician, md attempt to raise a laugh. What chafed him, however, and drew forth oho outburst of rancor which terminated the disgraceful scene was the futility of uis maneuvers, the uselessness of his evasions, the grievous necessity, to which he found himself pinned by Mr. Belmont, of giving plain answers to plain questions, aud exposing his titter inability to meet the charges made against him. All the dust and noise raised by the witness did not avail to bide the facts that he" had no reason which lie dared divulge for his suspicious countenance of the Landreau imposture, and that Garfield and Arthur were responsible for his maladorous diplomacy has not a trace of foundation beyond his untrustworthy assertion. Mr. Blaine’s equivocating account of his relation to the Landreau claim might be amusing, if the mind had room for any other feeling but one of keen mortification that such a wily, shallow empiric should have been allowed for a season to shape the foreign policy of this great nation. He is no lawyer, as his former colleagues in the Senate sometimes had occasion to inform him ; but the recklessness with which on Thursday he flung about, such phrases as res gestae, res ad judicata, etc., would at ieast convey the impression that he had swallowed a law dictionary and was writhing from indigestion. He considered, he said, the Ladreati claim res adjudicata, because a joint resolution recommending the State Department to present it to Peru was smuggled some two years ago through one house of Congress and repudiated by the other. He proceeded to aver rotmdly that he had done no more than Mr. Fish or Mr. Evarts, whereas it is palpable upon the face of published documents that the latter never pronounced upon the merits of Landreau’s claim, and that his predecessor told the Minister at Lima to do nothing beyond extending facilities, unofficially, to an American citizen, for our Government could not assume to conotrne a contract between Landreau and Peru, or to dictate the judicial action of a foreign power. But that is just what Mr. Blaine did, as he was reluctantly compelled to acknowledge by the examiner, because he peremptorily demanded that Peru should adjudicate upon Landreau’s claim, although he knew that the Peruvian courts had refused to recognize it. Such a demand, pressed at a time when the courts were in.abeyance, and coupled with a bellicose note to Chili not to touch the guano covered by the pretended claim, would, of course, bo construed to mean not only that Landreau’s alleged rights should be pronounced upon, but that- they sbonld be sectioned. In short, the pushing of Landreau’s claim at the date and in the manner chosen by Mr. Blaine was universally interpreted in South America, and could only be interpreted by reasonable persons, as an act of brazen, unscrupulous blackmail. And when Mr. Belmont insisted’on an explicit answer to the question, who first brought the

Landreau claim *to bis notice, Mr. Blaine, after much prevarication, declared that nobody presented it; he bad chanced to light upon the olaim among the old lumber collected in the State Department, and the idea of pressing it popped up spontaneously in his mind. The story does little credit to Mr. Blaine’s ingenuity, and will fail, we apprehend, to impose on the most incredulous. It was the consciousness of n blunder committed in the fabrication of a legend so improbable which signally increased the inventor’s irritability, and brought about the outbreak in which he finally indulged. The ludicrous miscarriage of h ndeavor to cast the odium of his perfidious South American diplomacy on the shoulders first of Mr. Garfield and then pf Mr. Arthur also tended to exasperate the witness. Inasmuch as the statement that Garfield before he was shot on July 2 had formulated and approved the policy set forth in the dispatch of Aug. 4 rested on the unsupported assertion of Mr. Blaine, not the slightest advantage was derived from this dishonorable attempt to sneak behind a dead man. Moreover, the witness made a second silly blunder in alluding to au alleged diary, iu which ho pretends that the late President recorded with great minuteness every incident of his public life. Little as Mr. Blaine knows of tho law, he knows that his allegation as to the contents of the diary are uot evidence, and that, if it was worth mentioning at all, he should haje produced the document. We will* tell him why he refrained from doing so. If it be true that Garfield was in the habit of making such daily entries, and if the policy pursued throughout the summer toward the South American imbroglio had really oeen mapped out in frequent colloquies between the President and Secretary, there must have been a record of those discussions in the diary. Obviously, were any such evidence in existence Mr. Blaine would have produced it with a flourish. There is no such evidence, for the witness had no more warrant from Garfield for his diplomatic corruscations than he had from Garfield’s Cabinet during the long weeks when their chief lay on his deathbed. As to the pretense that President Arthur is morally responsible for Blaine’s bellicose policy, because Trescott’s instructions were read over to him—that is not worth refuting. The charge against Mr. Blaine is that he grossly misrepresented the facts to which the instructions were supposed to be adjusted, and the conclusive proof of the assertion is that no sooner did Mr. Arthur have the opportunity of ascertaining the truth for himself than he repudiated the offensive features of the dispatch. When we consider the total failure of the witness to explain his advocacy of the Landreau fraud, or show any warrant from Mr. Garfield or Garfield’s Cabinet, or Mr. Arthur, for his unscrupulous diplomacy, we are amazed at the insolence with which Mr. Blaine pretended to believe himself exculpated, and demanded that Mr. Belmont should retract an expression, every word of which was justified. On the other hand, we are not in the least surprised that the examiner, who had borne with self command the railing and hectoring which had continually done duty for testimony, should have been stuDg beyond endurance by the impertinent demand, coupled at it was with an insinuation of untrutlifulngss. Nor, under the cir cumstances, can we chide Mr. Belmont very sharply for bestowing on Mr. Blaine the epithets which faithfully described his conduct on the occasion. “I beiieve you,” liesaid, “ to be a bully and a coward.” They were bitter, though truthful words, and some persons might feel disposed to resent them ; but the friends of peace need entertain no misgivings that the man who thoroughly deserved them will not consent to swallow them. The plumes of the so-called Knight of Maine have long been pretty well bedraggled and identified with the pinions of a barnyard fowl; and what mauliood he had was sacrificed when he groveled at the knees of the grim custodian of the Mulligan letters.