Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1883 — Curtain. [ARTICLE]

Curtain.

Thirty-five millions of tax taken off tobacco, cigars and banks, $11,000,000 off sugar, and not a cent off lumber, iron, clothing, or any of the necessities of the poor man’s life; taxes added on to glass and dishes and fence-wire rods and knit goods, this is the record of the infamous Forty-seventh Congress, the rottenest legislative body that ever disgraced the American continent. It is enough to make any dead man, who had in life any sense or patriotism, turn over in his grave and howl to see men voting for representatives who sell out to the lobby. There never was so big nor so corrupt a lobby in Washington as the one that swarmed there this winter and bought, bulldozed and bullied that infamous bill through the infamous Forty-seventh Congress. It was a lobby bill, and it is enough to make an American blush with shame to see, now and then, an lowa farmer siding in with the lobby. It is the last Republican Congress that will ever sit in Washington. The robbers’ bill was passed solely by the power of the party lash. Even Dunnell, of Minnesota, and An'enon, of Kansas, on whom we had depended to

help xis tqk® this question out of party politics, “whispering they would ne’er consent, consented." When they see this, thousands of Republicans all over .the liberty-loving, justice-loving West, who voted for Republican Congressmen last fall, will thank God that their votes did not elect a Republican Congress. If they have come to the Democratic party in platoons for a year past, they will now come in regiments and armies. There is no place else to go. Congress, like corporations, probably have no souls. They ought to have them and there ought to be a receptacle for them in the innermost recesses of perdition—not that we care, but it would be such a satisfaction to decent Republicans to think the soul of the newly dead Forty-seventh Congress had gone there. It is the only Congress they have had for eight years, and it stole the people blind the first year, and the next year raised the tax on dishes and stockings and woolen goods and reduced it one-half on tobacco and refused to reduce it a cent’s worth on lumber. If a Democratic Congress does no better, then so much worse for the Democratic party—that is all. How long will the patient ass bear the burden ? How long will the free American people ask the greedy monopolists of Pennsylvania how much tax they shall pay and what they shall pay it on ? We shall see. — lowa State Leader.