Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1883 — The Measure of Patriotism. [ARTICLE]

The Measure of Patriotism.

The Republican party has adopted a convenient test for the patriotism of the citizens of the Southern States. If a white Southerner is a Democrat he is an unreconstructed rebel, still adhering to the lost cause and watching -eagerly for the opportunity of paying the Confederate debt, pensioning Confederate soldiers aud repealing the Fourteenth amendment. ' If he is a Republican he is a patriot. Wade Hampton fought in the war. So did John T. Morgan and Matt. W. Ransom and M. C. Butler and a number of others now in political life as Democrats. They are unrepentant rebels, every man of them. Mahone, Longstreet, Chalmers, Mosby, Riddleberger, Wise and other Southern supporters of the national administration also fought in the war. But they are patriots. They have be•come converts to Republicanism and Federal appointments. There is evidently only one road open for the{re-establishment in the South of a patriotic regard for the Union as it is. That road leads into the Republican organization. Let all the ex-Confeder-atos, from Jeff Davis down, declare in favor of retaining the Republicans in power and give that party the vote of the solid South, and they will at once become Union patriots. If they need help to carry the negroes over with them the Government will supply them with any amount of Federal bayonets fnd carpet-bag missionaries necessary to convince the colored voters in what direction their true interests lie. Longstreet, Jefferda, Chalmers and the other ex-Confederates, who have attached themselves to the tail of Mahone’s kite in Washington are in a comparatively small way of business. They simply want some Southern postoffices, custom-houses and Marshalships in return for the pledge of the Southern delegations to Arthur in the next Republican Presidential Convention. Still they are patriots, truly repentant of .their Confederate sins,and are accepted with gracious condescension into the floyar’ ranks of the Republican party. —New York World.