Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1884 — BLAINE. [ARTICLE]

BLAINE.

charges and Specifications Relating to Public Ras< • . calities. Hie Great Republican Leader Stripped and Publicly * Whipped bv a Republican Organ. (New York Evening Poet, April 7th.) A correspondent, whose letter we print in another column desires some explanation what he considers the slig ing or hostile references to i James G. Blaine which so I

quently appear in the Even Post, and which he suspa must be, in some degree least, the product of private malice. « e think he is entitled, as are our readers generally, to some such explanation, and we shall proceed to make it cheerfully, starting, however, with the assertion that no editor or other person connected with the Evening Post in any capacity has. to our knowledge, had any difference, quarrel or controversy with Mr. Blaine or has ever received, any injury from him whatever or bears him any personal grudge., whenever he is discussed in these columns he is discussed either as the holder of a public office or as a candidate for a public office. Nor do we make any reference to his private affairs except when those affairs have or appear to have a direct and important relation to his character and claims as a public man. In fact all our comments on him and his doings are due to the tact that we consider his reappearance as a candidate for the highest office in the Government or any other, as an audacious proceeding, which, can only be accounted for by supposing him to have an ex traordinary and unwarrantable confidence in the popular forgetfulness. It is the duty of all those who do not wisn to see the I.epublican party buried dur • ng the canvass next summer with the hopeless task of whitewashing him, to set forth briefly, now that his boom is becoming so lively, the charges which he will have to answer before he can be elected to the Presidency. It wo’d be lamentable indeed, and certainly disastrous, if the task prescribed for Republican journalists by the convention should be not the discussion of great questions of public policy, like the tariff or the civil service or the railroads or the currency, but laborious examinations of Mr. James G. Blaine’s railroad transactions. We mean, as far as we are concerned, to avoid this if we can by taking up his railroad transactions now, before the bustle and excitement of the canvass begins.

THE FIRST CHARGE. The first of these charges is that in the spring session of Congress in 1869 a bill was before the House of Representatives which sought to renew a land grant to the - Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad of Arkansas, in which some of Mr Blaine’s friends were interested; that an attempt to defeat it by an amendment was made, and was on the point of being successful, and its promoters were in despair; that at this juncture Mr. Blaine, being then Speaker of the House, sent a message to General Logan to make the point of order that the amendment was not germane to the purposes of the bill; that this point of order was accordingly raised and promptly sustained by Mr. Blaine as Speaker, and the bil] was in this manner saved; thal Mr. Blaine wrote at once ts the promoters calling atten tion to the service he had ren dered them, and finally, aftei some negotiations, securec from them as a reward for ii the appointment as selling agent of the bonds of the road,

on commission, in Maine, and received a number of such bonds as his percentage; that the leading feature of this transaction appeared in two letters of his afterward made public, dated, respectively, July 26 and October 4, 1869. THE SECOND CHARGE 2. That he asserted at first on the floor of the House, with the view of covering up this affair, that the Little Rock and Fort Smith Road ‘‘derived its life, franchise and value wholly from the State,” and not from Congress, whereas the evidence subsequently taken by the congressional committee disclosed the fact that the road derived the value on which these bonds were based from the act of congress, of which Mr. Blaine secured the Sassage in the manner above escribed in 1869; that he asserted on the floor of the House that the bonds he received “were bought by him at precisely the same rate as others paid,” whereas the evidence showed that the bonds came to him as commissions on sales, which he secured the opportunity of making through his aid given in the work in congress, and that he solicited this agency, basing his request on the aid so given, and that he paid nothing whatever for the bonds, the consideration being his ruling as Speaker, and finis subsequent efforts to sell them. vVhat he did with these bonds, seventy-five in number, is uncertain; but strong, though not conclusive, evidence was produced, going to show that they weie taken off his hands at a good price by the Union Pacific Railroad (through the instrumentality of one Caldwell,) which then also was in trouble. The investigation on this point was never pushed home, owing to the sudden illness which overtook Mr. Blaine in 1876.

• THE THIRD CHARGE. 3. That Mr. Blaine, in 1870, made an offer, as appeared by his own letters, to one of his railroad friends, Mr. Warren Fisher, of Boston, tosellhima, half of one twenty-fourth in terest in the Northern Pacific Railroad, immediately after JayUooke’s contract .had “been perfected and the additional legislation had been obtained,” he having, he said,, come into control or this interest “by a strange revolution of circumstances;” that the amount of stock which this would represent, he said, wo’d be 1425,000, and the number of acres of land “nearly 275,000.” “The chance.” he<said, “was a very rare one; “he couldn’t touch it,” but he offered it to Mr. Fisher for $25<000; that Mr. Fisher accepted it and paid the money,but for some unexplained reason the stock was never delivered, and Mr. Blaine subsequently returned the am’t. This transaction was a very peculiar one for the following •easons: It appears from acts of Congress relating to the road, none >f which are of older date han July 2,1864, that the auhorized stock wasJsloo,ooo,ooo, tith a land grant estimated by he Commissioners of Public Lands at 47,000,000 acres, or 74,23 square miles. The line of f he road was 2J 00 miles long, i nd at the time of Blaine’s leter to Fisher it was, he s§ys, ■ieing built on bonds at $25,000 > mile,which would have made bonded debt ot $50,000,000. Vfr. Blaine, as member of conregs and Speaker of the louse, must be taken to have mown about the circumstancs of the road, and there theres pre seems no escape from the onclnsion that his offer was ■ased on the expectationSthat ie would receive almost as a 4ft a share in an enterprise dependent for its value on lerislation in which he had takn part Mr. Blaine’s defence n the case of this transaction < onsisted at first of a denial hat he had ever had any tran- ; action with the road at all, >ut he afterward rested on the f act that he had no pecuniary nterest in the transfer, and hat it was never actually iade: but though this might ;>e a defence to a suit against ' im for a conspiracy to defraud purchasers of the stock, 11 does not affect in any way he nature of the offer. His . stations with Warren Fisher

were in 1870, as appeared from the evidence, such that any favor done the latter, or gift presented to him, had a direct pecuniary value. THE FOURTH CHARGE. 4. Because he obtained certain letters which there is every reason to believe contained matter gravely compromising him, from a perfectly reputable witness, Mr. Mulligan, who was the proper and lawful custodian of them, after having vainly tried appeals to his pity, by pledging his word of honor to restore them, then broke this pledge, retained them by force, and subsequently read such of them as he pleased to the House in aid of his vindication; that this conduct, if not legally criminal, was such as no man aspiring to be the chief magistrate of a great Nation ought to be even suspected of. THE FIFTH CHARGE. 5. That his short service as an executive officer of the Government and the various efforts he has made during the past eight years to keep the public in mind of him have been sensational and theatrical, indicating a strong love of notoriety and an absence of the settled convictions, the sober judgment and the steadiness of character which are needed to make a safe occupant of any high or responsible administrative office, and that the means by which his “booms” are started and promoted, of which his “history” has recently been heralded and produced is a good example, bear too close an approach to the advertising devices of a circus or other public show to make the candidacy of any person resorting to them anything but a humiliation for the party producing him.

▲ PACKER OF CONVENTIONS. Lastly, it seems to us emphatically the duty of the independent voters to repress in some signal way the rapidly growing practice of packing conventions under the person; al superintendence of candidates for the Preside cy. It is of comparatively re< nt date. It is only a few yean; ince Mr. Tilden excited the orror of the Republican presto i v taking charge of his own car . ass and starting a “literary bureau” to s pply puffs of himself to the newspapers. Since then it has gr >wn apace, and it now exeites no surprise to hear that any candidate is actively engaged in using all his powers of intrigue, chicane .and corruptionjto secure the election of delegates all over the Union pledged either openly or secretly to act under his orders .at the convention, and if casting votes will do no good, to east them m such a way as to enable him to carry any bargain or •‘deal” with any other candidate which it may have pleased him to make.— The nominating convention has .already, through its size as well as for other reasons, lost nearly all semblance of a deliberate body, but it has not yet become wholly the product of “subsoiling” carried on by the various candidates themselves. In this art of packing conventions Mr. Blaine is now the greatest master in the country. His success would make this art the only one which American statesmen would hereafter cultivate or would apparently needfi to cultivate. It is high time, therefore, that he and his disciples were made to understand that it is not by such little games that the Presidency is to be won.