Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1884 — THEN AND NOW. [ARTICLE]

THEN AND NOW.

What the Chicago Tribune Said of Blaine in 1876. On tholith of June, 1876, it was generally believed that Blaine was sure of nomination—or actually as good as nominated—an assurance that was destroyed suddenly by the concentration of the “dudes and pharisees” and some other fellows on an Ohio person named Hayes. While the presumption of Blaine’s nomination existed, the paper [Tribune] that is now the Chicago organ of Blaine wrote as follows about the supposed-to-be accomplished fact, and printed the writing in its issue of June 15: “The convention will adopt a platform; but the only platform which will figure before the people will be Mr. Blaine’s own platform, written by himself, in his book of sales of stocks and his correspondence with Fisher, to which several letters not yet published have to be added. That is the platform which has been forced upon the Republican party, and which it will undertake to defend before the American people as a fitting record for a man who is to be made President of the United States. We belipve the nomination of Mr. Blaine to be a great mistake, a trifling with the best interests of the country, and an attempt to assassinate the Republican party. We do not believe that the act was the act of the people who do the voting in the Republican party. It was the act of the machine politicians, who prefer that the party and the country shall both perish rather than their corrupt and corrupting control shall be broken and overthrown.* The New York Tribune says: “The American navy has 1,600 officers and less than a hundred ships.” It takes the gall possessed by a Republican organ to make this pleasing statement. What has become of the $300,000,000 given Republican administrations to build ships? The idea of changing Blaine for a new man seems to be gaining ground in a quiet way among the sober and best thought of the country. It is the last desperate chance left the Republican party. Edmunds and Logan might pull through.'