Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1884 — HOT SHOT FOR BLAINE. [ARTICLE]

HOT SHOT FOR BLAINE.

Massacliussetts Independents Appeal to the Public In a Stinging Letter. [Sp'eeial to the Chicago Daily News.] The Concord anti-Blaine Republicans, says a Boston dispatch, are becoming combative. They are led by Samuel Hoar, a son of Judge Hoar, and a nephew of the Senator, both of whom have this year spoken for Blaine. Since the Blaine and Logan club declines their challenge to a public discussion of Blaine’s honesty they are to-day m dling the Harper’s Weekly supplement containing the Mull gan letters, chronologically arranged, with cross reference, to every voter of the town. This is accompanied by a circular letter addressed “To the people of Concord,” written by Samuel Hoar. It attacks Blaine sharply, saying: As you are deprived by this action on the part of the leading supporters of Mr. Blaine of the opportunity, which we should have afforded you gladly, of hearing a public, outspoken, face-to-face argument of this burning question of national honor or disgrace, it seems to us that a .decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that we should state our position. We prefer open, free statement and discussion to private or whispered slur and innuendo. We have sought this. Our opponents decline it. The people of Concord know that the character of Mr. Blaine is the issue of this campaign. Because of the want of it he is now opposed by hosts of lifelong, conscientious Republicans, and many, if not most, of his supporters will vote tor him reluctantly and with an uneasy sensation of fear for the future under his possible guidance. Mr. Blaine is his own accuser. His dishonesty, his falsity, his unprincipled jobbery', are proved, if it all, by his own statements arid his own letters. Which of them is the slander and which the confutation it is hard to see. One has to be careful in selecting, for fear that the confutation should prove more slanderous than the “slander.” If a thief should write “I stole your horse," and two years later should say, “I took him for one of my neighbors in Maine,” which of those statements would be the “slander” and which the confutation? Or, to select from Mr. Blaine’s correspondence and statements. which of the following is “slander” and which the confutation? [Here follow parallel columns of the contradictory statements from Blaine’s letters.] We charge that Mr. Blaine is a dishonest man and unfit to be President, and that the party which supports him ought not to succeed in this election.