Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1886 — A Contemptible Recourse. [ARTICLE]

A Contemptible Recourse.

The policy to be pursued by Republican leaders in the campaign just opening is definite in one respect. The word has passed down the line from Mr. Blaine that the Prohibitionists are to be denounced on all occasions for seeking to ruin the Republican party by organizing a third party, thereby assisting the Democrats into power. The Prohibitionists are therefore to be charged with hypocrisy and with having no other real object in view than the extinction of the Republican party. It has required a great deal of nerve to make this unwarranted assumption, but Mr. Blaine has always been equal to business of this kind. Just why the Prohibitionists should seek an underground alliance with the Democrats when the latter are opposed to prohibitory legislation is not very clear, neither is it clear how the Republican leaders are to achieve anything of benefit to their party by this unjustifiable recourse. To assume that men may not be sincere in their distrust of existing political organizations; that they may not be moved by the best of motives in organizing a party of their own, and that Providence has specially decreed the immortality and trustworthiness of the Republican party, could ouly emanate from such a Pharisee as the bedraggled statesman of Maine. The principle underlying the assumption is wholly contrary to the spirit of American institutions. The Prohibitionists have at least proved their sincerity. They have at last brought the Republican party of Maine to its knees begging for their votes, and promising to go the whol« length of the Prohibition doctrine in return therefor. But their votes being refused, they are now subjected in that State to the charge, specifically made by Mr. Blaine and echoed in Indiana, that they have simply organized in order to strike some kind of an absurd bargain with the Democrats, whom they have persistently declared for years to be inimical to the principles they maintain. Altogether it is as contemptible a scheme as was ever conceived by a party in a despairing mood. But the scheme is just what might havo been expected from such a trickster ns Blaiue, the most conspicuous charlatan of his time.— Indianapolis Sentinel.