Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 May 1887 — The Sherman Boom. [ARTICLE]

The Sherman Boom.

The boom for John Sherman as the Republican candidate in 1888 is assuming, under judicious management, very promising proportions. Its most interesting feature is its many-sidedness. To large numbers of Republicans it presents itself as a relief from the Blaine incubus under which they have rested so long, and which .they have found it so difficult to throw off. To others Sherman is the candidate of assured financial views, who can carry New York and possibly reconcile the mugwumps. To another class he is (becomingpacificator of the South, who is to rend asunder more effectively than aiy other Republican the solidity of that section. Yet it is not all plane-sailing even in his own party for the friend of the New York banks and the discoverer of Eliza Pinkston. Two formidable obstacles lie in the channel through which he must pass to a nomination; and there seems to be no present method of passing or removing them. The first is the opposition of the {irogresrive Republicans, who beieve, like Senator Hawley, of Connecticut, in local self-government and the abandonment of paternalism in government. Upon this point, for the purpose of catching Southern support, Sherman has irrevocably committed himself. In his Southern speeches he avowed himself heartily in favor of the principle which lies at the bottom of the Blair bill for aiding the States to educate the rising generation. It was not a wholly new attitude for him. He has always been a supporter of subsidies; and there is no essential difference between supporting one subsidy to aid an influential monopoly and supporting another to secure votes. Neither is the attitude at variance with the general attitude of the Republican party. It is exceedingly obnoxious, however, to the better elements of the party; and if Senator Sherman adheres to it he cannot count on their support in convention. Upon another point Senator Sherman is in rank antagonism to a large element of his party, though it is not so worthy or reputable an element as that which opposes ,his subsidy notions. While this element may be willing to cut loose from the “bloody shirt,” with all that the old war cry implies, it is determined to cling still to the hypocritical hypothesis that the party is the special guardian of moral ideas. But Sherman has deliberately declared against the “moral-idea” dodge. In effect, he has proclaimed the erasure from the party gonfalon of the cabalistic “g. o. p.” In his letter to the Young Republican Club of Virginia he distinctly outlined the future of the Republican party as a future devoted to the development and diversification of American industry. There is to be no brooding over the dead past, he says; no more crusading against real or imaginary wrong. The end and aim of the party, next to the securing of its own continuance in power, is business.

This will probably satisfy the pronounced protectionists in the party, though many even of these will regret the abandonment of the snivel and the whine. But to an immense faction in the party the snivel and the whine are indispensable. They would not know what to do with themselves in a party that plants itself on a business issue and refuses to plume itself upon its devotion to the righting of wrongs. And as a natural consequence this faction cannot support Sherman. All of which goes to show that the way of the aspirant to a Presidential nomination is hard.— Detroit Free Preen.