Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1889 — The Democracy and Its Critics. [ARTICLE]

The Democracy and Its Critics.

“There are in the Democratic party,” the New York Sun says,“ a small number of individuals who bear to the Democracy itself about the same relation as a knot does to a plank, and whose preferences, aims and aspirations are for defeat. Their expectation is to keep the Democracy in the minority. They want a party which will never become unduly large. They would rather lead a handful of followers to a long succession of defeats than become part of a great popular army, marching to permanent power in a nation.” And so with a few touches it graphically portrays the little band of malcontents who, in 1884, with defeat for an object and Ben Butler for a pretext, imperilled a success they could not prevent, and who four years later, dissembling their opposition under the name of party fealty, abetted and gloried in the result which gave the Presidency to a party casting a hundred thousand fewer votes than its rival. It is gratifying to have authoritative as--.surance regarding the little band that “the flag of. their political hopes is always at half-mast,” and to receive the hopeless confession that “the number of these individuals is nqt large; it is not increasing.” The Democratic party has “got together.” It has got together a body of sound and beautiful economic principles, and it has got together a body of voters exceeding by a hundred thousand the numbers of their antagonists; yet the enumeration of its virtues would be imperfect without mention of the rare and precious quality of sacrifice that enables some of its adherents for the common good to call attention to their own shortcomings.— New York Commercial Advertiser.