Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1889 — VOORHEES’ SPEECH. [ARTICLE]

VOORHEES’ SPEECH.

everything composed in whole or in part of wool; on the clothing of women and chil dren; on their cloaks, shawls, dolmans, jackets* talmas, ulsters, and other garments of similar character; on every description of ready made woolen clothing, and on every other form or fashion of raiment containing wool, known to the wants and uses of the human family. Such a bill is to my mind a bill of abominations. It presents the revolting spectacle of an increase of taxation and an increase of revenue amounting, according to careful estimates, to $3, 842,681.45 per annum, derived from the highest necessities of human existence, and all to be extorted in a measure of legislation which has for its avowed object a large reduction of taxes in order to prevent a vast surplus from accumulating in the treasury, as it has done in the past ana is now doing.” These details of gigantic and well-known wrong and injustice may seem needless in this age of light and information, but as me ministers of the gospel dwell from day to day, and from year to year, without cessation or forbearance, on all the details of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, so will those engaged in the work of reform, on all proper occasions, unsparingly arraign the hideous iniquities of the present system of protection to wealth by the enslavement of labor. This is a struggle on the part of the people for the overthrow of a vast, vicious, and immoral system of legislation, a system powerfully intrenched behind the bulwarks of untold millions, and so strong in its seductive allurement that it has drawn into its wide spread and dazzling folds thousands of men of upright lives, high moral sentiments, rare mental cultivation, and brilliant and facinating personal qualities. All this I know and concede, but the worship of mammon, the blaz ing glitter of mountains of gold has blinded them by the excess of its light, and they have, a perverted vision or no vision at all. of a true and correct morality between them selves and their oppressed, tax-paying fellow men. They strain at gnats and swaUow camels with every breath they draw. They see motes in the eyes of everybody else, and are totally unconscious of the enormous beams in their own. In their soft velvet pews at church on Bun day they recall with right* eons indignation the theft of a bacon ham ths night before by the father of an impoverished family, while their palatial homes, their ships, their banks, their bank accounts, and their bonds, are all the productions of dishonest laws, and sustained by not a dollar of their own earnings.

The story of Alexander the Great and the robber was once found in our school-books, and it ought to be found there again as a lesson to the present generation. The mighty Macedonian conquerer was engaged in plundering the nations of the then known earlh. He sacxed their cities, ravaged and deso*. lated their fields, and laid heavy tribute on the downtrodden millions whose countries he conquered. \\ tien at the zenith of his career, when he deemed himself moi e than m ral and took rank with the gods, a robber was arraigned in his presence for sentence and death. The doomed and desperate culprit, however, turned accuser, ami uiMounced the conquerer nd oppressor of manaind as a far prer.+er robber, plunderer, spoliator, highwayman, thief andgseoun drel than himself. We are dealing at this tixue and in this country with the Alexander the Great of tariff spoliation, with the arrogant and poworful monarchs of the mouev power, the colossal magnitude of whose robberies make them appear as a system of government, rather than as the abominable crimes they are.