Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 July 1890 — “POLITICAL HELLS.” [ARTICLE]

“POLITICAL HELLS.”

-A SCATHING ARRAIGNMENT OF THE DOMINANT PARTY. Tli# Cold-Blooded Policy Pursued by the Republicans Against the South—Extract born a Speech by Hon. Janies K. Jones, •f Arkansas, la the U. S. Senate. To illustrate to what leDgth the Bepublicau party has gone in the accomplishment of a partisan purpose, and particularly to snow by a witness of their own how they have been willing to sacrifice anything and everything to the preservation and maintenance of their “economic law,” I beg leave to call attention for one moment to a statement 4)y a high Republican authority. Alexander Johnston was professor of jurisprudence in Princeton College, New Jersey. was a political historian of distinction, and a Republican in foil accord with his party, and familiar with its counsels, its purposes and its history. In speaking of reconstruction in the South he uses the following remarkable languge: We have noticed also the pertehtous reappearance of the soced ng States after their reconstruction by the President as an vmperium in imperio. It would have been an impossibility for Southorn representatives under that regime, however honest their intentions, to divest themselves suddenly ol the prejudices and traditions or a life-time training and come baok' in full sympathy with the economic laws which were thenceforth to attach to their own section as Well as the rest of the country. They must then have returned as a compact phalanx of irreconcilables sure of tneir giound at homo and a positive danger to the rest of the country. All this was ended by reconstruction. This process, to speak simply and perhaps brutally, gave the Southern whites enough to attend to at home until a new generation should grow up with more sympathy for the new and less for the old. Tne energies which might have endangered the national peace were drawn off to a permanent local struggle for good government wnd security of property. Whatever may be alleged on humanitarian grounds against a policy which for a time converted some of the States into political hells, it must be confessed that the polloy was a suocess and that it secured the greatest good of the .greatest number. Air. President, here we have frankly stated a most brutal truth. Here is nn avowal of means resorted to and ends to be accomplished, which fairlv make one shiver by their heartless, cold-blooded ■bruiality. There is a diabolism running -through these sentences, in the description of the purposes of the Republican I party in the enactment of the reconstruction measures, that would have put Macchiavtdli to shame. Here is an avowal that • the purposes of these measures was, notwithstanding the hypocritical pretense that they were “for the lifo and property,” and that “peace and good order should be enforcod,” really to make the Southern States “political hells;” to -give the Southern people at home a permanent local struggle for good government and security of property, which was giving them enough to attend to at home to prevent their interfering with “economic laws” which were thereafter to attach t<® their own section as well as the rest of the country. One can scarcely conceive that in n «o-called Christian land, where the teachings of the meek and lowly Nazaxene are the standard of morality, a deliberate purpose could be formed to ’surround a large number of people with -conditions dangerous to not only their prosperity and happiness, but dangerous to the lives of women and children, for the purpose of thereby giving the “Southern whites enough to do,” and all for the purpose of preventing any interference with certain “economic laws.” But such is the fact. TUtis has been going on whenever you ‘have felt that your economic laws were ■ be ng a little too closely looked into. Whenever you have felt that you were -about to be called sharply to account for your political sins and misdoings, you Jhave made haste to divert the attention of the public from your elves, your methods and your misdeeds by undertaking to ■snake more “political hells” in the Southern States. Your force bills and -civil-rights nets were in pursuit of this wicked purpose. You have enacted law after law which the Supreme Court has -declared unconstitutional and which the able lawyers in helping to enact them must have known would not stand the ecrutiny of the courts, yet they passed, and the purpose must have been simply ■ to make trouble for the South, for political purposes. Were you fever in greater straits or was there over greater need for > such political juggling than now? The old methods are still in use. They •will not be so frankly nvowed, because -an enlightened and humane public would ! -condemn to the pillory of public scorn and contempt any man who would dare now avow such atrocious sentiments; but the same old spirit, hid ng itself in a hypocritical cloak of deep regard for the rights of man will now, if a paitisan end can be accomplished by it, subject every Southern home to danger, from the torch and the dagger.