Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 January 1893 — The Battle of November S. [ARTICLE]

The Battle of November S.

“Stirred by these moral forces, came forth the rank and file of the Democratic party, the honest masses whose enthusiasm for a good cause and a worthy leader brushed away like cobwebs all opposition and all feeble considerations of expediency in the party councils. Then came forth the ‘lndependents,’ the men who, as has been said of Edmund Burke, ‘sometimes change their ifront, butinever change their ground,’ ■the men who, in struggling for good government, had the courage to expose themselves to the pelting storms of political warfare without the shelter of a party roof over their heads; the imen whom the partisan politician calls ‘those enlightened, unselfish and patriotic citizens who rise above party,’ provided they rise above the other party, but whom he calls ‘a lot of dudes and Pharisees amountieg to nothing’ when .they happen to rise above his own party. “And among them came the college professor, the disinterested man of studious thought, the truest representative of the intellectual honesty of the country—the college professor whom the Republican party had called its own when it was the party of moral ideas, but whom it now affects to despise as an impracticable theorist, since it has become the

party of immoral practices. Indeed, a significant spectacle It is; on one side, with few individual exceptions, Harvard and Yale, and Columbia and Amherst, and Cornell and Ann Arbor, and many more; and on the other side, the high and mighty tariff, with Maj. McKinley as the professor of its science, with Matt Quay and Dave Martin as the exponents of its politics, and with John Wanamaker as the illustration of its sanctity. But still more came; thousands of old Republicans, who reluctantly severed the ties binding them to the party to which they had been long and warmly attached, and who, obeying the voice of their consciences, went where they could serve the public good.

“Thus, at the call of the moral forces in politics, was the powerful combination of elements formed to which the Democratic cause and the Democratic candidate owe their triumphant success.” —Carl Schurz, at annual dinner of the Reform Club.