Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1893 — MODERN REPUBLICAN IDEAS. [ARTICLE]

MODERN REPUBLICAN IDEAS.

Bavj. Butterworth of Ohio, one of the brainiest i epublicans in this country, delivered the memorial address at the soldiers’ home in W ashingionfand startled his political friends by the following: “We have indeed tried, as urged by Lincoln at Gettysburg, to bind up the nation’s wounds and to care for those who bore the heat and burden of battle, and for their widows and orphans. In that our people have nobly kept the faith. And here I am impressed to pause and say that we can not heal the nation’s wounds by availing ourselves of every opportunity to tear those wounds airesh. That we havi seriously blundered in many things the futur - historian will, in my judgment, affirm, although the politician may dissei t. For instance, at the close of the war we had within the insurrectionary border nearly 4,000,000 of recently liberated slaves. Their liberation, whether prompted by military necessity or the high r behests of humanity, was just, but no one will contend that any considerable number of them had any full and just conception of the duties and , responsibilities of citizenship, and ! a vastly less number had any idea of the functio*’s of government. Yet they, unprepared as they were and hapless as it left them, were clothed with the ballot, ostensibly as a measure of self-defense and common justice to them, but reallv and actually as a partisan measure. . The result was the inauguration of j a conflict of races, growing out of 1 a ra>e for supremacy in -certain i States, in which conflict the naf tional government proved power-

less to protect the oppressed or j uuish the oppn ssor. When the end of this shall come, and in what manner and with what result, pre'seats a serious problem, the solus tion of which is by no means clear.” Oliver P. Morton once made a strong argument against negro suffrage before th? 15th Amendment was passed, but afterward rec mted and took an active part with hie party in thrusting the “partisan measure” alluded to on the people. It was for the purpose of perpetuating republicanism that the colored man was given the ballot and the republican patty has not abandoned the idea that it owns the negro, although the latter has begun to realize that his share of file r?wards and emoluments offered in return for his service are somewhat slim.