Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 April 1894 — Stand Bv Your Guns [ARTICLE]

Stand Bv Your Guns

in the midst of these conditions a studied attempt is made on the part of the opposition to create in the minds of the weak and timorous belief that the unfortunate situation of the past year was brought about by the return of the democracy to power and the legislation which it proposes to enact. Let no tho’tful citizen be deceived by such statements or be frightened through such assertions. Nothing could be further from the tiuth or less in accord with the facts. The Sherman silver bill was not of democratic origin, but found its birth with the opposition, its sanction in their caucuses, its enactments through their votes, and*its vitality through the approval of it by their executive. Only in the erasement from the statute books and its removal as a source of weakness to the financial interests of the country has any democrat had aught to do with it. So, too, the McKinley measure, yet the law of the land, the resultant effect of whose operation has been but to increase the ruin wrought by the Sherman law.

The late administration found a treasury full to overflowing; they left it almost barren. They found gold oomin? into the country; their aet sent it out.— They found business confidence complete; they left it shaken and uncertain. In fine, that administration, and not the present one, must stand sponsor for the record of disasters of the year closed. If, as the junior senator from Massachusetts stated in his speech of Tuesday, “There is darkness before, and danger’s voice behind,” it finds its source in the legislation which he prompted, and, which, because of hope for partisan advantage, he is unwilling to have speedily repealed. Democrats may well feel solicitous for the party’s future, and ask of the party’s leadership such consecratiOcjto its interests as will meet the emergency which confronts it. Never was it in greater need of harmony of action or unity of purpose. It is now within the power of the democracy to crystalize into law the great reform to which its leaders and its rank and file have given so much of time, so much of energv, so*much of thought If it but accomplish this reform, none need doubt the glory of its future. Its return to the full control of the government will then have been of substantial benefit to the American people, and upon its acts will be placed the stamp of popular approval. It cannot afford to hesitate or fail in accomplishing the desired end. If there be those who have Jost heart because of the reverses of the past months lei them remember that no great reform has ever yet been freed of strenuous opposition and willful misrepresentation; no f avoi ed cl asshas ever yielded the bounties and immunities granted without a strugle, and none ever will. Seeming darkness may crowd upon us and the cause we represent, but so long as the democracy shall have the wisdom, the courage, and the honesty “to a k for nothing which is not cleaily right, and yield to nothing which is wrong," it cannot forfeit the confidence of the American people,—Comptroller Eckels at Boston, April 12.