Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1896 — REVOLT OF PLUTOCRACY. [ARTICLE]

REVOLT OF PLUTOCRACY.

No single issue ever raised in the history of American politics exceeds in importance that of opening our mints and redeeming our currency* from the control of those foreign and domestic corporations which seek to inflict on us as a permanent sys.em their usurpation of the sovereign power of issuing and regulating the circulating medium. The only single evil greater than corporation control of the taxing power is this of corporation control of the currency. It is greater because when the people are robbed, whether by direct or indirect taxation, the results quickly appear. But when the robbery is carried on through contraction of eash and the inflation of corporation credit paper, they are brought to bankruptcy before realizing the cause. But great as is this Issue, it is only an incident of the present campaign. The higher and broader issue which has been forced is between the millionaires of the country and the American people. The entire Plutocracy is in revolt against our system of popular constitutional government. So menacing a movement of class against people has never occurred before in our history—not even when the same class under the leadership of the Biddles of the United States Bank captured the administration of John Quincy Adams and so intrenched themselves In control of the government that they looked with contempt on the attempt made by the people under Jackson’s leadership to dislodge them and restore popular government. John Quincy Adams had been elected as a Democrat, but he abandoned the party, repudiated the principles to which it had pledged his administration and endeavored to revive the Federalistic party whose fundamental maxim, as defined by Daniel Webster himself, was that all stable and orderly government must be based on property. As the fundamental tenet of Democracy is that all just government must be based on manhood right and on the consent of the governed, the masses of the Democratic party felt the same hot resentment against the Adams administration which they now feel when they see Federal officeholders controlling the action of conventions called at the instance of Mr. Whitney of the Standard Oil Co. and Mr. Belmont, American agent of the Rothschild banks.

Andrew Jackson but voiced this just resentment of the masses when in his inaugural address he declared that it was the right of the people to eject from office those officials who had used office In an attempt to dictate the result of elections. It was because the people had seen Federal offices used to control State Legislatures, to dictate nominations, to interfere at the polls, that Jackson denounced life-tenure in office as foreign to the spirit of America and declared that whatever the evils of change, they were less than those of the permanent tenure which breeds in the office-holder the spirit of insolence and of despotism. He was again the exponent and champion of the masses when he followed his attack on Federal bureaucracy with a determined assault on the National bank and its control of the Treasury and of Congress. For this he was denounced in New York City and Boston as no other American President had ever been denounced before. But he did not swerve. With a supreme confidence in the people and in hisown integrity, he forced the fighting, keeping the aggressive always and not stopping to defend himself, until overwhelming victory showed that no man who really represents the cause of popular freedom need fear to appeal to the masses for support of the principles on which their freedom and progress depend.

On the issue as it was then presented, appeal has once more been made to the people. The plutocracy has once more usurped control of the government. Democracy has once more been betrayed. Onee more the millionaires of the country are in the field openly asserting that property has a divine right to rule manhood and that it is treason to deny it. They have drawn their lines of class and caste and drawn them hard. Those of them who once called themselves Democrats do so no longer. They call the Democracy of Jefferson and Jackson, as they do the Republicanism of Lincoln, an evil thing. They say that-the rule of the people is anarchy and they threaten the country with the worst they can do against it unless they are allowed to name the next President and put Messrs. Hanna and Morgan, Whitney and Belmont in control at Washington as their agents. But they cannot win. There is not money—there are not rifles and cannon enough in America or in the world to impose plutocracy on America as a permanent condition. Against plutocracy and class government the Democratic party has made its “appeal to Caesar!” And In America there Is no king but Caesar and no Caesar

but the people.—St. Louis Post-Dis-patch.