Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 245, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1916 — A Cloud On the Horizon. [ARTICLE]

A Cloud On the Horizon.

What is the ~ blackest cloud that hangs over the future of the American nation? It is not free trade nor the menace of foreign aggression nor the pauperization of industry nor the blight of sectionalism. It is the specter of class conflicts, labor against property, the poor, against the rich, riot against law and order. t In the day that society finds itself arrayed into two hostile groups, one representing the protest of working classes who propose to enforce their demands through violence, in that day the republic shall hear the clattering hoofs of the Man on Horseback. • The Adamson law is but one step in the pathway of progress toward' such a dangerous end; It holds out j the idea to labor that its votes are' to ■ he east, courted and gained, not on. questions of government, but in the furtherance of class interests.

We acquiesce in majority rule because it is recognized as the preponderance of judgment. The moment it becomes the mere sport of antagonistic selfish interests, the prey of class .wars, the resultant of conflicting threats,, of force, that moment respect for it is gone and government becomes the spoil of the strongest and most ruthless hands. No man who thinks, no man who reads history, no man who can judge the future by the past and dreads to. see the experiment of popular government in the United States fall before absolutism, can afford to approve with his vote the step id’ that direction taken by the president and congress when they bargained through the Adarrison bill for the labor vote.