Jasper County Democrat, Volume 3, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1900 — THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1900. [ARTICLE]

THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF 1900.

The presidential campaign of 1900 is under way. The leaders have been chosen and the lines of battle drawn. William McKinley is primarily a politician. He wears his principles lightly. When he thought silver popular he was a fr ®® silver man. He voted for free coinage along with Bland, when Bryan was a boy at school. Later he said the Democratic party was not doing enough for silver, and told how much more the Republicans would do if they were intrusted with power. In the Republican convention four years ago he was afraid to have the word “gold”’ mentioned. Now he is a partisan of the absolute, unmitigated, single gold standard. In Congress, when he had no offices to distribute, Mr. McKinley was an ardent civil service reformer. He became Governor of Ohio and turned over the helpless lunatics in the insane asylums and the inmates of “b the other State charitable institutions to the tender mercies of the spoilsmen. When he was a candidate for President the first time he promised that he would take “no step backward" in the matter of civil service reform. When he took office he became the first President to take a backward step since the reform s * * ns^tute< l under Arthur, fourteen years before. President McKinley said that we could riever be guilty of criminal aggression, ahd then he began and carried on an unnecessary war in the Philippines. He said that it was oiu\ ♦u * D u dUty ” t 0 th® Porto Ricans free admission to our own markets, and’ then he not ouly accepted but actually forced through Congress a bill levying heavy taxes both ways on Porto Rican trade. All these inconsistencies have a single cause—Mr. McKinley is not his own n, a s H® speaks from the good impulses of his heart and then he does what he is told to do. It is impossible even to imagine William McKinley msking such a stand for his principles against the pressure of party leaders as William J. Bryan has made this week. When we elect McKinley to office, therefore, his words furnish us no clew whatever to his probable course after he gets into power. To know what he is going to do we must know the man who for the time being is “running” him. In this ease it is Mark Hanna. William J. Bryan is the very antithesis of this opponent. No man has hhd more virulent or more unscrupulous ehemies; no man has been more outrageously misrepresented; no man has had his character, opinions and conduct more distorted and caricatured, but in all the whirlpool of detraction that has surged about him nobody has ventured to suggest that Mr. Bryan is owned by anybody but William J. Bryan. He takes orders'from no Hanna. He does not have to call anybody into consultation to.find out what he thinks. ' His convictions, based on his own matured study, are his own property, and when he has once formed them no power on earth can induce him to give them up or modify them or hide them under a mask. The country is coming to know and admire that splendid stubbornness of Mr. Bryan. The Democrats who did not agree with him on the silver question, annoyed as they were with what seemed to them an unnecessary sacrifice of political strength, are beginning to be glad that they have had that revelation of unconquerable, inflexible conviction. While it Is against them on one point, it gives them confidence that upon the other points on which they and the candidate agree they will not be betrayed. They have been looking for a man who would display on the side of the people that same immovable obstinacy that Cleveland displayed on behalf of the privileged classes, and’they have found him. Another term of McKinley, involving the indorsement of the almost unbroken record of bad faith which has characterised nearly nil the acts of his administration, would be about as bad a commentary on popular government as could be imagined. But could not the cause of popular government suffer still more should the party which has taken up the task of reviving the Declaration of Independence and other old-fashioned views of national honor be betrayed by its candidate? In the present crisis signs of surrender by .that candidate to bosses or to moneyed interests, or the exhibition by him of any of the marks of the quitter,” would be very disquieting to many a gold Democrat.What we need in the presidency now above all other things is an honest man —not merely one who is above picking pockets himself, but one whose honesty is aggressive—one who will not tolerate Neelys nnd Rathbones under him or Hannas over him, and whose honesty extends not merely to matters of money but to matters of principle. We know that if William J. Bryan said that anything was our “plain duty” he would shut that steel-trap jaw of bis and keep Congress in session until that duty was performed or the congressional term expired. If an organ told him that this action would cost him three million votes of growers of filler tobacco and “garden sass" he would tell it that the people could elect another President if they chose, but that fifteen million voters would not make him do a thing he thought wrong. That is a comfortable sort of person to lean on in a national crisis.—New York Journal.