Jasper County Democrat, Volume 7, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1904 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and Genral Gossip of the National Capitol. Special Correspondence to The Democrat: There is no denying the fact that we Democrats were last week astounded and confounded. That Parker might be defeated —that, of course, was among our counts and discounts. But other announcements excited more than transient incredulity. I was in the parlors of the National Congressional Committee of the Democratic party in the Riggs House when the wires first began to buzz. Congressman Cowherd, chairman of the committee, held the floor in his usual buoyant temper, and walked up and down reading aloud the dispatches handed to him. He had just returned from the West where he had found his own Kansas City district “all right and secure” and had discovered that Missouri “ought to give 40,000 for Parker.” Even before the returns began to come in he was feeling very sore because the party had not backed up his Committee, and when a dispatch said that Pennyalvania would send to Congress one Democrat and thirty-one Republicans he came as near profanity as he ever does, and told the hundreds of frieuds assembled around him that his committee had not received a single dollar from the national committee during the campaign and that the members had taken 1500 out of their own pockets to pay for the only printing they had been able to get! The declaration caused grave faces, sharp comment, and many expressions of sympathy, especially when it was announced that Cowherd hadbeen overtlyown in his own district because he had been compelled to be present in Washington. He is very popular in the House, one of the shrewdest, readiest, most active and enterprizing members, chosen out of the entire body because of bis political sagacity. Tbe causes of the landslide to Roosevelt? —for there are many. You can judge as well as your correspondent can. There seems to in the United States about eighty million opinions on this subject. I asked a prominent Republican yesterday for his diagnosis. “Well,” he said, “by his sagacious action, Roosevelt made himself solid with the Catholics, the Hebrews, the negroes, and the union labor vote. He rushed the

Panama business through, and whether right or wrong, the people like a man who does things. The normal Republican vote on Tuesday was reinforced by a million men who want the President always to carry a chip on his shoulder and who will back him up to any extent. “And all the people cried ‘Come, brother! Your one good term deserves another!” Senator Jones, seen at his residence here, says it was the alleged prosperity that carried the day—the people that have money and the people who hope to get money. To this was added the belligerent feeling which has prevailed in the United States for the last six years, filling the streets with boys in uniform and sending to the polls an army of preverted Democrats willing to follow to any conquest Theodorio the king of the Northern Goths. A Republican friend of mine insists that every lynching anywhere in the United States cost the Democrats at the polls on Tuesday ten thousand votes. But I think he is dreaming. The president’s formal declaration that under no circumstances would he be a candidate for reelection is received here at par as a sincere avowal. It seems a little hasty and premature, but it is just like the impulsive Roosevelt. The fact however remains that a President of the United States is no longer the arbiter of hia own destiny, and he is liable to be seized by eulogists and dunkeys and dragged into the White House again even against his own protest. What he will do during these next four years nobody can tell. He can so conduct himself as to promote universal harmony, amity and peace; or he can adopt a policy which will make his name a synonym of aggression and conquest, and bring the republic to the verge of ruin. He should be kept straight by the consciousness that the eyes of the world are upon him. t t t The numerous bronze gentlemen on horseback that preside over the squares and circles in this city are to receive an illustrious reinforcement in the person of a solitary pedestrian in military uniform of foreign and antiquated aspect, whose metallic counterpart will be unveiled in the grounds of the new War College next Saturday. These are better known as the Arsenal Grounds, but during the last two or three years a long row of limestone villas has been erected here for the use of officers, and fronting them on the other side of the park are being built very comprehensive and substantial barracks, adequate to all emergencies. The personage to mount the pedestal is Fredrick the Great, one hand rests on his sword hilt, and the other carries a cane —perhaps the very cane that his father belabored him with when the youth was caught in his boyish pranks; perhaps the very sword that he flung away at the battle of Mollwitz when he found refuge in a barn ten miles from the battlefield; perhaps the very cocked hat which he wore when he sold his Hessians to George 111 to conquer the American colonies withal. Our forefathers tore down the statue of George 111 in New York City and moulded it into bullets on that ocassion; but this statue of Frederick, presented by by the Emperor William, is to occupy one comer of a quadrangle in the War College grounds as an example to American youth. The other corners are, it is rumored, to be occupied by Alexander the Great Napoleon Boneparte and Theodore Roosevelt, and another quadrangle at the head of the “army close” probably will be decorated with the statues of Cornwallis, Cortez, Captain Kidd, and Jack the Giant- Kilier. The ceremonies on the 19th will consist of the formal presentation by the German embassador and a grateful eulogy of Fredreick by President Roosevelt Vt t t The illustrious British statesman John Motley is in the city

to-day, a guest of the President He seemed slightly incongruous, and embarassing, for this is the Liberal and courageous statesman who for years has opposed the insolent aggressions of his own country and ours against the republics of South Africa and the Orient. As a Little Englander, pro-Boer, and a professor of the art of “scuttling” one naturally wonders what he talks about with the President.