People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 March 1895 — IN MEMORIAM. [ARTICLE]

IN MEMORIAM.

THE LAST SAD OBSEQUIES ARE OVER. Plucky Tom Watson of Georgia Preaches the Funeral Services of the S3d Congress—Full T«ZJi> of the Sermon as Delivered. By request: The 53d congress is dead —thank God! It died of old age at noon, on Monday last, to the profound sorrow of all professional boodlers, and to the intense relief of every honest man and woman in America. Before giving up the ghost it had cleaned out every copper in the National treasury and had looted the people with every species of rapacious legislation. Its ante-election pledge of “more money,” became an after-election reality of “less money.” Its campaign promise of free silver became an extra session performance of no silver at all. Its stump speech and editorial bimetallism became, by some swift and subtle transformation, a most rigorous and ruinous single gold standard. Its yearnings for retrenchment and economy, somehow co-habited with the wrong mate, and the offspring of the mysterious error was a most prodigal and lawless extravagance. Its efforts in the direction of lowering the taxes led, by some blunder on the part of the steersman, to the heav- i lest burdens ever laid upon any nation in time of peace. i Its tariff reform, though the cries of birth-houk were somewhat unusually loud and prolonged, is a brat for whom nobody will stand sponsor, and whose only certainty of living lies in the fact that no republicans can be found who will make war upon it. Its campaign war cry against trusts and combines was a calculated discord, artistically introduced, as a prelude and contrast to the harmonies of sugar trust, whisky trust, and standard oil trust legislation. Its denunciations of Wall street, plutocracy, and class laws, turned out to be an effective screen, cunningly contrived, behind which Cleveland, Stetson & Co., were to conspire with Rothschild, Belmont, Morgan & Co., and were to manipulate the most gigantic swindle we have known since the palmy days of Jay Gould. Everything it promised not to do, it has done. Everything it promised to do, it has left undone. On every vital issue it has reversed its record, contradicted its words, gone opposite to its chart. With a record which seemed to promise an enlarged currency, it has earned the patewial smiles of old John Sherman by retiring more than one hundred millions of our paper money, shutting off the coinage of silver, and giving to the debt-holders twice as much cotton, wheat, labor and land as his dollar ever commanded before. With a history which embalmed democratic hostility to national banks and bonds, it has slavishly marched and countermarched as the bankers ordered and has about worn out Charles Foster’s republican plates in engraving democratic bonds. With a traditional motto of “equal snd. sxaqt justice to all men.” It h««

stripped tne wool-grower of all pro- | tection on his wool, in order that the i manufacturer might enjoy cheaper . raw material; and it has left the lum- - ber mills of the South and West to | compete with Canadian dealers for i Eastern and Northern patronage— ! while those same Eastern and North- j ern customers are themselves abso- I lutely protected in their lines of busi- 1 ness from any competition whatsoever. ! Jefferson’s distrust of a military and naval establishment finds itself indorsed, in this congress of Jefferson’s alleged party, by the most extravagant naval bill ever passed—passed too at a time when the people who vote the democratic ticket are not clamoring for guns but for bread! Jackson’s silver law of 1837 finds itself enacted into L policy which honors naught but gold. Benton’s theory of sustaining public credit by having the government live within its means, finds itself lonesome and old fashioned —discarded for the Cleveland practice of giving us more debts to pay. Stephens’ conception of state’s rights has dwindled down to a point where a democratic governor may protest against the armed invasion of federal troops, and finds *his protest whiffed aside with contempt—if some corporation will but hang a U. S. mail sack on one end of a freight car, and declare that the federal army is needed to pilot the mail sack through a mob. “Entangling alliances with none,” said the statesmen of the past, when referring to foreign nations; yet this administrations has dabbled in every international muddle, or by its policies of ambassadorships, and its leanings to protectorates and annexations, has done its utmost to commit us to the entangling alliances which will draw us into the whirlpool of foreign politics. Dead? Yes, its dead, this 53rd congress; and the American people will ever hold it in vivid memory. The homeless farmer who lost his roof-tree and his acres in the tremendous drop of cotton or wheat in 1893 or 4 will remember the 53rd congress—and will curse it. The bankrupt merchant, frantic over the loss of the accumulations of a lifetime of toil, will ever remember the 53rd congress—and will curse it. The countless unemployed, drifting from street to street, from tovzn to town, and from woe to woe, bitterly recalling the days when there was an enterprise to plan work and money to pay for it, will remember the 53rd congress—and will curse it. And in years yet to come, the tax- i payer bending beneath the load of Cleveland-Rothschild taxes, and finding it harder every year to get the dollar to satisfy the gold standard tax,; will remember the 53rd congress—and will curse its hideous record of guilt.— j People’s Party Paper.