People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1895 — TRUTH BRAVELY TOLD [ARTICLE]

TRUTH BRAVELY TOLD

SHOULD AROUSETHE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO ACTION. “The Flag Praised at Campaign Dimmers, While the Wormwood of Corruption Eats Away the Pole” —True Patriotism. Chickamauga, Sept 18. —At the dedication of the Illinois monument to-day Gov. Altgeld spoke as follows: 1 “We are here under one flag, all lovers of our common country, all citizens of this mighty republic, and we have come to perform an act of unusual significance. A great battlefield is to be dedicated —is to be made sacred ground. Upon the fields are the footprints of the sons of Illinois, and we have journeyed from afar to place enduring monuments on the spot where they stood, where they fought and where hundreds of them died. “Now, my friends, we owe our country more than talk. We cannot discharge our duty by simply celebrating the glorious deeds of the past. The law of disintegration and destruction never sleeps, and only eternal vigilance can check it. Every age brings its own dangers, and those that come stealthily are often more fatal than those that come with a mighty noise. Instead of an armed foe that we can meet on the field, there is to-day an enemy that is invisible, but everywhere at work destroying our institutions; that enemy is corruption. Born of vast concentration of capital in unscrupulous hands, corruption is washing the foundations from under us and is tainting everything it touches with a moral leprosy. It seeks to direct official action, it dictates legislation and endeavors to control construction of laws. Wealth is necessary ; let us not disclaim against it; but it is a blessing only as a servant, and not as a master.

To be an eligible candidate now often means to stand for nothing in particular and to present no definite principle, but be all things to all men, and in the end contemptible. Thirty-five years ago the call was for men to fight an open enemy in the field; to-day our country is calling for men who will be true to republican institutions at home. The flag has been praised at campaign dinners, while the very pole from which it floated was being eaten off by corruption. This age is calling for men who have convictions of their own, and who have the courage to act on them.”