People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 November 1895 — DEAR DEMOCRACY. [ARTICLE]

DEAR DEMOCRACY.

It is amusing to see the desper ation of dying democracy as it silently settles into merited oblivion. Knowing the absoluteness of their own defeat and hopelessness of ever recovering from the general disintegration, the big guns, and the little smooth bores, who still represent the remains of the deceased party, attempt to divert the public attention from their own miserable plight by shouting the same old chestnut, that “the populist party is dead,” as disregardful of the truth as a colored chicken thief. To be sure a death has occurred, and from natural causes, and at the obsequies the people’s party was present, stronger and healthier than ever before. For the benefit of a hibernating contemporary the following from the Fort Wayne Dispatch is given space. It is ample food for the reflective intellect providing the partisan cobwebs can be safely removed for a few minutes. The headlines below are not applicant to all cases. “DIES HARD, DOES THE COURT HOUSE AND POSTOFFICE ORGAN.” “Saturday the Fort Wayne Journal came out under stunning head lines and announced that the populist party was dead. This announcement is enough to make a horse laugh when, as every intelligent man knows, it was the democratic party that received its death blow, and the populist helped to bury the corpse. So far from being dead, the people’s party showed up big gains in every state where an election was held last week. With no money to make a campaign, the populists hitherto, almost an unknown element in Ohio politics, increased their vote to nearty 60,000 votes for Coxey. In some placesCoxey ran ahead of Campbell (democrat) although Campbell was backed by Brice’s corruption barrel of ♦300,000. W. F. Conley, populist, was elected to the State senate in the Paulding district, Ohio. Now editor Andy which is dying off—the pops or the gold bug democrats. Better go and ask 'Cleveland and Cal Brice. In Kentucky, which has been a solid democratic state for over fifty years, the populists hold the balance of power in the legislature. In seventeen counties in Kansas the democrats and republicans fused against the populists, and in several of these counties the populists “licked the stuffin’’ out of both old parties combined. In the south there is no republican party. The battle was between the democrats and populists. The pops captured many counties, hold a strong membership in legislatures and elected lately a governor in Alabama, who was counted out by the most gross and palpable frauds. Call you this dying. If tne populists party continues to die this way it will capture the country in 1896.” “The result of the elections in a dozen states last week which snowed gold bug democracy under plainly shows that when a party has no principle to fight for its time to give up the ghost has come. The trouble with the democratic party is this: The masses of the party are for free silver, and the bosses led by Grover Cleveland are for goldbugism, more bonds and monopolies in general. A party divided against itself cannot stand. It is only a question of time when the goidbug element of the socalled democracy will go where it belongs, into the bosom of the republican party, and the honest free silver masses will join the populist party which embodies true Jefferson and Jacksonian anti-monopoly principles in its platform and purposes.”