People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1895 — PRINCIPLES OF BACON AND JEFFERSON [ARTICLE]

PRINCIPLES OF BACON AND JEFFERSON

The following is from the pen of Hon.lgnatius Donnelly in the columns of theep Rresentativeof Minneapolis, Minn. The motto of Bacon, —“for the glory of God and the relief of man’s estate,” —is a proper foundation on which to build a great party; which, while it extends the hand of help to lift up the down trodden, bows reverently to the Creator of the universe—the Mighty One — from whom is derived all the blessings and powers of this earthly life. While iD Thomas Jefferson we recognize, more than in any other of the natives of our soil, the very genius of our institutions; he was the most American of Americans; the man who had “sworn upon the alter of his God undying hostility to every form of oppression of the bodies or the souls of men.”

If this paper can humbly represent the life-work and the life-purposes of these two illustrious men it need offer no apology for its existence. Bacon says: “Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property, which like the air and water, %sJongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.” Macaulay says, speaking of the purpose of Bacon’s philoso phy: It was the multiplying of human enjoyments and the mitigating of human sufferings. It was the relief of man’s estate. The art which Bacon taught was the art of inventing arts.

Ask a follower of Bacon what the hew philosophy has effected for mankind and his answer is ready:— “It has lengthened life; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form un known to our father; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendor of the day; it has extended the range of human vision; it has multiplied the power of human muscle; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled men to descend to the depth of the

sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land with cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean with ships that sail against the wind.” The other mighty spirit, whom this paper presumes to represent, is that distinguished American, Thomas Jefferson. The people’s party of the United States should make him their patron and exemplar. Indeed the great struggle in which we are engaged is but a revival of the battle of his life; we hear every day the echo of his words ringing through the clamors of the present conflict; we perceive every day how clearly his prescience penetrated even to these times.

He was pre-eminently the man of the people. He opposed, as we populists do, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. He broke up the system of “primogeniture” which gave all the property to the eldest son. He opposed and overthew the “law of entail” which tied up wealth from generation to generation and prevented its dissemination among the masses. He took advantage of the contest of the colonies with the mother country, about a mere matter of taxation, to build the new nation upon the platform of world-wide liberty and equality. Through the uproar of the petty and temporary dissension he blew a trumpet blast of universal principle which shall ring throughout the affairs of men as long as the world stands. He purchased from Napoleon, for fifteen million dollars, the whole vast Louisiana Territory which embraced all that part of Minnesota west of the Mississippi river, and through to Oregon. He had previously drafted the report which gave the great Northwestern territory to freedom. He opposed a national bank; he abhorred the aping of royalty now sb common and so offensive to every American; he abolished the presidential levee and military ball; and instead of going so be inaugurated chief magistrate in a coach and six, as his predecessors had done, he went on horseback and hitched his horse to the capital fence. He would have abolished all titles of honor such as “excellency” “honorable,” etc. He said: “If.it be possible to be certainly conscious of anything I am conscious of feeling no difference between writing to the highest and the lowest being on earth.” He extirpated the then popular delusion that “a national debt is a national blessing;” he “reorganized and rearmed the militia.” “To seculiarize and republicanize the government were the paramount purpose and the distinguishing feature of his administration.” After forty years of public life he died so poor that Congress had to purchase his library to relieve the distress of his family. He had none of the Rothschild faculty to accumulate trash. He died on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption by Congress of the Declaration of Independence, his immortal masterpiece, as if thereby God put his finger upon him, and marked him out, His great instrument for the good of the human family. We hope the people’s party in its next national convention will identify itself with the life and purposes and principles of Thos. Jefferson. We hope the Representative may be happy enough and faithful enough to stand squarely and firmly upon the platform of the greatest of men ahd the greatest of Americans.—The Representative.

The November number of McClure’s Magazine, containing the opening chapters of the Life of Lincoln, was out of print two weeks after publication, increasing the circulation by 45,000 new subscribers. The first edition for Decenuber will be over 200,000 copies, a further increase pf 25,000, and will contain other chapters in Lincoln’s early life with 25 , pictures, four portraits of Lincoln. • One of the Lincoln pictures and many of the other illustrations have never before been published. We are the only steam laundry in town. Spitler & Kight.