People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1896 — THE SOLID TRUTH. [ARTICLE]

THE SOLID TRUTH.

LAWS MUST BE OBEYED IF REPUBLIC LIVES. The Parity of the Ballot Mun Be p,«. served-—Tem Wtun'i Tell'a c Flee for the Parity of the American Ballot* Box. When Tom Watson was nominated to run against Black, who was shamed into resigning an office to which he knew his election was secured by fraud, he made a speech which will go down in the annals of the history of this country. His plea for the purity of the ballot was follows: “Everywhere it is profoundly realized that you cannot trample upon one law without weakening all; that you cannot destroy honesty in elections without placing a premium upon rascality which will encourage it to invade other branches of the public administration. Honest citizens everywhere began to feel that corrupt elections would lead to corrupt verdicts, corrupt judgments, corrupt laws. “Our civilization is an elaborate work—the result of ages of lofty efforts. It has been laboriously built up in spite of barbarism, in spite of the baser elements of society and as a triumph over what is base in the builders themselves. “This temple rests upon certain foundations without whose firm support the whole fabric falls. And in the civilization of the republic there can be no dispute that a part of the foundation is the purity of elections. “Controlled by the public sentiment which had at last become shocked and indignant at the open violation of the law by which my opponent prevailed over me, he now confesses, by his resignation, that a grievous wrong has been done us, and that the time has come for the honest elements of both parties to put the rascals under foot.

“I congratulate you upon this happy result, for it marks a revolution in the south. “The time has been when any crime committed in the name of the democratic party was an act of patriotism in the eyes of a majority of the people. As long as selfish and dishonest leaders could make the south believe that democracy, as they practiced it, was identical with the integrity ol southern life —social, political and commercial —-it was utterly impossible to awaken the public conscience to a. sense of the dangers of ballots suppressed, majorities manufactured to order, election returns cooked to suit the taste of the wire puller, and the laws of the land bent into supple instruments of political intrigue. The time has been when every man in this house would have gloried in the commission of a political crime which served the purpose of the democratic party—a party dear to all of us as the trusted guardian of our liberties, the special .champiqn of our'section, the chosen defender of our homes and fireside. Not a man here who has not loved the democratic party—loved its traditions; loved its great achievements, loved its heroic leaders, loved it for the enemies it made in the grand days when it fought the battles of the common people against class rule and special privileges. « “Not a man here who has not worked for the democratic party, who has noi suffered for it; -who has not blindly trusted it until human faith could stand no more.