People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1896 — Watson Honored at Home. [ARTICLE]

Watson Honored at Home.

Hon. John Temple Graves, one of Georgia’s most brilliant orators’ who, with Hon. Thos. E. Watson was Democratic elector for the state at large in 1888, in a public speech at Cartersville, a few days ago, said. “lam supporting Tom Watson for vice president of the United States.” I support Watson because he is a Georgian, who has won his way to fame and enduring honor through the thorniest trials that ever compassed a public life in Georgia and because his nomin

atiou represents the first organized political courage that has dared to do national honor to a southern man since the civil revolution. His nomination types the last gasp of sectionalism, and the first full breath of actual equality and fellowship that the south has drawn in the new republic of to-day. I support Watson because I feel that the Democratic party is bound in honor to support him —bound by the contract, solemn and honorable, implied in the presence and attitude of Jones and Bland at the Populist convention at St. Louis.

I support Watson because he represents a party that in its members and in itrj concurrence here, furnishes to the Democratic party its best and only hope of victory. One million eight hundred thousand votes is a fair exchange for this inferior honor to a superior man—a fair price sos the Democratic party to pay for the ransom of its principles. . We have no votes to spare. We cbmnot win against the money power* without the Populists, and we know it. If we win at all we win by the aid of the magnificent re-enforcement, and I believe that for this mighty help, the Democratic party is bound in honor to an act of reciprocal generosity.

I support Watson because he represents a party that has educated our Democratic party to a due consideration for the welfare of the common people, I say it fearlessly, and it cannot be denied, that reforms for which the masses have been clamering for years—whether it be silver or labor or income tax or popular rights or resistance to governrhent by injunction—had never been written, and might never have been written in a Democratic platform, until the Populist party, 1,800,000 strong, thundered in the ears of Democratic leaders the a mouncement that a mighty multitude demanded these reforms. And among the men who have molded, through storm and struggle, the the party that has educated ours to popular liberty. Tom Watson, of Georgia, stands easily as the

first and foremost of them all. I am in favor of paying this tuition fee in full. I support Watson because Sewall does not represent the platform on which he stands. Unheard of and unhei aided, picked up by chance and accident in the apathy and haste that marked the closing hour of the Chicago convention, he is out cf touch with his platform on almost as many points as he touches it. By the record he is at variance with his platform as a national banker. Re is on record in opposition to its tariff views. He was advocating a gold standard Democrat for governor three months ago, and this is to the credit of his judgement if not of his consistency. He is in opposition to his platform in the bounties which come to him from his ships. I believe that this very party is indifferent to him, and I am sure that Bryan, his commander-in-chief, has written his explicit condemnation in the public statement that a candidate ought to stand above suspicion on every plank of the platform which supports him. I support Watson because I have good reason to believe that three-fourths of the people of Georgia, without regard to party would prefer him to Sewall and and would vote for him if they were as free as I am. The gold-bug democrats were so well satisfied with the republican tariff that they practically endorsed it. The gold-bug republicans now are so well pleased with the existing financial policy that they reciprocate by claiming it is their orginal invention.