People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1896 — THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN. [ARTICLE]

THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN.

They Are to Rule This Nation, Not to Be Ruled. They Must Assert Their Sovereign Power. Government Based on the Rights of .Manhood. Not on Property and Its Privileges. > “We have nobody with na but the people,” said Mr. Bryan the other day in closing a description of the exodus which has tatoen out of the Democratic party every supporter of trosta and monopolies, every dependent on usury, every apeouMar on the necessities of the people, every benefkriary of the corporations which wish to substitute their own cheap and intrinsically worthless paper for money of the minte, every upholder of the British gold standard and the British bmaocntio system of life tenure in office, every man who believes that oorporatlqn attorneys on the federal bench aae greater than the people and entitled to rule the people without appeal even to the. ballot box, and, finally, every officeholder who oan be intimidated by a president and cabinet in sympathy with Wall street credit brokers, bond speculators and cornerers of gold. It is certainly true, and it is the central fact of this campaign, that “we have nobody with us but the people I” But it is not true for the first time. It was true in Andrew Jackson’s day when Judge Story, a Federalist supporter of Adams, described the Jackson Democrats as the “most vulgar and gross people in the nation. ” And it was true still earlier, for in describing the conditions which ushered in the great Democratic victory of 1800, when the Federalist party was virtually wiped out, Thomas Jefferson wrote his friend and Virginia neighbor, Mazzei, then in France, a letter in which be gives a strikingly accurate outline, not only of tnat campaign, but of this. “The aspect of our politics,” Jefferson writes, “has wonderfully changed since you left us. In place of the noble love of liberty and republican government which carried us triumphantly through the war an Anglican party has sprung up, who to avowed purpose it is to draw us over to the substance, as they have already done to the forms, of the British government. While the main body of our citizens remain true to republican institutions * * * against us are the executive, the federal judiciary, two out. of three branches of the legislature, all the officers of the government, all timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty, all British merchants and Americans trading on British capital, all speculators and brokers, and with them the banks and dealers in the public funds (United States bonds), a contrivance invented for the purpose of corruption and for assimilating us to the rotten as well as to the sound parts of the British model.” So succinctly and comprehensively does this sum up existing conditions that it is hard to realize that a century has passed since it was written. The Democracy is fighting the campaign of 1800 over again. Now, as then, cries of treason are raised against it by the enemies of popular government. Its leaders are denounced as enemies of law and order, as Jacobins, as dangerous anarchists, just as Jefferson was then denounced by every one who believed, as the Federalists did then, as the plutocrats do now, that government should be based on property and its privileges, not on manhood and its rights. But the Democracy did not turn then. It did not hesitate. Never so strong as when it has been deserted by all who fear the people. it pushed forward to victory under the leadership of the great man who first laid down “Trust the people!” as the fundamental principle of government. It was the greatest discovery ever made in the politics of the world—this, that the people can be trusted. Never in modern times was it a factor in the practical politics of any country until tfie campaign of 1800, when the author of the Declaration of Independence took the field in support of the proposition that the people are the that they are not to be ruled in America, but are to rule it. He had no one with him on that proposition but the people. But he was not frightened. He had behind him all the centuries of the dark ages of oppression and class government. He had before him all the ages of the glorious progress which is being worked now through confidence in the people and belief in their capacity for indefinite improvement through the indefinite extension of liberty. He dared to trust the people, and with him as their leader they won their first great victory under the declaration that all men are created free and with equal rights under the law. Let no Democrat fear the result. In spite of the hundreds of millions of wrongfully heir. wealth being used against them, the people of the United States can assert their power to govern. And they will do it!—St. Louis PostDispatch.