People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 March 1897 — Fooled Again What Next? [ARTICLE]

Fooled Again What Next?

The Kansas legislature has completed its work and adjourned. What it has done falls short of parry pledges made during the campaign about as much as have other legislatures. They have enacted no railroad legislation whatever; the very thing the party has grown up to perform, is abandoned. They have made some important changes in the state banking laws, conceded on all sides as needful; they have made it obligatory that when mortgages are assigned to other parties, the entry shall appear on the record before the mortgage shall be valid. They have cancelled a lot of boom town names from the list of incorporated towns; have passed some incidental regulations affecting shippers to the K. C. stock yards, and a few such trifling make shifts of a like order. The one procedure on which they will claim re-election is the cutting down of expenses, by whitling salaries and appropriations, which will represent a saving of about one million to the tax-pay-ers. The dissappointing feature is that the populist legisla ture has not risen to the occasion and taken radical steps in advance. Their record is cowardly and stamps them instead of incompetent radicals, as thoroughly radical incompetents. They have not taken one single step which tends to alleviate conditions of the wealth producer or make his lot in life less cumbersome. They have not advanced one proposition tending to open more avenues for employment of labor, but have spent their force in throwing additional safeguards about the institution of money loaning, making it more than ever a recognized institution of the state, and forgetting, as did the legislatures before the war, that humfen rights were paramount. What can the farmer, whose anxious, sleepless nights have seen in that legislature the only beacon light of hope, say now? Wherein can the struggling forces in other states, more interested in Kansas than Kansans themselves, now point to the superior work of populism as exemplified by its own unrestricted operations? far better for the entire reform movement throughout the state and the world had Kansas by one fell act wiped from her statute books every law enforcing the collection of debts made after a certain date. Then would they have sounded the key note of emancipation and reversed the whole order from one of slave driving to one of encouraging human honesty and business thrift. But like the states before the war, they look upon the institution of loaning money as a sacred one, and spend half their time, employ all their courts and retintte of constabulary to enforce collections under condi-

tions of supply made by the money power itself. The lesson is not one of discouragement entirely. However it gives no hope that present conditions are to be im proved by the mere act of voting one party in and another out; that when all the parties are grounded on recognition of institutions which in themselves belie an existence of equal opportunities, only differing in the matter of how many strands the slave driver shall be permitted to use in his lash, we are but fools to longer be stupefied into countenancing the right of the slave driver to either own the slaves or use his lash. What is true of Kansas, is only emphasized in Oklahoma where were only three republicans in both houses. They have done nothing but fiddle and snort over adjustment of fees and salaries, with no more regard for their platform promises than the parties before them who have been ousted for the same cause.

Why should populism appeal for public confidence in face of such acknowledged impotency? Populist success has been necessary up to this time, to prove that the whole system of party politics is grounded on an illusion—a pretense that human nature can be changed, that a perfect man can be constructed out of the filth aud excrescences which are now and have been but incubators of human vices. Did the republican party succeed in its tactics to compromise with the slave interests? Not until it inaugurated a wholesale system of confiscation and repudiation. No one has expected at hands of the people’s party or any other, such a course of devastating enactments as made the republican party immortal, but it was expected they would take some steps tending to make escape from the usurer’s grasp more hopeful.

We have looked with pity upon the party slave who blindly followed his party boss, but what can we say for the intelligence of the man who will longer hold up the populist party as the beacor. light of promise? There is nothing in such populism to alarm the money lenders or those who fatten from a control of the money volume. They have a trick ahead of any party political machine. What is it? Shall we apply the same, and effect our own exchanges or be good simple law abiding republicans, democrats and populists, fighting and snarling among ourselves like cats on the back fence? For one I have been looking for something which contains the elements for practice as well as theory and party buffoonery; something that in its very incipient operation helps every one and not as in politics, confers a job upon one and leaves a hundred to fight and quarrel in disappointment. I think I can find it long before a populist legislature in any state confers a permanent release upon its slave

population.

H. V.