Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1884 — BLAINE AND LOGAN. [ARTICLE]

BLAINE AND LOGAN.

The Unrivaled Statesman, the Unconquered Soldier. Both of. Our Candidates Endowed with Stiff Spinal Columns. A Ticket That Appeals to the Pride and Honor of the Country.

Blaine and the British. If it was the purpose of the British rumsellers’ organ, the London Telegraph, and. the British Jingo organs, the Standard and Pall Mall Gazette, to prejudice the American people against Mr. Blaine, or to injure his candidature by their dispatches and editorials deploring his aggressive attitude when American rights and interests are concerned, they have overshot the mark. The truth is, the American people admire Blaine because he is aggressive, because he has backbone, because he is jealous of their rights and interests, and when he had an opportunity was not slack in maintaining them. This is one of the elements of his popularity. The Pall Mall Gazette says: Whenever Blaine can oust the British from the position they hold on the American Continent he will endeavor to replace English influence and trade with American. Is not this the patriotic duty of an American statesman? It is a duty, however, which has been neglected in deference to what Senator Ben Harrison aptly characterized as a “grandmotherly foreign policy.” The Telegraph and Standard, as usual, mistake and misstate the sentiments of the American people. Americans are not Anglophobists. They have no reason to love England, but do not hate her. They are jealous of her encroachments on American trade in foreign lands. Otherwise they give the question of England very little thought. Of course, with the IrishAmerican people it is quite different. Every American statesman who thwarts England’s designs, who enforces the rights of American citizens in England and Ireland, is popular with them. Mr. Blaine is, without doubt, the most popular American statesman with thinking Irish-Americans, and the Telegraph correspondent states one of the principal reasons so exactly that it is worth quoting: His [Blaine’s] great strength among the Irish voters is due mainly to his activity while a Republican leader in Congress, during the years 1867, 1868, and 1869, in forcing England to recede from her claims of allegiance upon British-born subjects who had become naturalized as American citizens. This activity was developed in the case of Augustine Costello, who, with a -a large number of Irish-Americans, including Gen. Denis Burke, was arrested in Ireland and tried for utterances made in the United States. Costello was arrested while in Ireland, in 1867, and placed on trial for a speech which he made in New York while an American citizen in 1865. The speech was construed as treasonable, and, under the act of 1848, which especially declared England’s right to punish upon British soil British-born Subjects for treasonable utterances or performances made upon foreign territory, Costello was sentenced to sixteen years’ penal servitude. His claims of American citizenship were ignored, upon the ground that there was nothing existing between the United States and Great Britain debarring Great Britain from claiming as a British subject any person bom on British soil. Costello was removed to Milbank prison, when Blaine took up his case. Blaine organized a Congressional agitation, which resulted in the liberation of Cpstello and his colleagues, who possessed full American naturalization, and the treaty of 1870, in which Great Britain surrendered all claims of allegiance from British subjects who became naturalized as American citizens. ~ • It has been claimed in some quarters that Blaine never manifested any interest in Irish-American citizens until he became a Presidential candidate. The British correspondents bear testimony otherwise, and show quite conclusively that as far back as 1867 Mr. Blaine was the leading champion of the naturalized citizen. But this is not a matter in which Irish-Americans alone are concerned. It is one in which the German-Ameri-can, the Scandinavian-American, all Americans have an interest in which they feel deeply. Owing to AngloIrish complications it is one in which Irish-Americans have a peculiar and far-reaclung interest, as they are likely to manifest at the polls next November. We bt lieve with the British correspondents that Mr. Blaine will draw largely from the Irish Democratic vote. Else the protests against the imprisonment of American citizens in Ireland | on the part of Irish-American orators and mass-meetings have had no meaning and fio significance, and have been hollow shams. On the whole, we take it that the | special dispatches of the Telegraph and ; the Standard and the editorials of the i Pall Mall Gazette will make first-class ' campaign documents for the Republi- | can party.— Chicago Trilrune.