Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1884 — SENATOR HOAR. [ARTICLE]

SENATOR HOAR.

A Letter Effectively Meeting Mr. Carl Schurz’s Charges • Against Blaine. Mr. Schurz says that the election of Mr. Blaine will be a declaration by the American people that honesty will be no longer one of the requirements of government. I think Mr. Schurz is entirely mistaken here, also. It will be a declaration on the part of the American people that they do not agree with him in his estimate of Mr. Blaine. It will be a declaratiori*that tney do not find in Mr. Blaine’s conduct and letters what Mr. Schurz thinks he finds there. It will be a declaration that they agree with Dr, Clark when he paid Mr. Blaine his glowing tribute of admiration and honor, when all these facts were they agree with Mr. Curtis, who declared that Mr. Blaine's vindication ot the principal charge against him was triumphant. It will be a declaration that they agree with Mr. Blaine’s neighbors, of his own district and of his own State, with the representatives of a vast majority of the Republicans pt the country, who have three times, since all these charges were made, declared for him as their candidate for the Presidency. It will be a declaration that they agree with the Governor and the Legislature of Maine when they twice in succession made him Senator. It will be a declaration that they agree with Garfield when he made him Secretary of State, and with the almost half Democratic Senate when they, without an instant’s hesitation, confirmed hiin for that high office. Mr. Schurz says: “The friends of Mr. Blaine say his off ense has been condoned.” They say no such thing. They say he has been triumphantly acquitted. They find him not guilty of these foul and injurious charges. They say that in this complicated matter these repeated tokens of public confidence and affection ought to outweigh a million times the breath of rumor and of slander, or even the possibility ot an adverse interpretation of the meaning ot a single phrase. He says that our answer is only the cry of party. I think him mistaken in this also. Your party is but the instrument by which freemen execute their will. But it differs from other instruments in this: It is an indispensable instrument. It is an instrument made up of men, and, practically, of all the men who wish to accomplish the things you wish to accomplish, and deem vital to the prosperity, honor, anti glory of your country. It is an instrument itself possessing intelligence, judgmt nt, conscience, purpose, will. A majority of that party must necessarily determine its plan of battle, and the commander under whom it will fight. And when you separate yourself from the party whose principles and purposes are yours, you effectually abandon those principles and purposes. You might as well say, when the army ot the Union was about to engage the enemy at Gettysburg or Lookout Mountain or Five Forks, that you didn’t approve the plan of battle, or didn’t like the general, and that, for that day only, you would go over to the enemy or fight in another place. You cannot do it without being a deserter. No matter whether you dislike Grant or Meade or Sheridan. The battle on which the hope of Union and humanity hangs is to be fought there on the lines they form. No man knows this better than Grover Cleveland. “I am chosen," he says, "to represent the plans, purposes, and policy of the Democratic party.” If elected he will doit. James G. Blaine is selected to execute the plans, purposes, and policy of the Republican party. And he will do it. You may not like the generaltthe commissioned authority of the Republican party has selected. But you fight on the Democratic side, with the Democratic party, against the Republican. on everything on which the two parties differ, If you vote for Grover Cleveland. If you elect Cleveland you abandon further hope of civil service reform for this generation. You take the side of free trade against protection. You bid farewell for a lifetime to honest elections in the South. You suffer the great Mormon cancer to spread over the breast of the republic. There is but one thing on which Grover Cleveland has unmistakably planted himself. That is, that if elected, he will be a party instrument. What he said in his speech ot acceptance, he echoes in his letter. In that feeble document, which, as compared with Mr. Blaine’s, is as a mole-hill to the Allegheny Mountains, he declares that when “the party has outlined its policy and declared Its principles, nothing more is required of the candidate than the suggestion of certain well-known truths.” Is he for protection? Nobody knows. Does he wish to put down Mormonism? Nobody knows. Is he in favor of repealing tne tenure of office law? Nobody knows. There is not a single question at issue before the people in regard to which yon have any warrant of his action, except in his avowed purpose to carry out the will of his party. Mr. Schurz further says that if anybody hereafter charges that tne opposition to Mr. Blaine is a tree-trade movement it will be a lie. Hitherto it miy have been a mistake. But since he has reminded you that they were ready to support Mr. Edmunds, you will lie if you repeat the statement. Well, it is true, they favored the nomination of Mr. Edmunds, who is a protectionist. But is it not true that every newspaper and every prominent man who has come out against Blaine, leaving the Republican party this year, has a strong leaning to free trade? Do you think of an exception? The men who love, honor, and support Mr. Blaine have quite as lofty an ideal or purity and integrity in public station as those who oppose him. They make no distinction between public and private virtue. If a man be not controlled by the law of right and duty in private life, he is not to be trusted amid the temptation of public office. W’e will vote for no corrupt or unclean man for President. At the same time we do not mean to help any party to gain the Presidency by crime. I said in 1876. just after the Belknap trial, that there had been not only less corruption relatively to the size of the country in the twelve years that followed the rebellion, but less absolutely than in the twelve years of administration of Washington and John Adams. That is equally true if we compare the last twenty years with the first twenty under the Constitution. The Independent address enumerates some recent cases of dishonesty in high places. In some of them retribution has been tardy. In some there has been a natural, but indefensible reluctance to accept evidence of guilt against political associates. But in the main these are cases where dishonesty has been detected and remanded to public life by Republicans themselves. The party has been growing better and better. It was better in ’6B than in ’64, better in ’76 than in '6B, better in ’B4 than in ’BO. Attention is.called to the faetthat there are unworthy men still conspicuous. I think it likely. Wherever a victorious army is on the march you will see these vultures flying in the air. The company of men who have formed a hasty and unjust judgment of Mr. Blaine contains many persons whom I love and honor, many of whose friendship lam proud. They have been honestly misled. But in the main the honesty, purity, education, strength of the nation is in the Republican party. The men who saved the nation are more patriotic than those who tried to destroy it. The men who abolished slavery love freedom and labor better than the men who struggled to preserve it. The men who paid the debt are more honest than those who tried to repudiate it. The men who kept the currency sound are better financiers than those who tried to debase it. The men who stand for fair elections in the South are more fit to be trusted than the minority who are honing to seat their man in the Presidency by murder and fraud. The purity of the American home, without which there can be no purity of health anywhere, is safer with those who are trying to extirpate Mormonism than with those in whose eyes Grover Cleveland is the standard of personal excellence. The men who have achieved the independence of American manufacture, whose policy has called our. vast industries into life, and who. would exert every force which Governinent can rightfully wield to keep up the rate of workmen’s wages, are wiser and more far-seeing than those who would put these great interests'under the heel ot England again, and let the price of American labor be determined in the British market.— Letter in Worcester {Mass.) Spy. , ,