Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1884 — The War a Failure. [ARTICLE]

The War a Failure.

“Here you stand at the end of four years’ desperate fighting in the face of a merciless conscription, with your population exhausted, your labor neg lected, and your crops short. All this seems not to defer reasonable men from this programme of butchery and crime. For myself, I pever have believed in it: I wish my fears had not proved true: I wish they could restore the Union even on their plan of restoration, but it hips proven a failure. You qave tried Lincoln four years. He has called into the field more men than voted for him in 1860. Nearly four millions, I think, have been called for, and to-day, if two-thirds of the property of this district were sold, it would not pay your portion of the principal of the-public debt. If yau were to sell two cows out of every three, two sheep out of every throe, and two acres of land out of every three, then it would not pay your share of the public debt.”