Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 September 1886 — PUBLIC SPEAKING. [ARTICLE]

PUBLIC SPEAKING.

Hon W- D Owes, At Remington, Ind., Friday, Oct, Ist, at 7:30 p. m. 4 At Goodland, Ind., Saturday, Oct., 2nd, at 7:30 p. m.~ — Hon. Benjamin Harrison, AtGoodlWd, Ini, Friday, Sept, 24, at 1 o’clock p. m. . General Jasper Packard was nominated by | the republicans Of the 13th district, last week, as their candidate for Congressman. He is indeed a “grand good man” and well deserves to be elected. The hostility of the administration and its supporters to the payment of pensions to loyal veterans, manifested at the recent session of congress, is but a slight foretaste of what we shall see if these men are continued in power. The workingmen in this country have one thousand millions laid up in our saving’s banks. The more numerous workingmen of Great Britain can only show about four hundred millions of savings. These figures tell a true story of protection and free trade. A protective tariff is the only agency yet discovered for keeping American wages above those paid in foreign countries; and whatever tends to weaken and destroy that . safeguard is therefore inimicable to the interests of all classes of workingmen. This view of the case is the practical one. Whatever doctrinaries may assert, the fact is that protection conserves and promotes the welfare of all those who labor for a living, or, (n other words, a majority of the whole people of this country; and policy which does that is t good

Free trade would inevitably and speedily produce one of two results in this country. Out manufacturing establishments would be compelled to close up, or the rate of wages paid to the labor operating them would be reduced to the standard of Europe. Either of these results would be dangerous to the last degree, if not certainly destructive and utterly ruinous. The occupation of the anarchist will be gone when the free trader disappears from our politics.

‘ • ■ r *'• • ■ The New York Sun, a Democratic newspaper, good authority, after telling what farmers want tells what they don’t want, and says: “There is one thing that they very positively and emphatically don’t want, and our esteemed contemporary, the Evening Post, will learn the fact with surprise—the farmers don’t want free trade. The Democratic party, however, is committed to free trade, against the interests of farmers, workingmen, and producers of every class. That awful surplus in the treasury, so much harped upon in 1884 as the.unpardonable sin of the Republicans, and which was to be immediately distributed among the people when the great “change” took place, has increased more than 870,000,000 under the Cleveland administration, and instead of distributing it among the people, the administration even refuses to pay it out on the public debt Is this honest? When a man deceives and cheats you the first time, it may be all his fault. The second time it will be all yours. If a republican leader becomes known as having engaged in some great rascality, he becomes disgraced; and is rejected and condemned by the people. Where is there a single republican now in high position who voted lor the big salary grab of 1868? Not one of them is now ip public life. But in the case of democrats who voted for the grab, and drew the cash and hung to it, nobody thinks they are any worse democrats on account of such trifling irregularities Senator Voorhees is a pertinent proof of this fact. He voted for the bill, drew the money out, kept it, And apparently no democrat thinks the worse of him for it,

The troublesome < conscience appertaining to Mr. Henry I. Adams would no longer permit him to remain in the ranks of the republican party. It is fair to presume, however, that if the republicans had nominated and elected him member of the State Legislature, in 1884, and renominated him in the present year, or if they had realized his great merits and nominated him for cdunty auditor this .year, then his conscience would have hung fire for several years yet, and possibly would never have developed the dangerously explosive qualities which have lately suddenly fired him out of the* republican party and over into the prohibitionist camp. The consciences of constitutional office-seekers are dangerous things to trifle with.

| The Phalanx, the organ of Ind- • iana prohibitionists, scouts the I idea of prohibitionists acting with i the Republican party, and says, “We go to the Republican [party, in the event that that parts declares for local option! No, never. Let it declare squarely for prohi- : bitioß,and yet we will preserve our organization and carry aloft ' the banners of the third party.” iOf course you would, as the dis- ; solution of the prohibition party would dry up the little puddle in which you now disport yourself as one of the big toads, and leave you penniless and out of a job. It pays you to be a prohibitionist m a Democratic state, and the way to keep Indiana Democratic, | and at the same time strengthen . the whisky power, is to continue ’the third party business at the old 1 stand.

Every candidate on the democratic state ticket of Missouri is an ex-confederate soldier. Every candidate on the republican ticket, m the same state was a Union soldier. Both parties love the soldiers, but not Jthesame kind of soldiers. I The honest Democrat who wants tariff reform without free trade must look to the Republican party for it. The Democratic leaders at the recent session of congress obstinately rejected tariff reform and demanded free trade, and nearly all the Democratic state platforms of the year proclaim that British doctrine. . The more we hear from Maine, file better the news becomes. The latest returns show a solid increase over the estimate based on the early figures received, and indicate that Bodwell will have a plurality of fully 14,000. The victory is an important one in every way for the Republican party. W ith the exception of the Presidential years of 1872, 1876 and 1884, Mr. Bodwell’s ('plurality of 14,000 has not been equaled in twenty years. President Cleveland is a usurper because he was elected by the Votes of states which, in a free and fair election, would have been given to the republican candidate. In the same way, only in less degree, if the republicans have a plurality in Indiana this fall, as now seems very probable, and a democratic U. S. senator is elected, through the workings of the Gerrymanders, then that senator will be a usurper, without any moral right to the office he occupies. The-people of Indiana —Here, why did you pass that gerrymander bill, disfranchising "the majority of the voters of this State? Democratic party—Because we passed a bill limiting the charges of telephones to 83 a month. The people—Well, does the telephone bill save anything to the people? Democratic party—No-o-o,prob-abty not; but it’s something. " The people—But what has the telephone bill, bad as it is, to do with the fact that you were afraid to trust the voters of Indiana ?

Democratic party —Don’t know. Let’s go for the temperance plank of the Republican platform. We want to make the on that. • The people—All right; talk about it all you want to, but meanwhile we will see to it that you are not given another chance to trick the people of this State and then nirt be even ~decently~apor ogize for the same.—Jnd. Journal.

The Message of last week struggles vainly to find words to fitly describe the noble, rugged and manly virtues of Mr. Henry I. Adams, chairman of the prohibitionists’ central committee; and yet, in the same article, it plainly intimates that it has been the “weak, foolish and wicked” course of the secretary of the republican central .committee that drove this “cautious,” “conscientious,” “prudent” and “resolute” man away from the republican party and in'to the prohibition party! How it could be possible that the “weak and foolish” course of a single individual could have the effect of changing the political' convictions of a man to whom all those exalted qualities can.be ascribed the Message does not explain. It does not explain, either, the apparently irreconcilable contradiction be-

tWeen Horace’s hypothesis in explanation of Mr. Adams* change of political -associations, and that gentleman’s own explanation of the phenomenon. Mr. Adams says he was made a political prohibitionist by the failure of the legislature of 1883 to submit the prohibition amendment to the vote of the people. Horace says it was the “weak and foolish” course of the secretary of the Jasper county republican central committee that accomplished that momentous result. Mr. Adams and the Message man had better hold a private caucus and “pool cheir issues” before the latter makes any more bad breaks of this kind.

” An editor whose utterances are not the convictions of his heart, but are whatever the changing feelings or interests of the hour may suggest, is sure to involve himself in many and grevious contradictions. A couple of months ago when the Message man was worked harder than at present to conciliate the favor of the' democrats— doing «t for revenue only—he referred to the subject of the President’s pension vetoes, in his paper of July 14th, in a manner calculated to excuse and extenuate the course of the President and to belittle the criticisms made upon him in that matter. The following being what was said in the Message, on the date mentioned: “President Cleveland is not vetoing the private pension bills to the extent that some of the Republican newspapers represent.—Of 655 private pension bills which he has examined, 90 have been vetoed and 565 approved. Nothing is to be gained by lying for partisan anvantage.” Two months later it suited the changing mood of this same editor to discourse of this same subject in a vastly different strain, and the following appeared in the Message of Sept. 15th: “How different from this is President Cleveland’s treatment of the poor, needy, maimed and enfeebled but equally meritorious soldiers who apply ior pensions * * * * whom the President brutally ridiculed in his vetoes.”

The Message of last week, in speaking of the Gerrymanders of the last State Legislature, calls it “the infamy against which Senator Hoover ineffectually protested.” This allusion to Senator Hoover’s course in regard to that measure is a piece of the rankest and most transparent hypocrisy, and is made simply for the purpose of currying the favor of a few influential democrats of the county jvho are friends of Mr. Hoover, especially such as Messrs. Geo. Majors, O. B. Mclntire and Treat Durand, of Remington. The Message editor knew when he penned that tying sentence that Senator Hoover, although at ffirst/denouncing the Gerrymander, at a word from his master, Dan Voorhees, not only ceased ail opposition to the bills, but obediently voted for them at every stage of their consideration. These words of the Message” which we have quoted are a plain and palpable attempt to induce its readers to believe that Mr. Hoover made a consistent and persistent opposition to the Gerrymanders. The attempt is nqt only grossly and hypocriti-cally-false- but itns basely—teactF erous to the republican party, in that it is an attempt to make people believe that the man whom many rep übl icans of this dis tri ct helped to make State Senator, had made an honest opposition to the greatest crime against the republican party and against free institutions ever perpetrated north of Masons and Dixon’s line, when in point of fact the only effectual action taken by that senator in regard to those infamous measures was to vote for them at every opportunity. The mas who, like the editor of the Message, thus knowingly and brazenly attempts to deceive the people in such a case as this, and who. tries to make it appear that the act of an enemy of the party, which he pretends to serve, was right when it was utterly, intentionally and inexcusably wrong, is as much an enemy to that party as was the individual whose acts he thus falsely excuses.