Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 May 1887 — A DEMOCRAT ON THE WAR PATH. [ARTICLE]

A DEMOCRAT ON THE WAR PATH.

Colonel Pat Donkn Excoriates the , Cleveland Administration. In spite of all the gush and twaddle and .molasses-and-water slop of toadying organs and office-hankering scribblers, this administration strikes me as a dreary, dismal, damned failure. It came in promising everything, and it has done next to nothing, and much of the little it has done had better been left undone. The country has for years groaned under a system of war taxation in time of peace that piles up in the Treasury $12,000,000 a month of revenue excess. An exaction so monstrous would drive almost any other nation on earth to revolution. This much trumpeted Democratic-reform administration has done nothing to, lighten this intolerable burden. These swelling millions of millions of useless and wicked surplus must either be hoarded in the Treasury as an incentive to political burglary, or spent in knocking the bottom out of the best financial system on tbe globe by buying up the bonus on which it is based, and that means an indefinite contraction of the currency and ultimate disaster to every business interest. This vastly bepuffed administration has done nothing to remedy this evil and dangerous condition of affairs. It has done nothing toward amending the inequalities and the iniquities of the tariff, which its whole party had denounced for years; it has done nothing to curb the importation of millions of foreign outcasts, the paupers and criminals of all creation. It has done nothing to promote the purity of the ballot box; it has done nothing to restore American commerce and shipping to their once proud pre-eminence on the seas; it has done nothing to foster trade relations with our American neighbor nations. ■ - ‘ Some things, I admit, it has done. It has married two or three new wives; it has baptized one standard-oil baby with as much flummery and flunkeyism as if it had been a Spanish Infanta with 100 grandfathers, or a royal Russian Czar cub with a name as long as a fishing pole; it has brought back poodles into fashion, and inaugurated more nauseating tricks of servile fawning and soft-squashy panegyric than any other outfit that ever wal-lowed-in the White House; it has demoralized the finest postal service under the sun by appointing tens of thousands of ignorant and incompetent substitutes for trained officials; it has sent a horde of ancient and, uncouth fossils of the ichthyosaurian period in politics to represent our mighty New World Republic at foreign courts, and render us a laughing-stock to all the world.

The President’s Exclusiveness. The statement that President Cleveland has caused a private entrance to be cut into his private box in one of the Washington theaters, so that he may not be annoyed by the vulgar curiosity of the common herd when he goes to the play w'ill not be received with complacency by the Jeffersonian Democracy. Many of them will reecho Mr. Watterson’s caustic remarks on this theme: “At a time when all that is mean and sordid in our shoddy society is turning itself inside out to ape the manners of the titled and rich aristocracies of Christendom; when ill-gotten wealth is tumbling heels over head.in the scramble for a coarse, corrupting pre-eminence in parvenuism; when the old stately courtesy of simple manhood and womanhood, which once were a charm all their own in our public walks and ways, are being ingulfed in the hog-wallow of the new-made greatness, with its imported trappings, it was most fit and needful that a Democratic President and his Democratic administration should rise above the mud and the mire of fraud and cant, and plant thems Ives upon the high and solid ground of self-honoring reality, with its homely lessons of modesty and truth. A private entrance to a private box because the crowd ‘annoys’ him! Fah and out upon such tomfoolery! On what birdlings doth this our birdie feed that he hath grown so sensitive?” This private box exclusiveness and isolation from the people is excusable among the European sovereigns, who are not altogether secure as to the design of the subjects and who are apprehensive of what might occur to their royal persons in case of close propinquity, but Mr. Cleveland cannot urge this excuse, which would only write him down a coward. Hence it can only remain that he desires to be exclusive because he is annoyed by the gaze or touch of the crowd, of which a few short years ago he was an unknown and inconspicuous member. This peculiarity has been manifested several times since he entered the White House, and appears to be growing on him. As a bachelor lodger over the grocery store, as one of the “boys” in Buffalo, as Sheriff and hangman, and even as Governor, he was always approachable, but since his consorting with the mugwumps and his elevation to the Presidency he has cultivated exclusiveness and the usages of aristocracy with all the zest that is characteristic of parvenus blossoming out with sudden wealth and beggars dizzy with equine ascendency over the peripatetic herd beneath them. Nothing more surely ppp? claims the smallfryness of a man than the assumption of dignity among his fellows, or his pretentious character than his painful effort to assert and protect it. Men of real dignity never have to assert it or to withdraw from their equals from fear of losing it, or from apprehension that it may be questioned as Men bom to the purple are never afraid of soiling it by contact with their kind. Men of native dignity do not have to guard it or give it any thought. The President does not appear to be one of this kind. He is Evidently apprehensive that his dignity is illfitting, and that if he exposes himself to the public he may sass back into his old ways and lose it altogether, or that it may be discovered that it is pinchbeck and not the real thing. As the leader of the tawdry procession of flummery in Washington, none of whom will bear very close inspection, it is evidently needful that he should isolate himself from the public, lest some Jeffersonian aan» calotte should rudely brush against the bubble and burst it. But how about Jeffersoniarrsimplicity in a royal box!— Chicago Tribune.

Ex-Attorney General Speed on Kentucky and the Month. 'Cincinnati special to Chicago Inter Ocean.] Ex-Attorney General Speed, of Louisville, who was here to attend the Loyal Legion meeting, said: “I think even the Democrats of the South perceive how important it is that, for example, in my own State of Kentucky and throughout the South generally, there should be some strong opposition to the dominant party. Why, in Kentucky it is a question of nomination only, and election is so sure that those elected do not hesitate to disregard all pledge's. I bejieve that the next election will show a very dec ded change in the vote of the State, and that the Republican candidate for Governor, W. Q. Bradley, will probably be elected. I think that Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina will be among the uncertain States, and that, with the Labor party in the field, the next election will not turn on New York,”