Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 October 1890 — SHALL WE? [ARTICLE]

SHALL WE?

Shall Congress|be a deliberative assembly wherein public measures may be properly considered duly debated, and then, without waste of time, actually voted upon; and wherein the American principle of “majority rule” shall be respected, or shall it be a mob, incompetent to act, powerless to carry out the public will, with a majority so overcome by its own rules that it is dependent upon the minority for its authority and power? Shall we allow the Capitol to be filled up with men who obtain seats in Cpngress not as the result of a free ballot and a fair count, but by the forcible suppression of franchise rights, by wholesale frauds, by murder, arson, brutality and other crimes? Shall We abandon the policy of Protection. after all it has done for us, to enter policy which we have tested many times to our immediate, unfailing and tremendous loss? Shall we again rob ourselves of the rewards which, have so richly come from the restoration of silver, and once more play into the hands of foreigners who have been for years buy ing our silver at low prices and using it against us in the grain markets of the world? Shall we pay our money, $150,000,000 a year, to build up the merchant marine of England, to increase her strength upon tbfe sea and her hold upon the foreign markets of tho world when we might as well as not be paying it for our own advantage in all of of these respects? Shall we keep our plighted faith to the loyal men who offered their lives in defense of freedom and union and to the protection of whose families from want and misery we gave our word as a nation? These are the chief and the most -sharply defined issues upon which the country is asked to cast st deciding ballot this fall. Every effort is being made to side-track them, to envelope them in clouds and to carry the people away from them here and there on false pretenses. Tne Democrats start off in the next Congress, as usual, with thirty-one stolen seats. They have that number of seats to their credit without a campaign. By infamous gerrymanders, especially in Ohio, Maryland. Kentucky and Indiana, they expect to steal twenty-one other seats. This gives them an immense advantage. To the Republicans it is an awful handicap. But if the intelligent, thoughtful and patriotic people of the land will do their duty as citizens, if they will stand sturdily by their guns, if they will vote as they wish and th nk, the result will be a glorious Republican victory and a prompt and happ, completion of the work which President Harrison and this Congress have carried forward so wisely and so well. ISSUE NO. 1. Do you wish your Congress to be an orderly deliberative assembly, or do you wish it to be a lawless mob? ISSUE NO. 2. Shall there be a free ballot and an honest count throughout the length .and breadth of the land? ISSUE NO S. This bill preserves in operation ; • .... . u •

adapting it to the present state of trade, that revenue system which the greatest statesman of Europe declares himself constrained to imitate; a system which has given uS it material development “the most illustrious of modern time;" a system which first creates the finest market in the world and then controls it for our own principal enjoyment; a system which ha-; raised the American farmer’ to a digsity enjoyed by no other tiller of the soil, and the American mechanic to a place 'in society and affairs whfrh In the envy of his brethren in every land. Are you ready to pbandonthis Bystem? Do you want to open your doors to the cheap, serf-wrought goods of other countries? Do you want to create hero the very conditions that all our millions of foreign-borp citizens have fled from? If not, you must return a Republican Congress. p 1 , ISStE NO- 4. Do you want good money and plenty of it, or bad money and hot even enough of that to go around? ISSUE no. 5. i Will the workingmen and their organizations stand by the party which keeps its promises and performs its duties to them, or will they prefer the party which violates its promises and doesn't see its duties? ISSUE NO. G. Are yon in favor of a merchant marine, do you wish to see the Stars and Stripes restored to their old place on the high seas, or are you willing to Jbave America remain On foreign ships for a foreign trade? issue no. 7. IDo you wish the nation to keep its promises to the men who kept its flag aloft, or would you leave them to the tender mercies of poor houses and private charity? If the Republicans turn putlind vote in November, the victory will be theirs.