Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1891 — It Costs You Nothing. [ARTICLE]

It Costs You Nothing.

It is with pleasure we announce that we have made arrangements with that popular, illustrated magazine, the American Farmer, published at Cleveland, Ohio, and read by farmers in all parts of this country and Canada, by which that excellent publication will be mailed direct, free, to the address of any of our subscribers who will pay up all arrearages on subscriptions and one year in advance, from date, and to any new subscribers who will pay one year in advance, or to any subscribers in arrears who will pay us not less, than $3.00 on his back subscription. This is a grand opportunity to obtains firstclass farm journal free. The American Farmer is a large 16-page illustrated journal, of national circulation, which ranks among the leading agricultural papers. Its highest purpose is the elevation and ennobling of Agriculture through the higher and broader education of men and women engaged in its pursuits. The regular subscription price of the American Farmer is SI.OO per year, IT COSTS YOU NOTHING. From any one number,' ideas can be obtained that will be worth thrice the subscription price to you or members of your household, yet you get ft free. Call and see sample copy.

"Whatever the People’s Party may or may not be in other localities, the fact is as evident as anything not susceptible of absolute proof can be, thaf in Jasper county it is being used simply as a catspaw for the Democrats; and the attempt being made to dragoon the professed non-partisan Alliance into the People’s Party, has behind it the expectation that republican alliance men will vote the People’s Party ticket, while the Democratic members will talk very nicely until election day comes, and then vote the democratic ticket, as of yore. That was the scheme in 1890, and more decidedly will it be in 1892. The McKinley law raised the duty on linseed oil from 25 to 32 cents a gallon. The free-trader, adhering to his childish logic, will insist that linseed oil must be 7 cents a gallon dearer than under the old duty. Nevertheless, the price current shows that the price now is from 45 to 47 cents a gallon, while it was from 60 to 62 a year ago. But still the eternal parrot squawk of “The tariff is a tax, and is always added to the selling price” goes on, and ten thousand times ten thousand facts like these will not diminish the everlasting current of iteration so long as hired advocates of free trade can be bought for British gold and Importers’ Trust cash, and dupes be found to believe their utterances.

The Pilot claims,,to have many letters from farmers expressing satisfaction with the course of tha t paper in the matter of the pensio n laws. Strangely constituted minds the persons must have to see any cause for satisfaction in that source. The first contention of the Pilot regarding the so-called Dependant Bill was to declare it a pauper bill and to assert that no soldier could obtain a pension under its provisions without first “declaring himself a pauper.” Being driven from this position the claim is now made that it is a pauper bill, because if an ex-soldier is totally disabled from causes not arising from his army service, and if he has no other means of support except his sl2 a month from the disability or “dependent” bill, the said sl2 will not him save from becoming a pauper. To claim thata man might, by a possible combinatian of circumstances, draw a pension under the bill and at the same time be a pauper, is quite a different contention from the previous allegation that no man could get the pension at all, unless he was a pauper, or at least declared himself to be such.

But even if it be granted that a man might be drawing the maximum rate of sl2 a month under the disability bill and still be a pauper, how much better in such conditions would be the workings of the service bill, which the Pilot berates the government for not passing. Under the provisionsijpf the service bill which had the G. A. R. endorsement, and which found most favor among the old soldiers generally, the basis of the rate was 1 cent a month for every day actually in the service, with a minimum rate of $8 a month. Under this bill the great majority w onld draw less than $lO a month while even the comparatively few surviving soldiers who served four full years would only receive sl460 per month. It is thus evident that underthe service bill the great bulk of those entirely disabled and without other means of support would draw less than they do under/the disability bill. If therefore, the later logic of the Pilot be correct, then the service bill, which it commends, would be much more of a “pauper” measure than the disability bill which it condemns. The service bill is what The Republican always favored, but neither that bill nor any other that could be devised would prevent every possible case of hardship and seeming injustice.

We have too much faith in the good sense of the Republican farmera and ATHaTVce inen of Jasper county to believe that they can be “bamboozled” into supporting a political scheme originated and controlled by a combination of Democratic fine workers and disappointed office-seeking ex-Repub-licans, and thus turn the county over to the control of the Democrats. Especially are we of this opinion when the newspaper organ of the scheme is managed by a man who has himself furnished the undisputed aud indisputable evidence that those who knew him best knew him only as “an earnest Democrat” up to within only a few hours of the time of his arrival in Rensselaer as a pretended advocate of the People’s Party; and whose only ideaof argument is blackguardism and misrepresentation; and whose method of obtaining business encouragement is the threat of a boycott

A certain estimable Alliance member, of the People’s Party persuasion, remarked the other day that he thought The Republican had not given as much space to Alliance matters as it might have done. Now that is a subject upon which we have a word or two to offer “for the good of the order.” The fact is that from the every start, when the very first move was made to organize the Alliance in this county up to the present time, The Republican has never refused any request for favors by the Alliance. We have published without money and without price all notices of meetings or elections

that have been offered, .reports of the same after their occu rence, and indeed have sometimes gone to considerable trouble to obtain such reports. - But the true state of the case, as we apprehend the matter, is, that since the Alliance passed mainly under the control of the enemies of the Republican party, the officers have systematically avoided furnishing any information to The Republican or making any use of its columns as a means of communicating Alliance matters. The object of this policy is not far to seek. Their long laid plan to draw Alliance Republicans into the third party has been constanty in view, anil one of the means they hoped to employ was to prejudice the said Republicans against their own county paper. Their scheme in that particular has met withno apparent success, nor do we believe, it will in any other respect. The Republican has always been a friend of the Alliance —a much better friend, we firmly believe than those who are trying to drag it into politics, contrary to the avowed principles upon which it was established in this county.

If any readers of The Republican have imagined that we should now depart from the policy we have always pursued, and retort in kind to the several columns of billingsgate, misrepresentation and downright falsehood in last week’s Pilot, they are doomed to disappointment We prefer the applause of good men to that of blackguards. “Corruption wins not more than honesty,” nor blackguardism more than decency,” nor falsehood more than truth, nor misrepresentation more than fairness and candor. In a decent community like this, such vile, profane and obscene blackguardism as that of the Pilots carries with it its own punishment; and to suppose otherwise would be to suppose a community where the love of truth, decency and justice had departed. For the purpose merely of illustrating the character of the man who has undertaken the task of destroying the Republican party in Jasper connty, we will refer to a specimen example of the inconceivable baseness of his blackguardism. As two weeks ago he falsely implied that we had “villified Union soldiers,” in order to give himself an opportunity to parade before his readers the fact that he had been a soldier and to make a false statement in regard to the editor of The Republican, so last week he goes a long length further, and tries to make political capital out of his family afflictions. Without one particle of truth in the statement, and with only our entirely harmlessi -ff the fact of his being a widower, in connection with the subject of his age, which he had himself brought up, as a suggestion, he declares that we have made a “slighting allusion” to the death of his wife and there and then follows a parading of his afflictions before the public with half a column or more of hyperbolic denunciation of the editor of The Republican. Now the Pilot man knew full well that no words of ours could by any possibility of fairness be construed into a slighting allusion to his wife, and the fact'that he does not and dares attempt to quote our words which he pretends to find so injurious, is proof positive of that fact. We pronounce his statement that we made a slighting allusion to his afflictions to be an absolute and an intentional falsehood, and declare his bringing forward and p arading his family afflictions before the public for political effect and to injure an opponent, as he has done, to be, without exception, the basest act of blackguardism that ever came to our knowledge. The man who can utter a deliberate and slanderous falsehood for the sake of creating an opportunity to make political capital and personal blackguardism out of the death of his own wife and child, has sounded a depth ol moral baseness and mental degradation, which, happily for the credit of human nature, is as rare as it is detestable.