Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 July 1892 — Calamity Platforms. [ARTICLE]

Calamity Platforms.

Calamity politics, like the fear of the cholera, excites the country for a little while, but it cornea face to face with the intelligent judgment of the people and the panic subsides. The" calamity platform erected at Omaha would have collapsed before this had not the strike at Homestead given it something to feed upon. But that, too, 1b ceasing to be- a cause for excitement. The rabid anarchists who fook up the cause of the strikers have hurt that cause more •than all else because of their indictment of society, in general, which, if true, would demonstrate that the highest civilization ever developed is a miserable failure. In reviewing the calamity platform of the People’s party, H. B. Blackwell, editor of the Woman’s Journal , of Boston, aeks.

“Are these indictments true?-Are-the great body of American people In bondage to capitalists? 4-re they the victims of a financial conspiracy ? Is the property of the country becoming; concentrated in the hands of: the plutofrauded and degraded?:’ Is poverty becoming the ride?.. And are ruin and starvation .staring.men in the face?’?.

The sober sense of the men who adopted this platform.will contradict every one of these assertions and answer no to every question They know better,, and only drew up such, an indictment because they thought it might.delude some of .the. unthinking. Mr. Blackwell’s experience is the experience of every man of observation and intelligence. He says he does not ffodi around him> any evidence of such a state of. ja£Eairs». “On the contrary,” say» Mr, Blackwell, “notwithstanding all real or alleged grievances, I know by my own observation and expeuience, during. & lifetime- of nearly seventy yeans spent in active business, that labor in this country has never during that period been so well paid as it is now and here.” Mr. Blackwell gives his own, experience as a young man glad! to get work for $2 a we%k; as an employer before the war paying 75 cents a day for work which now, command* $2.50 a day; and as a consumer paying more for Everything he bought than he has to pay now. His experience is but the experience of history. There never has been, a time whew labor was better paid and whom a dollar had a greater purchasing power than now. What is true of the laborer is true of the farmer. The men who complain of hard times on the farm now would have grounds for complaint if their condition was that of the farmers forty years ago. In spite of the calamity howlers the country is steadily advancing in prosperity and all the people are sharers in that prosperity to a greater degree than they have ever been before in this country or in any other country.—lnter Ocean,