Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1892 — STEVENSON SPEAKS. [ARTICLE]

STEVENSON SPEAKS.

The Guest of the Watterson Club Dwells Upon Ills Record in the War, Declaring He Was for Its Earnest Prosecution. Hon. Adlai E. Stevenson, candidate for Vice-President, participated in the opening of the Watterson Club House at Louisville, on the evening of August 4. In the course of his remarks, referring to tho civil war, he said: ; “From the beginning to the close of that great conflict I was for the maintenance at whatever cost, of> our federal With the crowning victory at Appomattox the disbanding of hostile armies and the restoration of federal authority in all the States came questions which, to the peopie of the South, overshadowed all othe r questions, I believed with the Democratic party in the North that, with our arms triumphant, the perfect restoration of the Union was to be wrought out, not In the spirit of hate, but in the loftiest spirit of patriotism—that sublime patriotism which inspired the words, “With malice toward none, with charity for all,’with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see tho right* "With some of the States of this Union the period of reconstruction was but another name for misrule, for political ostracism of the white race, for robbery of a people already impoverished by war, for outrage upon rights of property and of people—so monstrous as now almost' to challenge belief. lu a word, all thatyvas loathdbme, and all that was offensive, and I that was culled government in many of the Southern States, can be summed up in the one word, ‘reconstruction.’ « “It would serve DO wise pin pose to revive the memories of this era,'-but for the reason that wo arc now confronted by the startling fact that the party in power stands pledged td the enactment of the force hill. History would but repeat itself. TlieitvlJ's that would follow the leg islation now threatened, would find their counterpart only in these which makeup so shameful a part of the reconstruction period. In view of what I havementioned and of the further fact that with such powerful auxiliaries as Northern enterprise and Northern capital, the South stands upon the threshold of a mateNal development unknow to this generation, can it be possible that the American people will now consent that the hands be turned back »ponxthe dial, and the era of misrule, of outrage and of violence be in-