Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1893 — A MONUMENTAL DISGRACE. [ARTICLE]

A MONUMENTAL DISGRACE.

The decline of the People’s Party, as shown elsewhere by their great falling off in votes, is indicated in Indiana by the great mortality among their party papers. A year ago there were thirty populist papers in Indiana. Now there are only a dozen, and those that still survive are “shaky on their pins.”

The populist vote in Kansas fell off 23 per cent,- at the late election; and in addition to that Mrs. Lease, their greatest leader, has been telling what a lot of scoundrels and incompetents her party has elected to office in that state. Th e populist move in Kansas has seen its best days. And in every other state too, for that matter.

. At the recent elections in Kansas as there Was no officer elected for whom all the state voted, but out of 630 county officers voted for the republicans elected 447. This shows very fairly the present relative standing of the two parties in Kansas, and that that state is once more in the Republican ranks. The same thing can be said of Nebraska, where the republicans ■carried the state by 6,000 plurality. ■ln-South Dakota, the revival of Republicanism is still more de- • eided. The People’s Party has had its day.

If President Cleveland, the beefwitted worshipper of English ideas and interests, and his toadying, Harrison hating, principle selling Secretary, Gresham, had their just deserts for the injury and insults to American honor, Aineric m interests and American patriotism, in the Hawaii matter Cleveland would be impeached and Gresham would be shot. Cleveland took the course he did, for want of better sense. Gresham, out of pure malice and hatred of the man whom the Republicans of Indiana, and after them, of the nation, favored for president instead of him.

The evil of the Louisiana lottery, and of most other forms of gambling, is that it impoverishes the many to enrich the very few. And the evil effects cut both ways. For the harm it inflicts upon society by impoverishing its many victims is in no way compensated by the wealth it bestows upon its few beneficiaries. In fact, quite the contrary, for the fortunes bestowed by lotteries are evils almost as great as its poverties. In nine cases out of ten, a . fortune got through a lottery is a curse to its recipient, and to all connected with him, and to society in general. Why it should be so is not always easy to see, but that it is so, all experience proves. For one thing, there is a deal of truth in the old saying, “Easy got, easy gone.” People suddenly made rich by sticb means, usually think their fortunes are inexhaustible, and they embark on careers of extravagance, and often ofdisappation; and when they find themselves getting poor again as the result, they usually make a quick end of what little they have left, by trying to get a second fortune By the same means they got the. first. And the state of a man who

has been rich and has become poor, is much worse than that of him who has never been rich at all. Moreover, the example of his extravagant habits, in the season of his wealth, has sown seeds of like habits in others and his ill-got fortune has thus proved a curse to himself and to society at large.

To what ridiculous means our unhappy democratic contemporaries are resorting, to relieve the democratic party from its responsibility for the hard times. Their favorite plea just now is that factories are kept closed because their republican owners want to punish the workingmen for voting the democratic ticket last fall, and also to compel the democratic majority in Congress to let the tariff alone. If this claim is true, it necessarily follows that factory owners are all Republicans. And since when did it become a moral and legal impossibility for a democrat to own a factory? Democratic owners of factories used to be common enough, and during the campaign of 1892, they bobbed up occasionally with a statement that they did not want protection in their business. What’s the matter with those fellows now? They surely are not members of the universal conspiracy to punish their workmen for voting just as they advised them to vote and just as they themselves voted.

The action of the Cleveland administration in the Hawaiian matter is a disgrace unparalleled in the history of the country. The provisional government in those islands, which overthrew a monarchy entirely unbearable in its dissolute rottonness and tyranny, and established in its place an orderly, decent and prosperous republic, and which was recognized by both the United States and Great Britain, has been denounced by the administration and is to be overthrown. A president who sells his foreign appointments to such aristocratic, English aping, incompetent dudes as Van Alen and Roosevelt, who appoints an unrepentant rebel like Blount as “My Commissioner,” an official not authorized by -any law, and who insults the American flag as his first official act, is now about to add the crowning disgrace by using the power of the government to re-establish upon her

throne a monarch whom her people were driven to reject, by her gross and unconcealed immoralities, and her attacks upon the constitutional liberties of her people. Mary H. Krout, who went to Honolulu as the correspondent of the Inter Ocean, studied the situation thorougly and as she is an Indiana woman her words have peculiar interest in this State. Her statement of ’ the facts in the Chicago Inter Ocean show tha Secretary of State Gresham’s letter is a tissue of falsehoods caused either by the gross misrepresentation of the rebel Blount or by Judge Gresham’s well known bite ter jealously of President Harrison. To use her language: * ‘Stripped of its sentiment—a false, misleading and meretricious sentiment that can only mislead — we find the President of these United States, the chief executive of a professed Republic, recommending the restoration of a corrupt queen, who lost her crown by abrogating the constitution which she had sworn to support; tacitly indorsing her evil attempts to legalise the sale of opium, and the rejuvenating of that other infamy, the Louisiana lottery, which has been condemned as inimical to civilization and to all national industry and progress. The queen stands for all these iniquities, a position she voluntarily assumed and stubbornly maintained in spite of the remonstrances of her best and her most disinterested friends. ” 7