Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1894 — A Northern Copperhead’s Hiss. [ARTICLE]

A Northern Copperhead’s Hiss.

Pensions and suspensions. The first is Republican, the second is Democratic. The difference is small iu words but mighty in deeds. Those: newspapers which used those big yellow patent medicine Easter covers were bigger suckers than hayseeds who buck the-circus fakir’s shell game, or merchants who advertise in a ‘ business directory.” We advi-e our brethren of the neighboring Republican press who are using those syndicate political cartoons, to cut off their brder for them at once. Such hideous, brainless things will do more harm than good.

Our much esteemed bucolic friend, Mr. J. AV. Cowden, actuated no doubt by a desire to add to the great but easily achieved glory he acquired a while back by “fathering” one ot S. P. Thompson’s articles on the gravel road question, last week attached his initials to the • Democratic Sentinel's edition of the aforementioned legal and philanthopic gentleman’s article on the Iroquois Channel matter. Now Jim is a good farmer and a fairly intelligent man, but, excepting a certain easy, airy grace of style with which he attaches his name to some other fellow’s writings, he has no very great claim to a place in the list of “them d —d literary, fellers,” as old Senator Ben Wade used to call them. In all truth, Jim could no more have written Simon’s Iroquois article than he could compose a scientific Latin thesis on the subject, of well, for instance “The points of resemblance in conscious and unconscious cerebral ratiocination between the act of the ostrich in sticking its head in the sand, and that of .S. Pericles Thompson in trying to conceal his ponderous talents behind the aliases of ‘Progressive Farmer’ and ‘J. W. C.’ ” Verily and in all kindness, we assure Mr. Cowden that in the long run, he will find it more to his credit as well as more to his profit to stick to his manure hauling job, so eloquently alluded to by Mr. Thompson in Mr. Cowden’s gravel road article, than to persist in his pursuit of literary distinction as the putative author of Sophocles P. Thompson’s disputative exacerbations. Jim, do yon catch on?

Congressman Hammond has discovered that there was no show on earth for a Democrat to be elected to Congress in this district this year, and he has therefore signified his intention not to be again a candidate. It didn’t take much ability to make the discovery, or Thomas Hammond would never have made it. We are right sorry that he did hbwevet7foF"lPF were anxious to see just how hard the people of this district would hit that cuckoo in the neck, in the next election, if the chance were Offered them.

It has lately came to light that some enterprising individuals out in Nebraska have jestablished a mint and have coined and put in circulation 500,000 silver dollars, of standard weight and fineness, and upon each of which their profits are therefore 51 cents. Their proper course now will be to imitate the action of our Democratic Congress, and proceeded coin the “seigniorage.” This will give them another half million. Their money is just as good as the government article, and their course in coining 49 cent dollars is not a whit more | dishonest. | Briefly but fairly expressed, Mr. Thompson’s position on the Iroquois channel matter, as laid down in his “Progressive Farmer’’ and “J. AV. C.” article, as well as stated in conversations, is just this: “I am bound to “bull” this matter through in exactly the manner I have started out, regardless of what injury or injustice it may inflict upon others; and at just as large an expense to people who

are not benefited as I and my engineer could induce the viewers to assess against them. It must follow exactly the lines I had my engineer locate it upon. It must make the ruthless and destructive cut through Charley Starr’s property, where I wanted it straightened; and it must make the wide and expensive detour around my cow pasture by the coal oil well, where I didn’t want it straightened. It must assess my wet lands from a quarter, to a third of the amount of prospective benefits; and it must assess the other fellow’s neighboring dry land from three to ten times the amount of the probable benefits. And when the work is all done if the people of Rensselaer don’t like it, they can, by expending about as much as the original work cost, carry the channel to its proper width, and give its banks a proper slope.” ——

We admit that the people of Rensselaer might, at a sufficiently great expense, thus mitigate to some extent the damage done by the channel as planned by Mr. Thompson; but the greatest damage of all, that done by taking practically all the fall out of the river through thetown, and changing it from a rapid, clean, healthful stream into a sluggish, foul ai d unhealthful canal, could never be rectified nor mitigated. That mischief once done is done forever, as the people of Rensselaer are likely to learn to their everlasting sorrow.

The Masm county, 111., Democrat, in an editorial supposed to be written by the son of a democrat who aspires to nomination for Judge of the Supreme court of Illinois, has this to say: ‘‘The loudest Republican panic wailers and ‘hard times’ calamity howlers are generally found to be those whose stomachs are filled with government groceries. Those thousands of sighing, whimpering fools and liars never stop, or reflect perhaps, that they by their unjust taking of the public money make it possible for panics to come. The greatest curse that this country has today and the greatest drain upon its resources, comes from allowing great, big, lazy men to draw pensions. These people are the fellows that mistake a belly full of potatoes for virtue and whoop it up in the ‘amen corner’ for panics.” The Inter-Ocean resents the above insult in the following able manner and says: “Hoke Bmith/or Cleveland him self never has spoken so insultingly concerning the loyal veterans of the war for the union. This northern copperhead’s diatribe is likely to be quotecTwith approval by Southern editors who have described the pensioners as “lousy beggers,” in evidence of Northern sympathy with the still unreconstructed South

It is needless to reply seriously to the false charge that the pensioners are the men who are making the loudest complaint of hard times. The hundred thousand recipients of charity in Chicago count few pensioners in their ranks. The idle iron and coal mines have been worked by younger and stronger arms than those of the aged and enfeeble survivors of the war. The mills that are closed do not belong to pensioners nor in time cf prosperity are they operated by them. There is hunger in the land because there is idleness in the land, and there is idleness in the land because no prudent man will pay 82.50 a day to other men who will make goods for him that he may have to sell in open com petion with like goods produced by European workmen whose wages are $1 less per day. There is no other cause of depression than this. If the Wilson bill be rejected by the Congress, and if the present free-trade tendivg majority be turned into a protective majority, business will revive at once.