Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 January 1874 — The Farmers and the Republican Party. [ARTICLE]

The Farmers and the Republican Party.

Dm mat mass of the intelligent fanners of thia country are identified with the Republican party, and haye been from the beginning of that party’s organization, This has been a matter of course. The farmers, as a class, are thinking men, and men of patriotic impulses and con▼ictions. Ana not only dunking men, but real working men and earnest men—men of acts as well as of thoughts; and the Republican party being a party of acts as well as of patriotic and progressive ideas, the fanners naturally gravitated to it, and have adhered to it, and as long as the Republican party will prove itself the party of popular rights and honest and upright government, we believe the farmers, as a class, will continue to adhere to it, with confidence that it is the only true popular agency through which public abuses can be corrected, the national honor maintained, and the great interests of the Republic efficiently carried forward. The proceedings of the New Hampshire Republican State Convention last week, have in them a significant political lesson for the hour. The farmers went into that convention in full force, and shaped its action. Their candidate for Governor—General McCutchins, a practical, hard-working farmer, and yet a man of more than ordinary intelligence—was nominated over the candidate of the professional politicians, and a strong resolution was adopted recognizing the agricultural element of the State as entitled to due consideration and pledging support to the farmers in their efforts to correct transportation and other monopoly abuses. This was a signal triumph of the farmers in the State Convention of their own party—nor did the party grant the concessions claimed with an ill grace, but prompily and as a matter of course; no Republican Convention, when the issue is fairly made, will question or deny recognition to the claim of the farmers—a class of men which comprises so large an element of ils membership. Just now the farmers have a special and very important little fight of their own on hand, against the transportation burdens and extortions of the railroad monopolies. They are very clearly in the right, and the Republican party of every State of the whole country owes it to the farmers as well as to itself to take the side of the anti-monopolists in this contest. The Republican party, as in Illinois, lowa, Pennsylvania and other States, has generally' manifested a readiness to do this wherever, since the issue has come up, conventions have been held or Legislatures been in session. We maysay that the Republican party of the State and of the nation has thus far exhibited a “ degree of sympathy with the “farmers’ movement’’ that leaves no question as to its trustworthiness on this score. The demand for relief from extortion and other monopoly grievances has virtually become a plank in the platform of the Republican party-, and if, »- as in New Hampshire, the Republican farmers themselves will take an active part in the party’s conventions and claim a rightful representation on the party’s nominated ticket, we doubt not that the grand object sought for will be successfully attained through this party, just as other great national reforms and measures of progress and beneficence have been attained by means of the same pow--erful instrumentality. The efforts of scheming political trick, sters —the discouraged members of the played out Democratic party, and certain disappointed, sore-headed office-seekers of the Republican party—to wheedle the farmers into joining them in a new party, is a bare-faced confidence game that promises success neither to the interests of the farmers nor to the best interests of the country at large. The cduntry’s continued safety is in the Republican party—no“new party” that may be organized by a set of mousing political swindlers, full of smooth pretenses, but seeking only their personal advantage, can be trusted as it has been and may be. Much depends upon the farmers themselves. They must, as Republicans, their influence felt within the councils of the Republican party. This they can do, should do, must do, if they would insure the success of their ideas. By allowing themselves to be bamboozled by old Democratic and s< re-head political schemers, whose only thought is the gratification of-their own selfish desires and ambitions,they would be merely throwing themselves into the traps of their enemies, and be sold out and betrayed in the end. The way they have done in New Hampshire is the wisest and best.— Chicago Evening Journal.