Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1874 — Indiana State Republican Platform. [ARTICLE]

Indiana State Republican Platform.

The Hon. Richard W. Thompson, sometimes known as Dick Thompson, and one of the Thompsons in whose cognomen and career the orthodox I* has played a very important part—for it has always stood for party —in short, the Hon. R. W,, Thompson, of Vigo, deserves the thanks of good Republicans everywhere for the Indiana platform. It reads like a book. It goes like a rocking-horse. It coos like any sucking dove. . Abstract an 3Ssay out of the Spectator; pluck a page out of Mr. Tupper’s proverbial philosophy; steal au editorial out of the old National Intelligencer, and you shall not find yourself in possession of a sweeter or more rotund piece of complacency. Ethnological investigators and travelers in South America tell us of a bird of uncertain plumage that' hath a habit, peculiar to itself, of sticking its head behind rock’s and things, while its great ugly body stands uncovered alike to the shafts and shots of the enemy. Thus does Colonel Thompson dispose the Republican party. He builds up about its beak—that cormorant beak whicli has these ten years been sucking the life-blood of the toiling millions of the West and South—a pretty arbor of verbiage, leaving the belly and the tail of the animal entirely exposed, and he says to

the people, “Come and see our exhibition.” He is as excessive as Jack Wharton’s California showman, who displayed the joint attraction oi the fat lady and a pair of anacondas. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I present you in the first place this beautiful fat lady, twenty-two years of age and weighing twenty-two hundred pounds. SlrtP'weighed one hundred pounds the day she wgs born, has been increasing in Weight one hundred pounds per annnm ever since, and if she goes on at tbe same ratio for the next twenty years, she will be the largest woman in the world, perhaps. Ladies and gentlemen, we pass from this fat lady to these monster anacondas, born on the coast of Africa, reared among the deserts of Sahara, suckled bv the Numidian lion and—” Just at thig point a rough and tumble miner in the audience, who had lost the connection, broke in with, “I say, Mister, I paid my-money to come in here, and I want to know if it’s in order to ask a question ?” The lecturer blandly replied, “Certainly, sir; as I said in the beginning of my discourse, I shall be glad to answer the curiosity of any lady or gentleman who may desire to be gratified with respect teb these astonishing curiosities of nature.”— Our miner was a little nonplused by this verbal overflow, but he was not to be diverted from his purpose. “That’s all right,” said he, “that’s all right. But what I particularly want to know is whether I understand you to say that that young lady passed those worms ?” “No sir,” roared the showman, “I said nothing of the kind. Music, John.” Colonel Thompson’s platform calls for a similar examination, and one which may prove equally embarrassing. It is too fat and florid, and the anacondas by which it is encircled are altogether overcon-, spicuous and enlarged. We seriously advise him, when he starts out to display it before the people, to carrry along with him a good brass band to strike in whenever awkward questions are asked.— Louisville Courier Journal.