Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1875 — Republican Principles. [ARTICLE]

Republican Principles.

Mr. Vice-President Wilson has assumed the herculean task of reuniting the scattered fragments of the once great Republican party, and of bringing back to the fold the Liberals who were insulted, proscribed, driven out, and branded with ignominy by Grant and a servile Congress, because they denounced the corruption and the outrages of the Administration. His method of reconciliation is indefinite, but here it is, as expressed in a recent letter: I had no doubt that these were Republican defeats rather than Democratic victories. Nor have I any doubt now that the majority of the nation will adhere to the distinctive principles of the Republican party, and can recover what was then so heedlessly thrown away. So believing, I think duty to the country demands that the Republicans should do ail they can to so reinstate their party that it will again invite and command the support of all who profess to believe in its principles and who rejoice over every reform es acknowledged abuses. It is well to inquire, What are these “distinctive principles” which Mr. Wilson says he has “no doubt the majority of the nation will adhere to?” All the great issues which called the Republican party into life have passed into history, and what is left of it only exists in the form of a political organization held together by patronage and the cohesive power of public plunder. Slavery is dead, the constitutional amendments are accepted, equality before the law is established, and sectional controversy is ended, in spite of the unscrupulous efforts of Republican leaders to alienate the North and South, and to keep alive the embers of discord and strife. Questions affecting honest administration of the Government and the great material interests of the people, now suffering as they have never done before, will decide the next Presidential election. When they are fairly presented, and the country is brought face to face with the record of the Republican party since the close of the war, there can hardly be a doubt of the result.

In possession of every department of the Government, and with immense majorities in both tranches of Congress, there is no escape from the responsibility for the disgraceful legislation and the Executive usurpations which have finally brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy, and prostrated industry, commerce, and enterprise in a common ruin. The crisis through which we have been slowly passing since 1873 is the direct, as it was the inevitable, result of a foolish and corrupt policy. It is practically demonstrable that the carpet-bag system which the Republicans forced upon the Southern States, by massing the negroes as a voting factor under the lead of adventurers, rogues and thieves, has inflicted as much real injury upon the Northern people as it did on the South, by the loss of markets, the sacrifice of investments, and the destruction of trade. Sooner or later this pinch must have been felt, and it only needed the explosion of 1873 to make the reality sternly palpable. The enormous land grants to railroad corporations; the huge monopolies created by purchased tariffs and special legislation; the excessive expenditures voted for the benefit of organized plunderers; the tinkering with the currency; the internal revenue frauds; the Credit Mobilier, the back pay grab; the doubling of the President’s salary and perquisites; the Custom House collusion and stealing; the creation of the Washington Ring, the Treasury'Ring, the Indian Ring, the Post Office Ring, Robeson’s Navy Ring, and other powerful combinations, represent the “distinctive principles” of the Republican party today.

The idle laborers, suffering mechanics, broken merchants, and starving miners, who have been brought to beggary by thp criminal conduct of the Republican party, are sufficient in themselves to turn the Presidential election. A million of workingmen were without any steady employment during the past year. They know why they wanted bread tor their wives "atid* children; and they will hot forget the cause of this distress when

they march, to the polls next, year and cast a centennial vote. — N. Y. Sun.