Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1898 — Accomplices Before the Fact. [ARTICLE]

Accomplices Before the Fact.

The Tribune yesterday published a list of 1,299 soldiers who have died of disease in camp, on transports, and at home since the beginning of the war. If accepted as correct in every detail, what does this list prove? Simply that the death rate among the 240,000 volunteers called into rhe United States service has been less tli&n the death rate in Chicago, New York, or any other large city in the United States. That is what the Tribune’s list proves. Now, what was it intended to prove? It was intended to prove that President McKinley and Secretary Alger had been guilty of criminal inefficiency and neglect in the conduct of the war. The appeal was not made to intelligent persons, who know the figures and can fathom the Tribune’s falsehood It was made rather to the ignorant and the criminal classes, who can be incited by any speeious misrepresentations to hatred or violence against the government of the United States. H was made, as similar appeals have been made daily by the Tribune for the last four weeks, to throw the unthinking people of the middle West into a wild frenzy of hate against President McKinley and his Secretary of War. With the fruits of its scandalous I mendacity already before it, with ! the criminal end of its course al-' most in sight, does the Tribune hesitate one moment? Not at all. It presses unremittingly forward to incite all who will listen, not 1 only to sedition, but to assassins-I tion. To the Tribune and its partners in shame it is now due that the President of' the United States, after a glorious war, cannot visit in safety his own state without a guard to protect him from the I vengeful hands of citizens of this country. To the Tribune and its partners in shame it is due that men and women, driven to the verge of insanity, have sought opportunity to wreak violence upon the chief magistrate of this republic and his wife during their visit ■ in Cleveland. Yet, with such horrible eventualities already in view, these reptiles of journalism eagerly press onward in their criminal way. The Tribune and its colleagues in the press of this country are all as guilty before the moral law today as was the anarchist who, from the office of the Arbeiter Zeitung incited the mob to the Haymarket massacre. They all are as guilty as the socialistic and anarchistic sheets which incited assassins to strike down the President of France and the German Emperor. They are, in a word, accomplices before the fact, willingly, wittingly, deliberately. If they do not become accomplices after the fact it is not their fault, for they are still doing their utmost to drive sedition and assassination to their last and most atrocious consequences. Ocean.