Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 102, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1902 — PARAGRAPHIC POINTERS [ARTICLE]

PARAGRAPHIC POINTERS

As compared with former party pronouncements the platform of the Indiana reorganized Democracy has a few planks missing, but the gentlemen who built-it have had so much experience in straddling that they hope to escape falling through any of the cracks. The tinplate workers have declined to accept a cut in wages in order to enable the mills to make a special vacation run on a foreign contract Propositions for the—reduction of wages at this time are out of order. This is not a tariff-for-revenue administration. Those who remember the frightful death-rate among the trusts during the only Democratic tariff period of which this generation knows anything, must feel inclined to protest against .this proposed annihilation of the trusts by the free trade route as cruel and inhuman punishment. - - -—— The Indianapolis Sentinel Insists that the American people are not "alarmingly prosperous.** Perhaps not. But how many people were scared to death by the prosperity which overtook them during the only tariff-for-revenue era of which this generation knows anything? Tom Johnson of Cleveland is preparing to makes tour of Ohio in a circus tent, under which he will give a threering and platform performance. The Indiana reorganizers would never permit this show to make a stand in Indiana, as the platform -in question is very much like the one constructed at Kansas City.

It seems unfortunate that in all the space that Democratic newspapers will devote to the trust issue during the present campaign they will be unable to devote a single syllable to any measure enacted during a period of absolute Democratic national control in this country by which any trust was injured or restrained. A Harvard archaeologist has been digging up some interesting relics of prehistoric times from a cemetery near Cairo that is thought to be nearly 6,000 years old, but he has found nothing much deader than the free trade issue which the leaders of the reorganized Democracy have disinterred for service during the present campaign. The statesmen who are in for wiping out protection reproach those who point to the prosperity of the American farmer and wage-earner under the protective system by saying that a full stomach is a poor argument. The leadership of the tariff-for-revenue propaganda found the empty stomach a pretty strong bit of logic to go up against in 1894.

Not one of the Southern manufacturing states In which Democracy is dominant has a child-labor law on its statute books, and representatives of organized labor who have gone to that section to inaugurate a movement for the betterment of conditions have been driven out as disturbers of the peace. Thousands of mere children are at work in these mills; the hours are from eleven to twelve a day, the wages from ten to fifty cents, adults rarely earning over a dollar a day. One of these factory children in twenty can read and write. From this fountainhead of real Democracy comes Judge Griggs of Georgia, chairman of the national Democratic congressional campaign committee, issuing interviews, proclamations and pronunciamentos, all having for their purpose the enlightenment on economic questions of wage-earners in a score of Republican states where modern conceptions of the rights of labor years ago supplanted the industrial mediaevalism for which stands Griggs and a hundred other members of congress who win dominate the Democratic side in the next congress. Until Democratic leadership, in that large section of the Union where Its sway is undisputed. makes a century’s advancement in the matter of labor legislation, let it cease its hypocritical affectation of interest in the welfare of the wageearner. A