Eureka daily sentinel. [volume] (Eureka, Nev.) 1871-1887, 1875-06-23
POLITICAL PARTIES AND "THE
INDEPENDENT VOTER"

country. California IS just now exs
~periencing q surfeit of this kind of
twaddle. 1t may have some remote
application to local politics, but when it
comes to talking about the %"indepen-
dent voter" having anything whatever
to do in shaping the great Presidential
battle next year, the whole thing is at
once ridiculous. Those journals which
shipped the party cable in 1872 are
now having great trouble in drifting
about in search of political anchorage.
These papers have failed, as yet, to
comprehend the relations of indepen-
dent journalism to politics. They have
not emancipated themselves from the
old notion that a public journal needs
q special political constituency. They
are acting like recently Matched chick
ems that wish to get back into the pro-
tecting shell. For a year or two they
kept insisting that the Democratic
party, with which they had acted in
the Greeley campaign, should disband
and give place to a new organization,
of which they would be the natural
organs and through which they could
r~e-establish the party relations which
they had been forced into renouncing
by the defeat of a movement which
they intended and expected to lead.
The Liberal Republican organization,
which they pioneered, having become
virtually defunct, they now assume to
be the organs of the independent
voter"
The Independent voter may b cleft to
take care of himself without a special
wet nurse. If he pinned his political
faith on any Of these new nondescript
organs he would be as servile as when
he followed them as organs of the Re.
publican party. Independence in poll
tics consists in following ones own
Judgment. 1t is as abject to be guided
by an organ as to accept the dictation
of a party. The really independent
voter is man who SISTERS by his W
compass and it is ridiculous for any
newspaper to assume to be his organ.
It is still more ridiculous to attempt to
form the independent voters into a
party. Parties cannot exist without
organization and discipline; they can
not exist without some surrender of
private Judgment to the majority OF
the organization. The independent
voter is a citizen who refuses to be
bound by party ties, and it is sheer alb
surdidy for any journal to treat him as
If he belonged to a pocket party and
needed an organ. The recent foolish
gush about "the Independent voter" is
the last dregs of the unsuccessful
movement to supplant the Democratic
party by a new political organization.
Nobody WHO is a competent judge OF
present tendencies has any doubt that
the Presidential contest of 1876 will be
waged between the old Democratic
party and the Republican party, which
has been sc long in power. Every at
tempt to form a successful third party
has utterly broken down. The Liberal
Republican party is thin ghost how
ering over a political grave ready to
vanish at the first growing of the cock,
The farmers movement in the West,
which at n time seemed to portend a
political revolution, has lost its aggres'
sive vigor. 1t will hardly make a rip
pie in the elections of the present year,
aud next year it will be utterly lost in
the great Presidential maelstrom. The
Republican party is too much weak
ened to afford another split, and the
Democratic party Is too confident t6
court or encourage any separate move
mont. We are on the eve Of a square
Old-fashioned contest between the two
great parties, in which the independ
emit will be found on one side or the
other. His independence will be man
Tested in changing his party relations
II he dislikes the candidates or the
platform of the party with which hi
has been accustomed to act. Practi'
cally, this is the only choice that will
be left him, aud II is mere thoughtles'
chatter to talk Of the next Presidential
election as If it were to be anything
different from a struggle between the
two existing parties, or as If the indie
pendent voter would have any intiu'
ence in either of the national conven'
tions by which the issues Of that con
test will be shaped. The sooner the
hermaphrodite organs, which would
like to be independent If they knew
how, dismiss such nonsense from theiI
columns the less they will confuse
their readers.
A FRrGHTFUL DIsAsTER.-The tele.
graph brings news of q frightful dis
aster in a mine near Nevada City, Cal
ifornia. The h oisting works took fire