The weekly miner. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1878-1881, 1879-10-14
RATIOS AND PATHOS.

Mr.. Roscoe Conkling, in opening the Re-
publican campaign at Brooklyn the other
night. had a good deal of ~virtunus indigna-
ton to express concerning Southern repudia-
ton of State debts. But why should the
eloquent patriot confine his attention exclu-
sively to Southern repudiatlon? Did he
never hear of such a thing as reputation in
Kansas, the Republican stronghold; or in
| Minnesota, little better? Has he ever heard
of a movement organized in Wisconsin and
having for its object something very closely
resembling the confiscation of other peoples
property whenever that property took the
form of railroad stock? Or even to-day let Mr..
Conkling look to the extreme northwest and
see if he cannot there find an attempt to sop
press a down trodden race " against which his
eloquent voice can be raised in protest. Some
time ago the State of Oregon enacted a law
prohibiting contractors from employing Chi
nese upon contracts taken from the State or
from any municipality within the State. This
law was passed some months ago. Now sup
pose it had been South Carolina instead of
Oregon that had passed such a law, and sup
pose further that it was the colored man in
stead of the Chinaman who was thus legisla-
ted against, does any one believes that Mr..
Conkling could have found terms in which
adequately to express his horror, his abhor-
renee of so wanton an outrage? And not he
alone, but the whole bloody shirt brigade
how they would have harped, how their little
penny organs would have piped to the same
old une of Southern outrages" until such of
their readers as take all such stuff for gospel
average Southern Democrat is a political bar
barian, a barbarian whom it is not only USE
less to attempt TO reform, but who, further
more, is pretty sure to knock on the head any
well meaning person attempting such refor-
nation. But it was a Northern, not a South
ern State which attempted this piece of op-
preston under the form of law. Besides,
and what is still more to the point, the in
ferior race thus oppressed are non voters the
right of suffrage has never been conferred
upon them. Taking those two facts together
it is not at all strange that neither Mr..
Conkling nor any other Stalwart has had
a word of pathos to expend upon the real
hardship inflicted upon the Chinaman, while
OH the other hand he turns his eyes towards
the South, sheds crocodile tears over the spec
tacle his imagination pictures to him as exist
ing in that locality, and pours out whole
volumes of bathos over the wrongs of the
colored man, concerning whose real position
he is careful to say nothing. The Chinaman
carries his case into the United States Court
where the Oregon law is declared null and
void, being unconstitutional F.; but even then
the radical spouters, those champions of the
down-trodden and oppressed (provided, al
ways, the d~own-trodden can be herded like
mules to the polls)-even then they have no
word to utter against what we must acknowl-
edge to have been a shameful piece of dema-
gosueism, that is, if we ourselves can lay
aside our prejudices in the premises.
Take again the murder of Dixon at Yazoo.
What political capital has been made out of
that event! What a beautiful character, half
martyr, half saint, the murdered Dixon was
given by his radical eulogists. But look at
the truth as presented by a journal of charac-
ter in an article reproduced in another col
umn. There we find Dixon and Barksdale
described as fellow members of a band of des-
perado politicians, such a band as must inev-
itably come into existence in any part
of the country where the bayonet rule
has destroyed confidence in the law.
Continuing their lawlessness after the
bayonet regime came to al end, Barksdale
and Dixon both evidently belonged to a class
not unknown in the mines, a class of which
when one member is killed by another the
! occurrence attracts but little attention from
respectable citizens, who are apt to remark
that as long as they do their shooting among
themselves it is little matter,' and to look up
on the loss of the man killed as rather a gain
to society.