Ashtabula weekly telegraph. (Ashtabula, Ohio) 1880-1886, 1880-07-30

professions are less honest in their in
tentions. But their education and con-
slant life duties become second nature,
more controlling than the better i'm
pulses of the heart. A lawyer becomes
so used to defending whatever he is
employed to do, the nicer distinctions
between right and wrong become swal-
lowed up in the consideration of larger
fees. A long life spent for those who
pay the best cannot be expected to be
diverted from life habits when the
emoluments and corruptions of high
positions surround them on all sides.
Besides, men who claim that from $500
to S6O,OOO are not extravagant fees for
small services cannot be expected to
sympathize with the farmers who raise
corn and haul it long distances to
market for twenty cents per bushel.
How can these men appreciate the toll
of the farm hand who works in sum-
mer's heat and winters storms for fifty
cents per day. The only way is for
such laborers to vote for such men as
have had experience in like tolls.
Again, man whose whole education
and lifelong practice has been TO instill
into him the doctrine and practice that
the few are born to command and the
mass to obey, without knowing why
or wherefore, has but little sympathy
for the hardships of the common
labOrer or private soldier. His educa-
tion and practice is to ignore all the
rights of such to think or to complain.
Military rule is necessarily arbitrary,
oppressive and aristocratic. An officer
demands only silence and obedience
from his soldiers. Usually he looks up
on them as merely machines to do his
bidding, and to sacrifice their lives if
necessary for adding another star to his
shoulder straps. Military men, either
as civil or military Governors, have usu-
ally ruled the world with an iron rod
A professional military man never has
and never will sympathize with, or aid
by his administration, the toiling mill
ions whom he governs. His idea of a
man for any department of Government
is one like himself, thoroughly drilled
in military discipline, and who has sac
riticed the largest number of men on his
road to military fame. Human lives,
in the hands of professional warrior,
are cheap chattels. And the interests
of the millions of farmers and farm
hands in this Nation would be small
matters in the strides and struggles of
a military hero for greater power and
more abject applause of a degraded
populace.
But there is now rare chance in the
steps of time for the people to select for
a ruler a man who knows all the hard
ships of common life, for he has felt
the same. He has waded in poverty
through the same road you are now
travelling. By his own right arm, di-
rected by an honest heart, he has come
to his present proud position, evincing
by every act of his life that he has not
forgotten what he learned in the hum
bier walks. Let every laborer, every
mechanic and the toiling millions, in
all departments of industry, keep in
mind that it is scarcely probable that in
this generation, or in this century,
the people will have another equal op-
portunity of voting and working for
man for the highest office in the gift of
mankind, for one who is so truly of
them and for them. Farmer ClarGSOn,
ia IoWG State Register.