St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1888-10-04
MUzzLED MAGNETISM
Blaine Ignores His Party, It's
Candidate and the Para
mount Issue.
Not a Single Reference to
Trusts or the
Tariff.
Twenty-Three Valuable Min
uteS Devoted to Abuse Of
the President.
Gp0uo,,'c VofAoC ond NofiNno1
Growers Vetoes and National
Banks Denounced by the
Plumed Knight.
Snecial to the Globe.

DETROIT, Mich, Oct. 3.-MT. Blame
spoke for twenty-three minutes this aft
ernOon in the Detroit rink to an audi
ence estimoted at 5000. All the rail
roads ran special excursion trains for
the occasion. the cheap rates and the
fame of the orator contributing to aug
ment the crowd. Many ladies were
present. There was the usual campaign
hurrah, but the meeting was not an eX-
clusively partisan one, as was evidenced
by the quite general applause which
followed Mr.. Blaine'S reference to An
drew Jackson as great leader of De-
| mOcracy and which occasionally greeted
the name of Mr.. Cleveland. Upon be-
ing introduced by the chairman, Gen.
Alger, Mr.. Blaine said:
Mr.. Chairman and Fellow Citizens-for,
despite the Hon. Don Dickinson, a New
Highlander may still venture to call citizen
of Michigan his fellow citizen. 1t was said
at the beginning of our government that the
veto power was an anomaly. In their effort
for the preservation of constitutional liberty,
when framing the great documentw which they
transmitted to their posterity, our ancestors
were compelled to copy largely from Eng.
land, whence they or their ancestors had
come. In England there had not been a veto
by the crown of any act of parliament since
the revolution of 1858. 1t occurred to the
mass of the people in the colonies that to
give the president the unqualified power of
vetoing any act of congress and to require
the votes of two-thirds of the senate and two
thirds of the house to override that veto was
to confer upon the president
MOST EXTRAORDINARY POWER.
1t gave him, in the senate and in the
house, that which was equivalent to one
sixth of the whole legislative voting power,
because the difference between majority of
one and vote of two-thirds amounts to one
sixth of the whole. So that the president Of
to-day, when he vetoes bill, yields the
power of thirteen senators and tfty-seven
representatives, in addition to his ordinary
executive functions. A power so extraordi-
nary was naturally used with great caution
by our earlier presidents. Gen. Washington,
III eight years, made use of it twice. The
first Adams, the successor of Washington,
never resOrted to it. Jefferson-con
sidered very enormously, but still
as their great prototype-in eight
years never used it at all. Mad
ison in eight years used it three times
Monroe made use of it once, and John
Quincy Adams never. In the first forty
years of the national government, from
Washington to Adams, the veto power was
used six times. Then came into Office the
great leader of the present Democratic party.
as 1t has been organized for the last sixty
years-General Andrew Jackson. Applause. |
however, his contemporaries, or those who
have followed them, have differed with him
on certain questions, il has been remembered
that the first effort of the Southern disunion-
lists was strangled in the cradle by that
soldier president. (Applause.] In the sue
ceeding forty years the veto power was used
sixty times, and of those sixty vetoes. over
fifty were by Democrats. So that the party
Democratic has been uniformly the one
which resorted TO the one-man power to
defeat the popular will. General applause.l
Up to March 4. 1885, when the present presi
dent Of the United J., States was inaugurated,
the veto power of the government had been
used, in all, about seventy-five times; that is,
from 1859 to 1SS5-1O0 years lacking four.
Now, Mr.. Cleveland [applause], in three
years and half, has used the veto over 800
times ['Hear, hear" and aapplausel, or had
when left New York day before yesterday
how many times since then l do not know.
[Derisive laughter and applause]. of those
vetoes, 206 have been to prevent pltiful pen
sions of ST. month, of SO month, and a
few believe, of Sl2 month"; to worn-down
and starving soldiers of the United States.
Loud applause.] He is the first president
of the United States who ever vetoed a bill
for the relief of soldier who had exposed
his body on the field of battle to bullets and
shells of the enemy
IN DEFENSE OF HIS COUNTRY.
l wish had those veto messages here and
had time to read them to you. They have all
Dee0 issued III anu, a.
succinct expression of the difference be-
tween the Republican and Democratic
parties of to-day, / commend that document
as one of the best in print. Now, mark you
this! There was not in any single instance
a charge that the man 10 whom the pension
was to be given had not been soldier of the
United States. There was not a single dis
pute as to the fact that the men who were to
be relieved by the pensions were in sore and
pressing need of bread. There was not, in
any single case, the slightest question in
volved as to the constitutional power Of con-
gress to grant pensions. But every
one of President Cleveland's veto
messages read precisely. as though
they WERE in each instance, the
decision of the commissioner of pensions on
an application for pension under the law.
Now, we all know (and it has been so from
the foundation of the government that no
general law can provide for all cases We do
our best. by general laws, to reach all cases,
but, in generalizing, there will always be
found exceptions and every one OF these 200
that have met vetoes from the president came
outside of the general law, but not outside of
the personal merit of the applicant in any
case Every case had been before the com
mittee of a Republican senate and before the
committee of Democratic house, and every
case had been passed through Republican
senate and a,Democrat1c house. 1t would be
hard to imagine more impartial legislation
than that thus produced. and yet they meet
every time with the absolute veto of the pres
ident. Some OF them even out of
THEIR GRIMNEss AND THEIR CRUELTY,
had, / think. spice of humor in them. I
read one-I wish had it here to read now
in which the man. the victim of desperate
neuralgia, to allay the pangs Of which he
was in the habit Of taking opiates, was found
dead in bed, and the question was, whether
he died from the pain or from an overdose
of the opiate he had taken, and, If from the
latter, whether the dose was taken lnnocently
or with the intention of suicide. Mr. Cleye-
land in his veto message said it would be a
very bad precedent to grant the widow and
children of that man pension because, of
course, you know. case OF that kind might
be SO often repeated-where man
would have desperate neuralgia, would
take too much of an opiate, and would some
morning be found dead. With all due
respect to the president 1t carried my mind
back to boyhood days, when l attended the
theater oftener than do now, and when /
may remember, the professional philsnthro-
pist in that play refused to contribute any
thing upon the subscription paper for the re-
lief of the widow Of O bricklayer who had
fallen from the top of high house on which
he had been working. because, as the philan-
thropist said-I think, he was in some re-
spects the prototype ofathat veto-"H you re-
Iieye the widow and child Of that bricklayer,
you will have all sorts of people falling from
all sorts of houses" [Great merriment and
good humor1 am not going to dwell upon
that subject, and only introduce it
TO PLACE 1T Wis A Wis
with another, and that is the great sur
plus In the treasury OF the United States, q
part of which might have gone to that poor
man without endangering the stability OF the
government. lLaughter That surplus
which the president has been accommodating
with great industry for nearly or more than
year and a half; refusing to apply it to