, 1888-08-05
SENATOR VOORHEES,
Campaign Opening Speech a
Terre Haute.
Damaging Thunder Storm in
New York City.
The BowerY Holocaust-More
Bodies Recovered.
Senator voorhees, IN Indiana.

Nv
Democrats of this city and vicinity held a
mass meeting tonight and Senator Voor-
bees made the opening speech of the
Democratic campaign in Indiana. He
said in part:
Every movement in the machinery of
the government set In motion by the Re-
publican leaders and managers has been
to swell and bloat the gains of the rich
and increase the burdens of the poor. The
Republicans conspiracy to fasten its
fangs on the money power in the strug-
CLING body of American labor took its first
great step when authorizing legal tender
currency in 1862. The greenback, the i'm
mortal and glorious greenback, was dis
eliminated against and made non-receiya-
BILE for duties on imports and for interest
or the bonded debt. No financial meas
ure was ever more oppressive and de-
structive to the rights of labor in its re-
suits than this. The senator declared that
this act enabled the b%ullionlsts of Wall
street to realize a profit in naked specu-
lation" with the bonds and currency of
the nation of nearly one thousand million
dollars. l do not believe any other o
pie On the globe would have submitted
unless restrained by force to the mon
strous act of congress of March, 1869.
BY a dishonest stroke of a dishonest pen,
guided and held by dishonest leaders of
the great party, the debt which labor has
to pay was swollen 25 per cent.
The speaker then quoted a letter written
by John Sherman in 1860. wherein Sher-
man said: 81 think a ~bondholder violates
his promises when he refuses to take the
same kind Of money he paid for his bond"
Why, asked the speaker, should not the
greenback come to the front at this time
and at all times, when the interest of the
laboring classes are under consideration
and persistently stigmatized and carica-
tured as a rag baby, for years denounced
as dishonest money, a fraud upon the
business and commercial world. Yet it
stands to-day its purchasing power as
great as the brightest gold. The Repub-
hcan candidate for president suggested in
1875 that an idiot asylum should be erected
for the believers in the greenback. | be-
heved in the greenback then and | do
now and | lake my place alongside of you
under Gen. Harrison's sweeping, unintelli-
gent and brutal criticism and denunciation.
he canvassed this state in 1878 as the
candidate of his party for the senate, as /
did as the candidate of mine. and the
people of Indiana decided by more than
10000 majority that he was nearer a
financial idiot than was and that | should
go back to Washington.
Senator Voorhees, then entered upon
the tariff issue and recounted the history
of modern tariff legislation. No relief,
the speaker declared. was offered to labor
by a resort to the domestic excise system.
On the contrary, this system was made
the pretext for still further encroach-
ments on the part of monopoly and greed
against the rights of those who toll. They
it was who demanded the acts of con-
gress of 1862 and 1864 by which protec-
tive duties were made to ascend to a
Pixies Peak altitude on the express ground
that the manufacturer should be COM
pensated for the amount of his internal
tax.
On this point the speaker quoted ex-
tensively from Senators Morrill,, Allison
and others. For nineteen years the Re-
publican party has caused the people to
pay the manufacturer at least one hundred
millions a year in consideration of a tax
paid by the manufacturer to the govern
ment. The money kings have thus far
resisted every effort to reduce the noun
famous tariff duties by which they have
"a SAN pS0EASs
Senator Voorhees, then discussed the
labor question and the surplus, and de-
clared that the labor interests of the coun-
try need in circulation every dollar that
can be spared from the expenses of the
government, and yet there is piled up as
a useless surplus enough of the laboring
peoples money to pay down in cash more
than two hundred dollars for every day
since the birth Of Christ.
Touching upon the Republican internal
revenue plank, Senator Voorhees, said:
In this Christian land and age men are
sometimes spoken of as Chris
tan Statesmen, yet they have nothing
better than free whisky and tobacco to
offer the people in response to their cry
for relief. The shareholders of the South
once belonged to that class which COM
posed the money power. They once were
the ~monopolists of cheap, under paid labor.
The most bitter and implacable supporters
of slavery thirty years ago were, in fact,
the most successful and efficient abolition
lists of the nineteenth century. They
struck too far and their blows came back
to destroy them. And so it will be with
the purse proud, i~nsolent and misled tax
eaters of the present day, by making no
concession to an overtaxed people and by
refusing a single dollar of reduction on the
necessaries of life, but, on the contrary,
insisting that whisky and tobacco should
go free. Manufacturers have done more
to promote the ideas of free trade in this
country in tie last few months than the
ELOQUENT and gifted tongue and pen of
Frank Hurd, Henry Watterson and David
A. Wells.
The speaker then touched upon the
part Gen. Harrison took in suppressing
the riots in 1877, and closed by saying
that as the attorney for Blaine. Harrison
committed a crime against the state by
declaring in the dismissal of the Blaine
suit against an individual paper that jus