St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1888-05-15
GRESHAM'S RECORD.

A man never knows himself until he
gets into politics. At least, he never
| gets his past life pulled together in such
shape that he can see it all at one glance
until he becomes formidable candidate
for some political Office. That is why
Judge GRESHAM is perhaps better ac-
Quainted with himself to-day than
ever before. It is altogether prob
able that he never realized what
small potato he was until the BLAINE
folks got to editing his record. Up to
within the last month OF two the judge
| had reason to be stuck on himself, for
pretty much everybody else was stuck
on him. He had been a cabinet officer,
judge of the federal court, and had
held various public trusts, and yet
everybody spoke of him as clean man,
who was guided in public affairs by a
sole desire to do the square thing. If
Judge GRESHAM had never become a
presidential candidate, he would have
gone down into history as one of the
pureSt men that ever adorned public
life. But itdoesn't look that way now.
The BLAINE folks are talking a good
deal, and what they say is calculated to
tarniSh the judges good name and to
knock the spots out of his presidential
boom. They indulge in good deal of
mysterious undertone talk about the
political trades the Judge made to get
into cabinet Office and from the cabi-
net to life position on the federal
bench. And then they profess to have
something that they are holding back to
be sprung at an opportune time, which
will show that Judge GREsHA0I'S
celebrated ruling i'll the JAY GOULD
railway case was not so purely
unSeltish as the judges friends would
have the public believe. In addition to
these mysterious intimatiOns of crooked
transactions Oh the part of one who is
held up as an example of immaculate
purity in American political life, the
BLAINE people have gone to work and
unearthed Judge GREsHAM's political
record thirty years back, and, as a re-
suit, show that he was an ultra Know
Nothing, who went about breathing
slaughter and threatenings to all Amer
lean citizens of foreign birth. america
for Americans" was judges polit-
zeal war cry thirty years ago.
SO far as the intimations thrown out
by the Blainites concerning Judge
GRESHAM'S crookednesS iii politics or
his ruling in the Wabash cases, they
will count for but little against him IN
less substantiated by proof. But so far
as his Know-Nothing record is con-
cerned, it is bound to give the judges
presidential aspirations a very black
eye. Not because of any special
prejudice in the Republican party
against Nothingism, because
the old Known othing party was
the germ of the Republican party,
but it will be because of the gen
eral recognition of the fact thai man
with an unmiStakable KnOW-Nothlng
record would not make an available
presidential candidate. That record
would ALLEVIATE the entire foreign-born
population at the start, without any
show of attracting strength from other
quarters, because the entire Know
Nothing element is already inside of
the Republican party.
Judge GRESHANI'S friends must have
been ignorant of their candidates past
record'When they started his boom, or
they underestimated the hyena-like ca
pacity of the BLAINE leaders for delv-
ing into the dead past.