Staunton spectator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1849-1896, 1888-08-15
The Campaign in Indiana.

The campaign has opened vigorously in
Indiana. Senator Voorhees, delivered .
great speech at Terre Haute on the 4th in.
slant, from which the following extract is
m ade, wherein he discusses some of tho past
transactions of the Republican party in its
designs of increasing the wealth of the rich
and lowering the opportunities of laboring
men,
Mr.. Voorhees, said: propose to show
that the history of the republican party on
the subject of taxation is the history of pre-
meditated crime against the laboring peo-
pie of the United States. Every movement
in the machinery of government set in mo-
ton by republican leaders and managers has
been to swell and bloat the gains of the rich
and to increase the burden of the poor, to
deprive labor of its honest reward and to
reduce the industrial classes on the farms,
in the workshops and in the mines, to the
estate and conditions of serfs paying tribute
to their rapacious masters. The republican
conspiracy to fasten the fangs of the money
power in the struggling body of American
labor, and to enable gigantic usury and
legalized robbery to suck the blood of every
American industry took it's first great step
when, in authorizing legal tender currency,
in 1862, the greenback, the immortal and
glorious greenback, was Disseminated
against and degraded in the money markets
of the world by being made non-receivable for
duties on imports and for interest on the
bonded debt of the United States. In all
the annals of nations no financial measure
was ever more wilfully wicked in concep-
ton and design, nor more far-reaching OPP
pressive and destructive to the rights of Ia
Dor in its results than this. The senator
declared this act enabled the ssbullionists"
of Wall street to realize profit in 'snaked
speculation" with the bonds and currency
of the nation of nearly one thousand million
dollars. The laboring people have been too
patient, too forbearing. do not believe
any other people on the globe would have
submitted, unless restrained by force, to the
monstrous act of congress of March, 1862
By one dishonest stroke of dishonest pen,
guided and held by the dishonest leaders of
great party, the debt which Labor has to
pay was swollen 95 per cent. The great
bulk of our bonds, the five-twenties we're
payable in greenbacks. and tho authors of
the act of March, 1859, knew it was false
when they declared they were payable in
coin. The speaker then quoted at length
from the speech of Senator Beck on this
subject March 18th last. Also quoted the
letter written by John Sherman in 1868, and
resurrected by Beck, wherein Sherman said
81 think the bondholder violates his promise
when he refuses to take the same kind of
money he paid for his bonds" Why, ask
the speaker, should not the greenback,
with its glorious history and with all the
crimes eommitte and attempted against it
by the leaders of the republican party, come
to the front at this time and at all times,
when the interests of the laboring classes
are under consideration! Branded at its
birth with the bar sinister as bastard in
the field of currency; persistently stigmatiz-
ed and characterized as a rag baby; born in
founding hospital without known paren-
tage; for years denounced as dishonest
money-a fraud upon the business and
commercial world, yet it stands to- day in
every state in the union with its head as
high and it's purchasing power as great as
the brightest gold tnat ever flashed from the
depths of the earth. 1t is true that the re-
publican candidate for president suggested
in 1878 that an idiot asylum ought to be
erected for believers in the greenback-for
you, my old greenback friends, and for me.
l believed in the greenback then and do
now, and take my place alongside Of you
under General Harrison's sweeping, in
tolerant, brutal criticism and denunciation,
did SO ten years ago, when he poured out
his seornful wrath upon US, and was we'll
content with the result. He canvasscd the
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 in the popular
| vote for members of the legislature that Ia
was nearer auaneial ieiist than I was,
and that should go back to Washington
and leave him at home.