Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1890-11-28
THE TRUTH OF TIE SITUATION.
TF'fom Puck, Nov. 18th. I

The weeks rol! by, and ere long the Christ
mas holidays will be nearer to us than the
late elections; but in spite Of the festal infiu-
ences OF this halloWcd season. the Republican
papers stick to the one solitary occupation
which seems to have any interest to them
discussing the causes of their recent defeat
| Was it the Mckinley bill? they gravely in
quire, Or was it the Force Bill? Or was it
| just nothing-a mere fortuitouS concourse OF
votes for Dem ocratic candidates?
| Bless your dear souls, it was everything It
was the Mckinley bill, and the Force Bill,
and the Reapportionment Bill, and Speaker
Reed, and the new rules, and John Wanama-
ker, and the Blocks of Five, and Benjamin
Harrison, and the crooked pension business,
| and the Census, and any quantity of other
things. You need not trouble yourself to
hunt out any one cause OF your defeat; there
are causes in abundance and there woald
have been more if you had had q little more
time in which to worry the people. DO not
distress yourselves to decide which sort of
cake gave you the stomach-ache. You have
eaten all the sorts there were. Any one would
have been enough. Put the StOmach-ache
down to all
You began industriously amassing this vast
accumulation OF Democratic votes as far back
as 1884. Before that, you had tried the pa
Hayes and the stealing for him Of the Presi,
Dental chair. Nor were the choice of Gen.
Garfield and the unholy squa hbie that follow
ed his election in any sense good politics.
pie behind You. You retained their conf
dence And you abused it, In 1884 you nom-
mated a man whom large number of yGnr
followers could not support for purely con-
scientious and uDsaltish reasons. We need
| not enter INFO the merits Of the case. You
were warned of the result. Yet you forced
| that candidate upon men who had been loyal
to you. They defeated him.
Then you lost your temper. You wanted
revenge, You We're not hot in the defence of
y.rinpin1pS. iudapd did not
| to vindicate your chosen candidate from the
discredit of defeat. After spending four years
in trying to annoy the Democratic President,
and to obstruct all useful legislation, YOU
| nominated another mana nobody, whose
only claim to the place was that he had no
| bad record. BY dilit OF shameless, ayowed,
open corruption you elected him, Since then
you have acted as though the country
| YOU have received this little reminder that it
does not.
As soon as you found yourselves in nower,
with a bare majority in the House OF Repre-
| it b. STEALING, without even decent trial the
! seats OF honestly elected Democrats, Then
you denied their rights to the minority. You
cynically announce that your return to Assem-
ed Oil that assumption.as if you had really
turned the American Republic into an cleo
tive monarchy. You passed pension laws
utterly indecent in their unwarIanted extrav
aHalCe. 1 on threatened uS-anu you GnfcdG-
en- us still-with two bills that would
practically, between them, dsfranchise half
the country.
Then you did pass bill the like OF which
could not be drawn up elsewhere; unless it
wera in Redlam, than in the Fifty first Con-
gress. 1t is called the Mckinley bill; but it
ought to be called ga Bill to Raise Prices and
to Make Life Harder for Everybody, except e
Few Prosperous Manufacturers. Sc mad a
production was this bill that it actually put
tariff on tin plates Something that every
man, woman, aud child uses-not because any
tin plates are made in this country, but be-
cause, some day, some man, somewhere might
wish to think of making them! And on top
of all that, to add gratuitous insult to Wanton
injury, you raise the price OF tobacco, SO that
every man can have daily reminder that you
don't care how hard you make life for him. DO
you think of anything calculated to irritate
and enrage the citizen which you have for
gotten to treat him to?
Do you wonder that you Will sit in the next
House with total representation hardly
more than half the size OF the Democrats,
clear majority? Nobody else wonders. Ii
the Democrats, after they have been long in
power, become half as arrogant, selfish, and
neglectful of duty as you became. they will
be turned out OF their places, too, ii the people
have to fill their seats with Farmers Alliance
candidates.
The Democrats have no one to warn them
of this as you were warned between 1891 and
1883, when you got full and fair notice that
your pension legislation was an outrage, alG
your neglect to reduce the customs tariff All
imposition upon the neanlo. You, cared for
neither Wrang nor right You had no thought
that Of: the basest sort-was ali that you con.
sidered. Now you will have a chance 10 think |
upon public matters as yen have rot thought
in MANY yeays-and may it pratt you. You
sstninking part" First you will think, and
then you Will think, and then, Oh htsa-you
will think
And II you don't make rabid lunatics OF
yourselves in tile session that yet remains to
you, you can sit in the Fifty-second Congress,
ninety of you. and do, with benefit to your
own brains and souls, at least, the duty of a |
wise and conservative minority, in Eratistins
Msgs Of ustIce Il an r eterconaent
maiority-ana line, large, healthy, exuber-
ant Democratic majority it Is that you will
have To IRA ctice on