Birmingham state herald. (Birmingham, Ala.) 1895-1897, 1896-08-08
NATIONAL TICKET.
FOR PRESIDENT.
William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska.
FOR VICE PRESIDENT.
Arthur NJ. Sewall of Maine.
THE "BOSS" TALKS.

On the 29th of July last Tom Reed of
Maine delivered himself of long speech
at Alfred, in that state, on the subject
of the presidential election.
We have carefully looked through an
extended digest of this effort of probably
the ablest of the republican leaders to
discover the reasons he is able to assign
why his party should be restored to
power We have found none. OF sneers
and malignity, half suppressed, there is
abundance of blank assertions no limit
as to the greatness and goodness of his
party, including himself of course; but of
manly and candid appeals to sound,
sober Judgment and patriotism there is
none.
1t was perhaps too much to expect
anything of this kind from the boss. In
his innermost being he fully believes
that these United States were made for
his party alone; his party for his part1otl-
lar fragment of it, and that fragment
largely, if not wholly, for himself. There
is not in all his harangue a liberal
thought or a generous sentiment for the
very good reason that such men as ne
and such parties as his can neither pro-
duce nor maintain them.
There are some things in the boss talk
that are significant and some are even
amusing.
Two months ago, he says, no man of
any standing would have risked his rep
utaton as prophet by limiting the
slightest doubt of republican success In
this campaign. He admits that things
are now somewhat different; but on this
single ground, namely, that the demo-
cratic giant has only recently reused up
and come to himself he bases his present
hopes of party triumph, and speaks IN
slpercilious way, evidently forced and
assumed, however, of the free silver
movement as "froth and foam in the
air." "a mushroom of the night and so
on. The boss forgets that great move
ments do not take the pains, nor need,
to send messengers to announce their
coming. When was a cyclone or an
earthquake, or a tidal wave, ever long
anticipated by its victims? The world
was surprised by the deluge, though
forewarned for more than a century; and
Belshazzar was not looking for Cyrus and
his hosts within his walls until in the
midst of his impious orgies his Mortified
gaze was arrested by his sentence, writ
destiny and executed by it that same
night 1t was not to be expected that
the asolent boss and his besotted allies
of any name would discover the signs or
their coming doom, though others might.
They do not even now realize where
they stand, right in the path of the I'M
pending storm of a great peoples right
eous wratht.
The boss patronizinGly condescends,
with contempt lily concealed, to throw a
bone to apostate democrats, so-caled, by
telling them that although the demo-
cratic party is always wrong, some DEM
ocrats are not so bad as that 1t would
be amusing, if it were not horrifying by
its profanity, to know precisely what the
boss really thinks of those whom he
terms good democrats" alias McKin-
leyizers.
The boss says we are in a bad fix and
something must be done. No one, GER
tainly, and least of all real democrats
who advocate free coinage, will deny this
statement. But Reed attributes all our
troubles to democratic policy and ad-
ministration while he well knows that
nothing can be farther from the truth.
He claims that we were prosperous from
1879 to 1898, but fails to state
that the very period he mentions
was the only time since 1873 when silver
coinage was not under the ban entirely,
and that until 1890 we had not been
ours d by McKinleyism. He fails to men
ton that all our prosperity accrued I'M
der the Bland-Allison silver coinage law,
and with tariffs very low compared with
Z the Mckinley bill; tariffs which brought
in an unwieldy surplus of revenue, to re-
duce which was the very purpose avowed
and stated in the caption of the robber
tariff of 1890. He wholly suppresses the
truth, known to no one better than him.
self, that it took McKinley's tariff and
his own infamous billion dollar congress
less than two years to exhaust the huge
surplus in the treasury and bring us to
the very verge of an issue of bonds to
meet a deficiency of revenue in the last
hours of Harrison's administration; and
that those bonds had been actually pre-
pared for execution. He entirely over
looks the fact that the democrats 90
whom he now calls good" are the only
ones who have been in power since March
A. 1898; and that with slight exceptions
they have exercised that power directly
against the will and sentiments of the
vast majority of real democrats, who
have now risen up at the first oppor-
tunity and repudiated the apostates
whom he now for his own purposes
pretends to take to his bosom, and who
of all men, are the authors of the woes
he imputes to the democracy whom they