The Mankato free press. [volume] (Mankato, Blue Earth County, Minn.) 1879-1924, 1896-09-04


mount to the rights of the owner: we
are running him for chief justice, so
that capital will come tumbling over
itself to get into the state. We have
raked the ash heap of human failure
in the state and have found an old
hoopskirt of man who has failed as
business man, who has failed as an
editor, who has failed as preacher,
and we are going to run him for con-
gressman-a t-large. He will help the
looks of the Kansas delegation in
Washington. Then we have dis
covered kid without law practice,
and have decided to vote for him as
attorney general. Then for fear some
hint that the state had become re-
spectacle might percolate through
the civilized portions of the nations,
we have decided to send three or four
harpies out lecturing, telling the peo-
pie that Kansas is raising hell and
letting corn go to weeds.
ooh, this is a state to be proud Of!
We are people who can hold up our
heads. What we need here is less
money, less capital, fewer white
shirts and brains, fewer men with
business judgment and more of these
fellows who boast that they are just
ordinary cid clodhoppers, but that
they know more in minute about
finance than John Sherman We need
more men who are posted, who can
below about the crime Of '73, who
hate prosperity, and who think that
because a man believes in national
honor that he is tool of Wall street.
We have had few of them, some
$50, 900, but we want more. We need
several Thousand gibbering idiots to
scream about the Great Red Dragon
of Lombard street. We don't need
population, we don't need wealth, we
don't need well dressed men on the
streets, we don't need standing in the
nation, we don't need cities on these
fertile prairies; you bet we don't.
What we are after is the money power.
Because we have become poorer and
ornier and meaner than spawned,
distempered mule, we, the people of
Kansas, propose to kick. We don't
care to build up, we wish to tear
down
"There are two ideas of govern
ment, said our noble Bryan at Chi
cago. There are those who believe
that if you just legislate to make the
well-to-do prosperous their prosperity
will leak through on those below. The
Democratic idea has been that if you
legislate TO make the masses pros
porous their prosperity will find it's
way up and through every class and
rest upon u.s.
That's the stuff. Give the pros
porous man the dickens. Legislate
the thriftless into ease; whack the
stutfing out of the creditors, and tell
the debtors who borrowed money five
years ago. when the money in circula-
tion was more general than it is now,
that the contraction of the currency
gives him right to repudiate.
'Whoop it up for the ragged trousers;
put the lazy, greasy fzzle who can't
pay his debts on an alter and bow
down and worship him. Let the state
ideal be high. What we need is not
the respect of our fellow men, but a
oh, yes, Kansas is a great state.
Here are people fleeing from it by the
score every day, capital going out of
the state by the hundreds OF dollars,
and every industry except far ming
paralyzed, and that crippled because
its products have to go across the
ocean before they can find laboring
man az work who can afford to buy
them. Let's don't stop this year.
Let's drive all the decent. self-respect-
ing men out of the state. Let's keep
the old clodhoppers who know all
Let's encourage the man who is
posted He can talk, and what we
need is not mil hands to eat our meat,
nor factory hands to eat our wheat,
nor cities to Cypress the farmer by
consuming his butter and eggs and
chickens and produce; what Kansas
needs is men who can talk, who have
large leisure to argue the currency
question while their wives wait at
home for that nickel's worth of blu
ing.
"What's the matter with Kansas?
Nothing under the shining sun.
She is losing wealth, population and
standing. She has got her statesmen,
and the money power is afraid of her.
Kansas is all right. She has started
in to raise hell, as Mrs. Lease advised,
and she seems to have an overproduc-
zion. But that doesn't matter. Kan