The herald., 1898-11-06

too great to admit of descending to person
aI,t;es I am not speaking in behalf OF any
candidate or candidates, but rather to lead
your minds away from the puerllitles OF pol
itics and the pettinesses OF the compalgn te
the praver conditions which confront US
Thomas Carlyle once said that England
contained 20,Q0Q000. people-mostiy Tools
He MIGHT have passed the remark on to his
neichbors. A political optimism and a
shameful negligence growing out OF that OPP
timism are CHARACTERISTIC OF the American
people. We have gotten it firmly impressed
upon us somehow that the Almlghty is
peldqed to the United States. We are con-
WINGED that God takes care of children,
fools and America. If folly is any guarantee
of divine insurance, we hold about IU,O00,ooU
certificates in this country. In the lntoxica-
tion that has come to us through the wine
of political liberty, we have failed TO see
the drift of our own unwlse actions, ana
have foolishly and complacently passed our
laws too often in ill-advised haste, and have
thought that the form of our government
and the very name of republic" must act
as a sort of talsman against political evils,
and that democracy could do no wrong.
POLITICAL EXPERIMENTS
The sovereign people of this mighty COM
monweath. drunken with the spirit OF their
own freedom, have been cajoled by the per-
uasive voice OF wicked and selfish advisers,
and have involved themselves in wretched
entanplements. What we have proudly
called. and blindly thought was, govern
ment of the people by the people and for
the people, is beginning to show itself as
huge lie. -,
These United States are not governed by
the people, nor are they governed for the
people. Nothing can be more presumpt-
uous," SAYS a friend of mine in one OF his
books, ethan the literature that treats of
IL ~.,@l, Sol il,,-, nf gnt,,n AS
yet, democracy can scarcely be considered
to have been an experiment. 1t has not
yet been tried. A government of the people
is dream yet to be realized. There are no
truly democratic institutions. Wherein
democracy has been thought triumphant, it
has been the triumph of expediency substl-
tuted for democracy. Wherein it has failed,
something less than democracy has been the
AMERICAN POLITICS
We Americans are not democratic peo-
pie. We do not select the representatives
we elect; we do not make our own laws; we
do not govern ourselves. Our political par
ties are controlled by private close corpora
tions that exist as parasites upon the body
polite, and give US the most degrading and
humiliating despotism in political history.
Our legislation is determined by a vast sys-
tenn of lobby. The people know, though they
cannot prove, that our legislative methods
have become the organization of indirect
bribery and corruption from one end of the
land to the other. 1t is hardly an exaggera-
tion to say that the chief work of our state
and national legislation in recent years has
been to obstruct, defeat or cheat the will of
the people.
We are anything but democratically gov
erned, but are under the government Of
political and legislative bureaucracies that
dominate, plunder and oppress by an indi
rection that conceals both the reality and
the nature of the dominion, corruption and
oppression Our American senate is seri-
ously reminding us of the court of Louis
XVI. The people of America today do not
know how to utter their true political word,
and are no longer able to express their polit-
icai faith through their institutions. The
politicians who control these institutions are
ignorant of what the people really think and
believe. They are largely insensible to the
rising tide of social feeling that will yet
sweep away the foundations of political faith
and order unless recognized and received as
Q national regeneration.
THREATENING EVILS
In our foolish pride in the genius of our
institutions we have thought that the evils
In our political affairs would right them
selves. A self-eleaning politics, like self
scaling boiler, it yet to be successfully in
vented. There are forces at work today in
this country that will overthrow every insti-
tuition which our fathers sought to estab-
lish, and which they handed down to us to
perpetuate, unless checked and crushed by
There are dangerous elements in
the very heart of our political life
that are poisoning its blood and de-
ranging its functions, and We are apparently
blind, or criminally indifferent, to the ter
rible urgency of the hour that is demanding
their removal. With strange stupidity,
we have kept our eyes fixed upon the few
poor, miserable anarchists who have crept
Into our midst and raised their strident yelp
against our government, and we have over
hooked the sleek, well-fed and well-dressed
manipulators of congresses and municipal
legislation, who have polluted and perverted
the issues of courts and councils and of leg
islatures to the detriment of the interests
Of the people and to the fattening of great
trusts and corporations.
We have hung few crazy bomb-throwers
and thought that with their death we had
saved the country from disruption and red
ruin, and we have allowed a horde of crafty
gamblers in finance and industry to defeat
the ends of justice and of legislation. to ig-
more and prostitue our laws as no wild-eyed
anarchist has ever dared to hope he might
do. We have spoken great swelling words
about the firm stand we must take against
all attempts to subvert the institutions of
the republic; we have lost no opportunity
of proclaiming that we are the people and
that the people are sovereign we have ad-
yocated rigid and capital measures against
the anarchistic tribe, and then we have bent
our necks to the yoke of anarchy in high
place and have submitted tamely to the most
damnable mpositions at the hands of a cor
rupt and vicious lobby in our national and
state legislatures
We have seen things come to such a
pass that a man i'll Ohio, the Warwick Of
modern politics, the king-maker of America,
can openly buy his seat in the United States
man who barely escaped court martial for
cowardice in the civil war can buy a place
in the cabinet and furnish the world with
the spectacle of slulker directing the office
of secretary of war; aye, we have seen these
two men and others of their coterie forming
a political and financial pool and buying the
presidency of these United States, and yet
we have the face to affirm that this is re-
public and that democracy is a fact!
THE ISSUE DEFINED
Here is the issue, men OF America. It is
not silver against gold, but manhood and
the rights of citizenship against both. There
has much been said about ''the crime Of
'73" I have no desire at this time TO dis
'9S interest me more. The great crime of
the age is not the demonetization OF silver,
but the denationalizing of the people of the
United States. 1t is the substituting for
government by the people of government
by conjunction of capital and injunction OF
courts. At private meeting OF capitalists
held in New York city to raise money for
the Mckinley campaign a very important
man feryidly declared that he had already