The Black Hills union. [volume] (Rapid City, Pennington County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1889-1904, 1899-01-13
AND MORALS.
AND THEIR INFLUENCE UPON
POLITICAL ISSUES,
n Views OF u Minnesota Man In
Farm, Stock and Home-Unsatis factor
Politics Of tho Present. But Bright
OF the Future.

~ oho"eu "udl 1Ou nOuSnt ABOUT
money by the kind of men he gave it
to- The so-called successful man
10 In most cases nothing more than an
absorber, a human bull-frog-all
mouth and stomach. The influence OF
such people would be evil in any coun-
try, but in this so-called land Of the
free, where gold is not only the stand
ard of value, but also the social, liter
airy, intellectual, moral and political
standard, the effect is baleful in the
extreme. This evil influence is more
apparent among farmers than it is
among any other class of people, be-
cause it is direct. In the city the
wealthy men, the schemcrs and fran
chlse grabbers have to act through
agents and lick-spittle go-betweens,
but in the country the wealthy farmer
controls the under strata Of the farm
ing community, and between this up
per and neither milestone the great
middle estate is almost destroyed.
How are the arguments of people to be
met who say that their sole business
IA JAIL Ii " lL!dhS llolCS IL Sou
cannot show dollar for dollar with
such people, regardless Of circum-
stances, you are ruled out Of court,
and the %strangest part Of matter is
that nine-tenths of the landless and
homeless part of the community will
applaud the verdict.
Nothing succeeds like success in
money matters, with such people, and
as they measure every mar by their
W narrow, selfish standard, their
tape measure being too short to meas
ure a real man, they reduce every ones
motive to its lowest term and stamp
h dollar mark on 1t. If a person
lifts his voice in behalf Of reform he
IS simply "a politician out Of a job"
and worthy Of nothing but contempt.
The least harmful of these men are
those who satisfy themselves by add
ing house unto house and field unto
field" for by some kind law of re-
compense such men generally have a
spendthrift family, who squander their
in-gotten gains faster than their mis-
erly parent scraped them together. If
the miserly money grabber enters the
church it is generally late in life, and
not for the love of Christ or his peo-
pie, but to exercise the devil, and as
money is his omnipotent the principle
Of life he thinks he has fulfilled the
the whole moral duty Of man when
he throws a dollar into the contribu-
ton box! Here we have the real rea-
son why the Christian church IS large
ly a congregation Of modern scribes
and pharisees, and also an answer to
the repeatedly asked question: "Why
will not the people attend church?'
Spiritual and Intellectual life is i'm
possible in the presence of Olives"
for it can neither thrive nor live in
the money-standard atmosphere that
he takes with him wherever he goes.
In politics, with very few excep-
lions, the wealthy farmer goes with
the machine. In fact without his aid
the machine could not be run at all.
A Jim Hill only excites his envy and
admiration, for though he suffers with
the rest Of us by exorbitant freight
rates, etc., he comforts himself by say
ing: "He is only smarter than the
rest of us; we would all do as he does
If we had the chance" Here is the
key to the whole political problem. 1t
W the puZzling question which
every thoughtful person must have
asked himself time and again: why,
in the name Of common sense, do our
people fill the halls Of legislation
whose interests are directly opposite
to their own?" 1t explains why, with
the rascality and jobbery in the army
and the consequent suffering Of our
soldiers, our people in the recent cleo
ton gave the powers that were alone
responsible a vote of confidence! The
massacres at Hazleton and Y;rden
taught them nothing, and the people
of our WI state answered the cry for
injustice of the Leech Lake Indians,
and endorsed the binding Irvine steal,
congress, and an overwhelming dele
CATION of ringsters to the state legis-
lature.
Nothing could be falser than Con-
gresham McClery's aphorism that
the political fight is always between
the successful and the unsuccessful"
The saying is as devoid of truth as
his currency bill is devoid Of sense or
justice. All history teaches us that
it is always a fight of right against
wrong, Of justice against injustice.
From the time Of ancient Nineveh,
with it's "six score thousand persons
who could not discern between their
right hand and their left hand" down
through the ages to Cromwell and the
flower of the English people, who put
down the rotten aristocracy and the
rabble which upheld them, through our
own revolution against their descend
ants, down again through the civil