The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1899-09-22
Ghe Messenger.


ran should be speaking in an antitrust
conference if he is a trust friend. But
really We do not exactly comprehend
him or know precisely what he is strik-
ing at. Whether he is for or against
the trusts it is quite sure that they will
play a very important part in the cam
paign of 1900. The signs are all hat
way. The democratic party will stand
up as the friend of farmers and all
others who are seriously threatened or
injured by the devouing and accused
trusts. All who call themselves dem
ocrats will nave to go that way or fare
worse by Identifying themselves with
the monsters who are threatening the
welfare of the people and even free in
stitutions. Ex-senator Washburn has
presented the real dangers that threat
en- and from him the Messenger quoted
quite lately. Unless all observers of the
situation misinterpret and are blind to
facts, there is a most profound feeling
ramifying the whole country against
trusts, and it amounts to both disgust
and Indignation. There are democrats
who favor trusts as there are democrats
who favor the gold standard. Cochran
is for both, we uppos All who OPP
pose the platform of the democratic
party in 1909 can, if they will, go into
the old corrupt republican party and
fight for gold, the trusts, the empire,
and against the people and the consti-
tuition and the Declaration of Indepen-
sdence.
But the democracy will be sure to
adopt an antitrust platform. The re-
publicans too are badly split up as to
trusts. The Mark Hanna gang will go
for trusts in a whOOp. He will drag
little Mckinley into any thing he may
desire. Remember that the republican
party is the lifelong, well entrenched
advocate and servant of all the manu-
f%acturers who grow rich by a high
tariff tax, and who place the great bur-
den of subsidy upon the 10000, 900 Of
American toilers and IA, 900, 900 voters,
hat they may wax fat at their expense.
The republican party has been all
through the decades the plant instru-
.ment in the hands of Plutocracy, and
it is too deeply involved and too thor
ouSHly " V llee llScll
the stain of guilt and the burden Of
condemnation for it's subserviency to
the money power. The democrats, on
the other hand, have been for a
quarter Of a century the active enemy
of the high protective theory. Before
the war in the days of the Walker
tariff it stood bravely against high tax
AtiOn and gave the country a tariff
that averaged less than 20 per cent.
The present republican tariff monster
of iniquity, average perhaps 60 per
cent, or more than three times what the
Walker democratic tariff averaged. And
that too at this late day when American
manufactured goods are sent into all
of the marts of the world to compete
with the manufactured goods of all
the great nations. 1t is the people at
home who pay the great prices and not
the people from home. You can buy
American goods in South American
p cities FOUR to five thousand miles away,
twenty or twenty-five per cent cheaper
than you can buy them at the manufac-
turtles in the north. No greater piece
of legislative villainy is enacted than
the present republican tariff, which is
actually worse, more of a robber, than
the Mckinley tariff it ~supplanted,
which was a most rascally and oppres-
sive piece of machinery.
The democratic party in 1900, will
stand where it stood in 1876, in the
great anti-tariff campaign unde Til
den. You will find the dragnet tariff
tax, the great robber; the uncOnstitu-
tiona expansive policy, the great I'M
lawful departure and oppressor; and
the vi1lainous, g%rasping, devOuring
trusts, the enemies and cruel tyranny
of the people, all denounced and OPP
posed by the democratic convention in
1900. If not you will see a split that
will turn over thisg great country bound
hand and foot to the vile, corrupt, false
republican party to abuse it and dis
pose of it as the Mark Hanna crowd
may think best for themselves.
The republican party. of course, will
do as Mr.. Washburn said, pass resolu-
tons against trusts, but he says that
it must go much farther, must take
the trusts by the horns, if it would pre-
vent a wide split in the guilty old party
(the G.. O. P.) and save it from being
overwhelmed. But who will put faith
in such a rotten, faithless thing?
We are not willing, as some think, to
believe that the labor organizations will
favor trusts in the coming fight. II
they should do so they would only give
more power to the trusts, continue in
power their old enemy, the republican
party, aid help to Cypress the great
working classes in all the occupations
of life. The president of the American
Federation of Labor made a speech at
Chicago that leant much towards the
trusts, it is understood. He took the
ground that all organized labor was a
4...n4 nnl +hn+ thn1r had naNar haan