The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1904-09-08
THROUGH JAUNDICED EYES HE
VIEWS THE SOUTH.

drooling of United States Secretary of
Agriculture Wilson, the more pro-
nounced is ones views that the Secre-
tary belongs to the class of the long
cared and braying.
1t was in Vermont that the Poll
teal Agriculturist whose effort is to
farm the farmers sought to appeal to
the prejudice of the people of Yer
mont by a senseless Islander of the
South. Declaring that this section is
the headquarters of the Democratic
party he placed with this a gratuitous
insult by declaring that the votes for
the Democracy came from the back
alleys
No student of affairs would make
such an assertion and it's falsity is
written on it's face. The Southern
vote is from a section of country that
owns little back alley population.
1t is the great agricultural zone of
the United States, and the great mass
Of it's voters come from the country
proper, or from small towns which
are made up from the country, and
which do not know what is meant by
the back alley
The back alley product of citi-
zenship is not found amid such en-
vironments, but it has it's genesis in
the great cities. 1t is in the congested
centres, the over-crowded tenement dis
tricts of the North that the back
alley is known, and in the States
which give the greatest Republican
majorities are the cities which
abound in back alleys" Yet this
being so no Democratic orator has
been found to declare that the Repub-
Lean vote is a black alley vote. They
have had regard for the decencies of
the situation, and are not attempting
to become maligners and slanderers
of any section, that political ends may
be subserved.
But Secretary Wilson seems to be-
long to a rattle brain class. His per-
Torrance in declaring that because
the cotton farmers were getting big
prices for cotton last season ruin
was coming to the country will be re-
membered. That was colossal stu
pidity and demonstrates his unfitness
for making any kind of a statement
about anything connected with the
South. High prices for wheat out
West does not lead him to moan over
the figures paid as a acalamity, but
then the Secretary halls from the
West.
No, the South and the Democratic
party here is not a back alley vote
caster. Education is the guiding star
of the party and the section and no.
where else in this country is there
more genuine work being done to free
The electorate from the control of the
illiterate and the vicious. 1t is the
jaundice in the system of Secretary
Wilson which causes him to look cross
eyed, for his enmity to the South is
such that his system is permeated with
the disease of sectional and party pre-
judice, so that his brain and his eye
sight are both affected.
Here is a statement which we make
calmly, deliberately, dispassionately,
basing it upon the class of popula-
ton in all sections of the country. 1t
is that the most intelligent vote is cast
by the people of the South, for it is
cast by population that has not had
interjected into it a strange foreign
element, but one that traces it's ances-
try back to the founders of the Re-
public. 1t is to the South, to it's in
telligence and to it's voters that this
nation must look for the great steady
ing and reserve force upon which the
country will sometimes have to CALL
The most American part of the Union
is in the South, and when he gets
away from this as a basis Secretary
Wilson is merely playing the dema-
gogue, and stirring up sectional pre-
judice for partisan purposes. That
was the animus of his speech in Yer
mont; that is the germ of the idea
that he sets forth.
But the intelligence of this country
hardly needs the facts to be called to
its attention. The folly of Secre-
tary Wilson is so that even the dullard
may know that it. is folly, and the
South is content to leave the case to
the minded, knowing that the al
legation of Secretary Wilson has no
g round upon which it can stand when
reason takes up the argument.
The Republican bosses of that mall