Hopkinsville Kentuckian., 1907-10-05

comedies to it success and power;
Lord Macaulay never said a truer
thing than this: There is no more
dangerous adversary than he who
while affecting the impartiality of the
judge, employees all the arts of the all
vCcate," and Mr. Beach, while assum-
/ ing to be the friend of the organiza-
tion, while assuming to be merely a
looker-on in Jerusalem-or whatever
other town he halls from Qaughter)-
silly, artfully and impersonally injects
into it all the poison and all the false
hood OF his master, the American To-
bacco Comptny. Continued applause)
His argument, in brief, is this. He
wishes to present this case to the
world-a lot of wooden-headed farm
ers in Kentucky and Tennessee-down
here in what is known as the "black
patch got notion in your heads
some way, God knows how; he init
mates that your heads are so thick
that somebody must have bored them
and poked it in; that the cause of low
prices in 1902 and 1903 was not due to
anything his innocent client, the
American Tobacco Company had done;
and he first attempts to show that the
low price received for that tobacco
was due to TRADE CONDITIONS;
then he attempts to show that in ad-
dition to trade conditions it was due
to the EXTREMELY MEAN QUAIL
TY OF THE CROPS AND THE Pc
CULIARITY OF THE LEAF Al
THAT TIME Qaughter); then he goes
on to say that the scraping of plant
beds actually has so decreased and de-
pleted and curtailed the crop that that !
is why the price went up (laughter) !
Now, that sounds very foolish to you
and me; that statement was made for
foreign consumption Qaughter) Then |
he argues that there never was any
combination between the American
Tobacco Company and the Imperial
Tobacco Company and the Regies, |
that they never were in collusiOn, that /
there never was any proof to sustain |
it, he says this country was never di-
vided into districts and each man had |
a district, and he concludes by saying !
that the poor American Tobacco Com
pany never did you any harm in its |
life, and finally that you, without |
cause or excuse have stupldly gone to |
work and covered this country with |
war and desolation, and that you are |
a band of Ku Klux, and the New York |
Sun says you are worse than the |
hunchakists, a band of Arminian as |
sassins.
am here at your request, in my |
poor way to prove, as best l can, that |
those statements are untrue, and that |
we are not marauders and not anarch-
lists, and that while there have been |
instances of lawlessness which we all /
deplore, nevertheless I maintain that |
the law has been fairly well enforced; |
that we are not; as a rule, as a whole
in a state of terror or war, |
that we are still good citizens. going
to church, loving God and working |
for living. (Long and continued ap-
plause.)
Now, I wish to read you his first
statement-and l wouldn't misquote
the gentleman for anything-and / am
not going to misquote anybody here
today. l will read you the first state
ment of Mr.. Beach. You never heard
like this before, and neither
did /, until | read in the newspapers
that / was liar for saying that this
fellow was not telling the truth.
/ wish to say in this connection that
very few papers in this district have
treated me unfairly; that two newspa-
pers in Hopkinsville had just COM
plant against that interview, but not
on account of any fault OF mine-the
understood me to say that
Mr.. Beach was a correspondent OF one
of these papers, and don't blame the