The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1907-09-05
DEMOCRACY WILL NEVER DIE.
Though Its Obituary Has Been
Written Countless Times 1t Still
Safeguards the Country.

When the obituaries of the demo-
cratic party were being written over
and over again between 1866 and 1876,
the party was increasing all the while
in power to respond to the country's
demand for restoration, for constitu-
tional government in the states and in
the United States for peace, for economy
in taxation and expenditure, for respect
from officeholders for the right of the
people to be secure in property as we'll
as in person.
1t checked coercive government, as
it was then using force to create op-
portunity for plumber. 1t took the bay
onet from the polls. 1t drove back to
their dens such a jackal horde of politi-
cal thieves and Holsters as had not been
loosed on any other Caucasian country
in modern times. 1t found not only the
southern states, but almost every state
in the union, infested with bands of
robbers who used the machinery of gov
eminent to organize rapacity, piling
fraud on fraud until the only limit was
the opposition of the democracy which
had been read out of existence as dead.
1t was this democracy, not dead then,
but living then, as it is now, which re-
stored a deeply troubled and almost
bankrupt country to peace and pros
perity.
When the present and the future
make like demands upon it, it will go
on showing the same living forces in it's
answer to the demand. It's great pow
ers of opposition to the worst possible
abuses of government were never more
strongly called for than by the results
of the last ten years of disregard for
the constitution and the laws of the
United States, for the constitutions and
laws of the states, for all that is intend
ed to check arbitrary power SO that
American constitutional freedom may
be perpetuated as the worlds greatest
force of progress.
No blunders of individuals or of mere
organization inside the democratic
party, and no force of opposition outside
can prevent it from doing once more the
work of restoring the country to safety.
If all that has been said of the ca
pacity of democracy for laundering by
it's enemy were true, it would be unim-
portant in comparison with the central
fact of democratic history in the United
States, the central truth of the meaning
of democracy everywhere, as it stands
or advances in opposition to the arbi-
trary use of the machinery of govern
ment by office-holders who disregard
constitution and law in the attempt to
perpetuate as political system the
organized rapacity of those whose
puppets they are.
Where the organized rapacity of
1876 took MILL ons, it takes tens
of millions now, with the cry always
for more. In no country of Europe in
1907, not in Germany under the i'm
perialism of the kaiser, or in Russia
under the despotism of the car, does
arbitrary power threaten the actual
earners of the country with more in
tolerable and unnecessary eNtortion
from their earnings than that which
threatens the present and future of the
| United States. In no other country OF
the world is the feudal power of private
and mercenary organization now greater
in Capitalization and in the control Of
all the centralizing agencies of govern
ment than it is in the United States.
When democracy is the only hope O.
checking such reaction, it can no more
fail at the crisis now than in the past
Such demand for the unification of al
its forces as is made now has never beer
vainly made in the past. 1t will show
now, as has always shown, that it is
not only fully alive, but fully able tc
reach results in the spirit which makes
it irresistible as the greatest force sup
porting and perpetuating American
liberty.-St. Louis Republic.