Year: 1875

| Democratic The Democratic party held
and proclaimed doctrine of the rights
of the State governments that amounted
to State sovereignty, and ended in bloody
rebellion. The Democratic party active
| ly IN one part of the country and passive
ly in another, sought the violent over
| throw OF the general government. The
Democratic party superseded the civil by
the military power whenever it was nee
! essary to sustain slavery. The Demo
cratic party, by prostituting the civil
service to partisanship, fostered admins
trative fraud, carelessness, and extrava-
gance, of which Swartwout and Price
were the frst-fruits The Democratic
party proposed in its National Conven-
ton virtual breach of the public faith.
The Democratic party is allied with the
only sect in this country that threatens
religious freedom, as it has elsewhere
always destroyed it when it could. The
Democratic party has been always the
tool of the interest that hated freedom
of the press and of the person.


Thus the Democratic party has been
the steady and recognized foe of what the
Maryland Convention calls "the cardinal
principles of republican government
enunciated by Thomas Jefferson" to
which it pledges its "unfaltering devo-
ton" Undoubtedly it has often made
the same professions before, but the an
swer is written on every page of our po-
itical history. While it held four mill
ions of men and women deprived of
every right and in the most loathsome
slavery, it still called itself the party of
the people, and especially of the poor
laboring man, and of equal rights. Mr..
Allen. who is now, as Democratic. candi-
date for Governor of Ohio, asking labor
ing men if they will submit to the ire
morseless yoke imposed by "a moneyed
aristocracy," was, when in Congress, the
supple tool of the aristocracy of slavery,
which degraded labor, denounced the
free working man as a mud-sill, and
made the slaves, whom it reduced as
nearly as it could to mere cattle, the ri
walls, in the States which it controlled
and the territory that it sought to con-
troll, of the intelligent mechanics and
farmers of Ohio and of every other Free
State And it is Mr.. Aliens boast that
he is unchanged


The Boston Herald, in temperate and
courteous article, says that in stating
such facts as these we forget that few
Northern Democrats favored slavery,
and that, in any case, slavery is gone.
The Herald, however, will remember
that Northern Democrats sustained to
the very last the slavery policy of their
party, whether they favored slavery or
not, and that a Northern Democratic
President assured his Southern allies
that the war for slavery would be fought
out in our streets. AS to the present po-
sition of the party, it is evident that
neither the lifelong convictions of its
leading members nor it's real feeling as
shown in its press and conduct are es-
pecially favorable to equal rights. Now
the choice in 1876 lies between the Re-
publican and Democratic parties, and the
claim of the latter that it is the party of
equal rights is as much false pretense
as the claim made by some Democratic
papers that it is the party of hard money.
All that we say is not that the Republi-
can party has not serious offenses to an
swer for, but that the great objects which
are justly most precious to good citizens
are very much more likely to be promot-
ed, according to all the signs of the times,
by the Republi than by the Demo
cratic party. And it is the constant
statement of this truth which makes US
seem to the Herald incapable of rising
above party prejudice. We can, indeed,
conceive, with the Herald, of great
party true to the American principles of
liberty and justice. But the Republican
party is certainly much nearer that ideal
than the Democratic.


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