Year: 1875

conclusive against them. The results OF two
years of investigations forbid their making any
claim upon the score of honesty the condition
of the Treasury answers abruptly their profess
sons of retrenchment, and the condition of
the public service, the character OF a large
proportion of the men in office, the record OF
the President himself and the fiagrant dis
honesty of their repeated protestations in favor
of Civil Service Reform all stand cOnspieuousy
in the way OF any further attempt to use that
much abused pretense in another campaign.
For The rest, it remains only to reiterate the
claim that it is party of moral ideas that 1t
contains the most of the intelligence, honesty
and patriotism in the country, and that the
country can better afford to trust it, with
all its crimes and follies, than to risk
the ascendency of the Democracy. There is
some truth in this, but what procession of
facts and circumstances, of broken PROMISES,
short rt-sighted policies, and repudiated leaders
would rise up against the assertion of the
claim. Butler leading the House, Carpenter
presiding over the Senate, aud both repudated
by the people after the party had indorsed
them the fading line of statesmen even now
almost forgotten, who retired under the shadow
of Credit Mobilier Back Pay and Bribery in


vestigatiOns, the entire history of the party, in
short, during the Grant Administration
against such an array who could have the as
surance to ask the perpetuation IN power of a
party of such moral deasY


No. There is nothing left the leaders of the
Administration party but this last desperate
resource. Failing to find anything in their
recent record upon which they could go to
Al, erl inic a rotN
wise legislators, they have jumped the whole,
and set to themselves the task of convincing
the people that the same condition exists
now which at the close of the war made their
political ascendency essential to the final sue
cess of the principles for which the war was
fought, and to the prosperity and peace of
the country. The people are to be made to
believe that the spirit of resistance to the
Federal Government is as rife as ever in the
Southern States and no less dangerous that
the disposition of the white citizens is brutal
and murderOus that no Northern man
is safe in the expression of his opinions or
the exercise of the freedom of speech; that
the helpless blacks who have been set free
and clothed with the privileges of citizenship
are in imminent peril of reinstatement; that
the Southern people are as class not only
arrogant and tyrannical, but scheming and
dishonest, and that nothing but the continued
ascendency of the party now in power can
prevent general overthrow of all the results
of the war, the reputation of our own and
the assumption of the Rebel debt. and the
impovershment of the North to pay Rebel
claims for cotton seized, crops destroyed, fields
and plantations ravaged. and slaves emanci-
pated during the war.


We say the course Of the Administration
and its leaders points to this, and only this.
as the policy Of the campaign of 1875. And
we say, further, that q more revolving con-
spracy against the peace and welfare of the
country could hardly be conceived. When
Stephen A. Douglas in 1854, IN the interests,
as it was charged, of his own personal ambi-
ton, flung into American politics the bill
by which the Missouri Compromise was re-
peaed, and the Slavery question re-
opened, it was denounced rs great
crlmo against the American people
and against liberty, and the North rang with
denunciations of Mr.. Douglas from pulpit,
press, and platform. Vastly more shocking to
the moral sense and utterly without reason
able pretext or excuse is this deliberately
weighed and carefully concOcted conspiracy
to perpetuate party power by reOpening the
ghastly wounds of the war which kindly
nature was so rapidly healing, and which the
nation was forgetting with such greatness Of
soul and tenderness of spirit as never before
illustrated any history.


This it is that here and now upon the very
threshold of the whole bad business we de-
nOunce as crime against the party whose
early knightly record it sullies, against the
country whose peace it aims to destroy, and
against humanity which it sins against and
shamcs. 1t may seem easy to arouse the
slrmbering passions of people just resting
in the consciousness of triumph by the false
alarm that the PROSTATE enemy seeks to renew
the fight and reverse the event. 1t is easier,
no doubt, than to meet the people upon the
record of this Administration. But success waits
on neither plan. How much mischief they
nav do IN the next two years Heaven only
knows. If they carry out the programme
foreshadowed by the President in his Aikan-
sas message and undertake the revolution to
which his language clearly points, we may
count upon two years Of turbulence and dis
order worse if possible than open war. But
the end will come, and the people will repeat
to President Grant as he goes out of office
what he said when he came in, Let us have
"peace."


MR. BRIGHT At BIRMINGHAM.


There have been few statesmen in America


Al. l. hoo