Thank God, with our Australian Ballot system, each free-born American citizen carries with him into the voter’s booth, if he be at all sensitive, and clothed with an enlightened conscience, the same awful sense of responsibility with which the enlightened and tender-conscienced Catholic enters the sacred realm of the confessional-box. Tremendous issues are at stake. He feels their force, and arises to the occasion, as he ever has done when the exercise of worth, virtue, or virility has been required upon his part, and of the great mass of the common people, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, furnish fair samples of the people’s worth, virtue, and virility.
The Buffalo _Commercial_, than which there is no paper in the State of New York in possession of more perspicacity and political common-sense, in speaking of Senator Allison, a Republican leader of the Senate, states that just before leaving for Europe he intimated that the McKinley Bill was too strong a specific for the Republican party. “You remember,” he said, “that epitaph on the tombstone of the young man who died before his time: ‘I was well; medicine made me ill, and here I lie.’”
The Illinois _State Journal_ remarks: “Until the post-mortem is held, it is, perhaps, just as well not to be certain what it was that hit the G. O. P. last Tuesday. It may have been the McKinley Bill, or the Homestead matter, or the Lutheran business, or the naturalized vote, or several other things, and then it may have been a complication of all these diseases.” Thou wise physician, who would lose sight of the most important evidence of the disease, the discontent of the people, the artificial class distinction created by the sham aristocracy of America, the diagnosis of the disease, called discontent, as made by the press generally, is as faulty and erroneous as would be the opinion of the quack who would call measles, smallpox. Every symptom of the displeasure of the people at the prevalence of the crime of “caste” in our country was evident; yet, apparently, the most learned failed to discern it.
The Toledo _Bee_ says: “The Republican party is dead. The step backward has been taken, and it was a step back that led the party over the precipice of power into the depths of oblivion. The Democratic party has relegated the boodlers, the spoilsmen, and the factional leaders to the rear. What is there left for us to live for?”
