The Crime of Caste in Our CountryDavenport, Benjamin Rush
History
The Crime of Caste in Our Country
Davenport, Benjamin Rush
Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
“Stuffed with sturdy common-sense which ‘sees clear and thinks
straight,’ and so commends itself to the ‘plain people’ who love
the right and seek justice;
“Stuffed with a foresight unsurpassed by that of any statesman of
our time;
“Stuffed with a purity of patriotism which views place and power
merely as opportunities to render service to the country;
“Stuffed with unprecedented majorities, the eager tributes of the
people in testimony of their approval;
“Stuffed with the confidence of his countrymen, who have called
him again into their service in order that wrongs may be righted,
oppressions overthrown, errant tendencies checked, and that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people may
not perish from the land;
“Stuffed with the Democracy that means all this, for truly--
“The next President _is_ a Democrat.”
If, as we hope, “Grover Cleveland is stuffed with the virtue which
accepts public office only as a public trust,” then he will accept his
office as President of the United States as a trust from the “Common
People” of our country, and not from the political party who nominated
him,--_i. e._, the Democratic party; he will accept the trust confided
in him by the Democracy in its broadest sense--the “Common People” of
the land.
If he be “stuffed with honor,” in accepting that trust, he will do so
with full cognizance of the fact that in honor bound he is to acquit
himself in his high office to which he has been called by the “Common
People” of America, as will best satisfy them, and remove those crying
evils which call aloud from the hearthstone of every Common Man in
America. The most objectionable of all the evils, and the one most
prominently considered by the voter last November, was the existence of
an attempted class distinction in our country.
If he is “stuffed,” as God grant he is, “with sturdy common-sense,
which sees clearly and thinks straight, and so commends itself to
the plain people who love the right and seek justice,” his sturdy
common-sense will teach him that he has been elected by the “plain
people,” and he will “think straight,” that the “plain people” want
such legislation and the execution of such legislation as may relieve
them--not in pocketbook, but in feeling--from the assumption of a
superiority upon the part of the wealthy worshipers at the throne of
“caste,” and to that end a graded income tax will be productive of more
good and be more efficacious in the accomplishment of an object so near
to the “plain people who love right and seek justice,” that it made the
plain “Common People” forget old affiliations last November--old ties
and associations--and vote for the President-elect and the political
party by which he was nominated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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