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
If he be “stuffed with a purity of patriotism which views place and
power merely as opportunities to render service to the country,” then
when his term of office shall have expired, having rendered that
service to the country, and the “Common People” of the country, to do
which he was elected President by the “plain people,” he will have
endeared himself so to the patriotic “plain people” of the land, having
faithfully kept the trust reposed in him by the people, that his name
shall go down in the records of the nation associated with the names
of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.
Grover Cleveland is certainly “stuffed” with the confidence of his
countrymen, who have called him again into their service, in order
that wrongs may be righted, oppression overthrown, arrant tendencies
checked, and that “the government of the people, by the people, and
for the people, may not perish from the land.” Let us hope that
this confidence is well placed, and that now, when he may call to
his assistance both branches of the national legislature, he will
right those wrongs, and overthrow the oppression of which the people
complain; and the chiefest of these is the accumulation of vast sums of
money in the hands of families and persons, which creates a danger to
“the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
The people do believe that he is “stuffed with true democracy, in
its broadest sense,” else they never would have elected him. And how
can that true democracy be exhibited better than by suggesting such
legislation as will cast the burden of taxation upon that class who
can so easily bear it--that class which have rendered themselves so
entirely obnoxious to the “Common People” of America, those “plain
people, who love the right and seek justice,” and who, loving the
right, have sought justice by calling him to the position of Executive
of the nation? How can Grover Cleveland better right the wrongs of the
“Common People” than by urging, as chief of the party in power, the
passage of a graded income tax, which would certainly meet with the
approval of the “Common People,” by whom he was elected, that thereby
funds might be furnished for defraying the expenses of the nation, and
thus relieving the burden cast upon the “Common People,” at the same
time preventing a continuation of this much-to-be-feared accumulation
of wealth in the hands of a few in our country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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