The symmetry, beauty, and virtues so pre-eminent in the party of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, will ever present a spectacle for the admiration of the “plain” “Common People” of America. They loved the Republican party in 1860, and cast their votes for it because it represented them--the plain “Common People”; because the candidate of the Republican party, Abraham Lincoln, was one of them, the “Common People”; because in the right hand of the Republican party was carried the standard of _equality and emancipation_; because in their standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln, the plain people recognized a typical man of the “Common People.” “Mudsillism” was synonymous to them with the term “Common People.” The industrial and laborial North was aroused to righteous indignation by the assumption of a social superiority on the part of the cavaliers, the believers in “caste,” in the South. The Republican party, led by that wonderful creation of the American soil and the air of freedom, Abraham Lincoln, won the battle of the equality of man in 1861-65. Following still the guiding star which had left its reflected glory upon the horizon even after it had descended into the tomb made by the assassin, the people of the Union elected the victorious general, Ulysses S. Grant, to the office of Chief Executive of the nation. Believing in and trusting the man who had been a friend to Abraham Lincoln, when he was surrounded by a multitude of dangers, they cheerfully re-elected the victorious General Grant to be the President of the people for a second term. Slowly, but none the less surely, had been going on, during General Grant’s administration, the disintegration of those principles that made the party of Abraham Lincoln _great_ in the eyes of the “Common People” of the Union. After twice enjoying the exalted position of Chief Magistrate of the nation, General Grant was called upon to surrender his office to a successor. So great had been the inroads of decay upon that sterling honesty of the Republican party--that Republican party which had been planted by the loving hands of Lincoln in the breasts of the American people--that President Hayes succeeded General Grant, as a Republican President, only by concessions made in the interests of peace by a great statesman, Samuel J. Tilden.