We have been Republicans, we, the “Common People,” until the party for which we voted in 1860, and which, under the leadership of that great Commoner, Abraham Lincoln, forever silenced the claim of the Southerner to social superiority. We have been good Republicans until _you_ have fostered and aggravated the ulcerous sore of a sham aristocracy, defiling the healthy and vigorous body of the Republican party. You may have the best of the argument on Protection; it may benefit our pocketbooks, but we are not selling our birthright, the equality of man, for a mess of pottage! The _Mail and Express_, at great trouble, and, doubtless, expense, furnished plausible excuses for the defeat of the Republican party, and disliking to admit the _true cause_, for in admitting that true cause, it would be necessary to hold the father-in-law of the proprietor of the newspaper responsible for his share of this “Waterloo.” (In fact, W. H. Vanderbilt was to the Republican party what Grouchy was to Napoleon at Waterloo.) With great care did the _Mail and Express_, saving no expense, ascertain the opinions of the various newspapers in the State of New York, concerning the cause of the defeat of the Republican party. Its columns were filled with the opinions of editors throughout the Empire State. Many and various were the reasons given. The defeat was blamed upon the “stay-at-homes”; the defection of the farmers on account of the McKinley Bill; the Saxton Ballot Law; a simple desire for a “change”; lack of organization; and a few correspondents intimated that the “Common People,” tired of accumulations of wealth, voted the Democratic ticket in the hope of securing relief and equality thereby. Could not one editor have been found by the inquiring representatives of the _Mail and Express_ who possessed sagacity sufficient, coupled with enough frankness, to say, directly, that it was not against the policy of the Republican party, their platform, nor candidate, that the people voted November 8th, but that it was against that element in society which the proprietor of the _Mail and Express_ represents so ably as the son-in-law of W. H. Vanderbilt, the sham aristocracy, snobbery, and the believers in “caste”? It is not so much a matter of astonishment that the editors of Republican newspapers should have misjudged with regard to the cause of the social revolution as it is to find that eminently representative American, General Benjamin Harrison, the candidate of the Republican and the present President of the United States, giving expression to ideas so erroneous as those accredited to him in an interview published in the New York _World_, November 13, 1892.