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
should treat his brethren gently; he should not make satellite
allusions to their troubles. Let them gibber.”
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?”
Says the Louisville _Courier-Journal_: “The people will have none of
its high tariffs, and none of its Force Bills; but without its high
tariffs and its Force Bills, it is only an organized hunt for official
plunder. The people will not support it in its old course, and will not
believe its brittle promises of reform.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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