As a matter of fact he was more active than ever upon the stump, not only in his own section of the state, but in distant parts, and the effectiveness of his speeches in Howard may be judged from the unrestrained fury with which _The Tribune_ assailed him in a personal way. It is doubtful if more bitter personal attacks have ever been made upon any politician anywhere or at any time, but it does not appear that Kern took any notice of them. The fact that the opposition paper referred to him in this campaign as “the Democratic party of Howard county” may throw some light upon the motives for the attack. Where it had previously softened its political asperities with scarcely veiled personal admiration, it now spoke of him habitually as “this fellow Kern.” Two years later, in 1878, so vicious had some of the Republican leaders become against him that the scurrilous story was circulated that at a Democratic meeting in Anderson he had “thanked God for the death of Oliver P. Morton.” This was too brutal in its falsity for _The Kokomo Tribune_, which made an investigation and denial with the statement that “Kern is about as mean a Democrat as anybody ... but this article is intended to give the devil his due.” It appears that in 1880 he was not a member of any committee or a delegate to any convention, but later in the campaign he was drafted to run for prosecuting attorney, and again he ran several hundred ahead of his ticket without winning. In the county convention of 1882 we find him reviewing the issues as he had done regularly for twelve years. His speech this year smacked strongly of the position he so prominently took in later years regarding corruption in elections. Reporting the speech _The Kokomo Despatch_ said: “He bore down heavily on the use of money at the polls and predicted that the time would come when every candidate who uses money to buy his nomination or election will be repudiated and spewed out by the people.” This practically ends his political career as a citizen of Kokomo, for the next campaign was to find him a candidate on the state ticket, and upon his election he changed his residence to Indianapolis. From that time, however, until his death, thirty-three years later, the Democracy of Howard county claimed him as its own, and in campaign after campaign he was called upon until the last one in which he ever participated to discuss the issues in Kokomo. Many stories are still told to illustrate the impression made by the Kern of this period upon the voters of Howard county. One of these relates to the supreme confidence of a Quaker idolater of his living in the Quaker stronghold of New London, where Democrats were a novelty. One cold election morning this venerable Democrat hobbled laboriously to the polls to be confronted by an old character of the village by the name of Uncle Jimmy Arnett, who was noted for the uncompromising bitterness of his Republicanism with the question: