This bitterness of partisan feeling was engendered by the Republican plan for the gerrymandering of the state. The bill agreed upon by the Republican caucus represented partisanship gone mad. The most grotesque combinations of counties were made for congressional and legislative purposes. The most vehement protests of the Democrats and of citizens of sufficiently independent character to resent injustice were of no avail. The Republicans, booted and spurred, rode rough shod over all opposition. A United States senator was to be elected the next year and nothing in the way of the juggling of legislative districts that would make more difficult the re-election of Daniel W. Voorhees was left undone. Appreciating the impossibility of preventing the consummation of the plan, Kern withheld his fire until the bill was put upon its passage, and then in an excoriating speech, all the more severe because every count in the indictment he drew was notoriously true, he voiced his protest in a general denunciation of the legislative record made by the party in power during the session. This speech is historically interesting, especially the following: “In 1887 you denounced the rules of the senate adopted by the Democratic majority under the leadership of Green Smith as ‘outrageous, brutal and revolutionary,’ and yet on gaining power you re-enact those rules without the dotting of an i or the crossing of a t. “In former years you have denounced the Democratic legislatures on account of the number of their employees; and yet here in the senate chamber senators can scarcely get in and out of the chamber without stumbling over the crowds of idle and useless employees who swarm about performing no service. “You have denounced the Democratic ‘profligacy’ in the little items of expenditures about the general assembly, and yet I call your attention to the fact that of the twenty-eight sets of Burns’ statutes purchased by the senate for the state at the commencement of the session every set except three have been stolen and carried away. “You lay claim to a record of economy and yet, leaving your officers with their princely salaries, you seek to make the record good by taking food and clothing and the comforts of life from those of God’s unfortunate children who are confined in the asylum of the insane, and those who are being educated and cared for in the institutions for the deaf and dumb and blind. “You have claimed to favor the abolishment of the spoils system from the politics of the state and yet under your legislation of this session politics has been carried into the public schools for the first time in the history of the state.” Interruption--“How about the Nicholson law?”