READ WHAT THE
New York Journal and American
OF OCTOBER 7th, 1904
HAS TO SAY TO DEMOCRATS

Get Together
Get Busy
Push Live Issues
Go in to Win

T is thirty-three days until the Presidential election.
The Republicans are thoroughly organized and are
conducting an adroit campaign. Backed by those who
hold the Government as a thing to be used in helping
them to grow richer at the expense of the people, the
Republican campaign managers have more money than even
Hanna scared out of these same special privilege seekers in
1896. The National Republican strategists, not being
attacked along their weakest lines, have assumed the
offensive, and with an insolence born of confidence in the
potency of the purchasing power of a dollar on election day, have
shifted the lines of the fight to false issues.
There can be no victory without a fight. And a fight pressed
to the limit on real Democratic issues will win.
It is time for the Democrats to get busy.
The Republican party was never more rotten than it is to-day.
Leaders were never further away from the Constitution than are
those now glorifying the Czarship of Roosevelt, who has usurped
the functions of every branch of government.

100

No party was ever more slavish to selfish interests — criminal
trusts and commercial freebooters — than is the Republican party
this day.
Cortelyou, the National Chairman, stepped from a Cabinet
position wherein he was expected to hold the lash over these
law-breakers and to furnish information that would enable Knox
to put them in jail, and became a beggar for their money to debauch
the ballot box.
And Cortelyou got it and is getting it, and that shows
how well pleased the Trusts were with him as a government
detective sworn to run them to cover. The scandal of this
alone should damn Roosevelt's administration.
The Democracy has permitted the trust issue to become
obscured in academic discussions of things on the other side of
the earth.
It is well for the Filipino to be free, but the paramount thing
now is that the American people remain free.
It has been apparently forgotten that any party that is a
slave to the Trusts is an enemy to Labor, organized or unor
ganized, and yet the issue has not been pressed home to the
laboring m\n.
And who is the laboring man? The man making a salary,
whether a dollar a day or a hundred dollars a day. That man is a
laborer who has worked to build up a business and has pressed
that business along honest and legitimate lines to success — com
peting fairly and meeting competition bravely.
These people will decide this election. They cannot be bought,
though they may be occasionally sold out. They may be fooled,
but, as Lincoln put it, not all the time.
The Democratic platform at St. Louis made a square out
declaration against illegal trusts. It charged the Republican
Party with fostering Trusts. It charged that in this favor to
Trusts the Republican Party was a foe to free labor.
It charged that in its favor to trusts the Republican party was
in favor of cutting the throat of competition, encouraging monop
oly and thereby reducing labor and all those not in trusts to a
condition of peonage.

And the Democratic platform offered a remedy in that it
demanded an enforcement of the law against trusts and the
dealing out of justice equally to all men.
Democracy stands for equality under the law, for oppor
tunity and for personal freedom.
It is for liberty of thought, for the equal standing of the greasy-
handed workingman, the clerk and the man of wealth before the
courts, and it demands that the back-door routes of the privileged
classes to these same courts be closed.
The truyt plank of the St. Louis platform should be dis
cussed. The labor plank should be discussed.
It should be driven into the hearts of the American voters
that Democracy is against Republicanism to-day because Repub
licanism is now a party of favoritism, and classes, just as it was
when Jefferson, who demanded the rule and EQUALITY of ALL
PEOPLE, as against Hamilton, patron saint of Republicans
who advocated limited suffrage and the administration of the
Government by a centralized force made up of the privileged
classes. There is more in Democracy that lives and that Democrats
believe in than is set down in so many words in the St. Louis
platform. It has a common law that it gets from Jefferson, who
believed in equality, and from Jackson, who when a selfish power
sought to make the Government part of its money-making machine,
broke it down and went before the people on the question and won.
The radicalism of the Democracy to-day is that it demands
the same rule of law for the rich and poor, for the great man and
the little man. And that is what its orators must preach to the
people. The criminal trust is against the law— is against the liberty
of commerce — against the freedom of competition— and
seeks to make a slave of every man on its pay roll, and a
serf of every man selling it ra>w material or buying its
finished product.
Preach this to the people. It is Democracy.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 08561 2027

The trust has fixed the age limit when its workers must be set
adrift to starve or beg. It has reduced salaries and reduced men.
It has increased the cost of living to a point never before reached,
even when food and clothing were sold, in the depreciated money of
war times.
This is the great Democratic issue.
It is personal to every American voter. It can be taken into
his home. It will in the end mean liberty or industrial and com
mercial slavery to the individual.
The trust issue is in the St. Louis platform. Five more weeks
remain to force the fighting. The time is long enough if the issues
are driven home.
The Republicans have planned to dump $2,000,000 into this
State alone. But mone)'' is never as powerful as truth.
Let the truth be told.
Let Democrats get together, bring the real issues to the
front, and go in to win.
The Democracy never dodged an issue, and it is too old to-begin
now. ' It has in its platform and its splendid traditions issues that
will command the support of liberty-loving Americans.
They are the REAL Democratic issues, and Democrats, by
being truly Democratic, can win by preaching them to the people.
Get together and get busy.