The Ballot Issue, 1892.

REPUBLICAN.	DEMOCRATIC.

We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be allowed to cast one free and unrestricted ballot in all public elections and that such ballot shall be counted and returned as cast; that such laws shall be enacted and enforced as will secure to every citizen, be he rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, this sovereign right guaranteed by the Constitution. The free and honest popular ballot, the just and equal representation of all the people, as well as their just and equal protection under the laws, are the foundation of our republican institutions, and the party will never relax its efforts until the integrity of the ballot and the purity of elections shall be fully guaranteed and protected in every State. We denounce the continued inhuman outrages perpetrated upon American citizens for political reasons in certain Southern States of the Union.	We warn the people of our common country, jealous for the preservation of their free institutions, that the policy of Federal control of elections to which the Republican party has committed itself is fraught with the gravest dangers, scarcely less momentous than would result from a revolution practically establishing a monarchy on the ruins of the republic. It strikes at the North as well as the South, and injures the colored citizen even more than the white; it means a horde of deputy marshals at every polling place, armed with Federal power, returning boards appointed and controlled by Federal authority; the outrage of the electoral rights of the people in the several States; the subjugation of the colored people to the control of the party in power and the reviving of race antagonisms, now happily abated, of the utmost peril to the safety and happiness of all—a measure deliberately and justly described by a leading Republican Senator as “the most infamous bill that ever crossed the threshold of the Senate.” Such a policy, if sanctioned by law, would mean the dominance of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of office-holders, and the party first intrusted with its machinery could be dislodged from power only by an appeal to the reserved right of the people to resist oppression which is inherent in all self-governing communities. Two years ago this revolutionary policy was emphatically condemned by the people at the polls; but, in contempt of that verdict, the Republican party has defiantly declared, in its latest authoritative utterance, that its success in the coming elections will mean the enactment of the Force bill and the usurpation of despotic control over elections in all the States. Believing that the preservation of republican government in the United States is dependent upon the defeat of this policy of legalized force and fraud, we invite the support of all citizens who desire to see the Constitution maintained in its integrity with the laws pursuant thereto which have given our country a hundred years of unexampled prosperity; and we pledge the Democratic party, if it be intrusted with power, not only to the defeat of the Force bill but also to relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure, which in the short space of two years has squandered an enormous surplus and emptied an overflowing Treasury, after piling new burdens of taxation upon the already overtaxed

REPUBLICAN.

DEMOCRATIC.

We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be allowed to cast one free and unrestricted ballot in all public elections and that such ballot shall be counted and returned as cast; that such laws shall be enacted and enforced as will secure to every citizen, be he rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, this sovereign right guaranteed by the Constitution.
The free and honest popular ballot, the just and equal representation of all the people, as well as their just and equal protection under the laws, are the foundation of our republican institutions, and the party will never relax its efforts until the integrity of the ballot and the purity of elections shall be fully guaranteed and protected in every State.
We denounce the continued inhuman outrages perpetrated upon American citizens for political reasons in certain Southern States of the Union.

We warn the people of our common country, jealous for the preservation of their free institutions, that the policy of Federal control of elections to which the Republican party has committed itself is fraught with the gravest dangers, scarcely less momentous than would result from a revolution practically establishing a monarchy on the ruins of the republic. It strikes at the North as well as the South, and injures the colored citizen even more than the white; it means a horde of deputy marshals at every polling place, armed with Federal power, returning boards appointed and controlled by Federal authority; the outrage of the electoral rights of the people in the several States; the subjugation of the colored people to the control of the party in power and the reviving of race antagonisms, now happily abated, of the utmost peril to the safety and happiness of all—a measure deliberately and justly described by a leading Republican Senator as “the most infamous bill that ever crossed the threshold of the Senate.” Such a policy, if sanctioned by law, would mean the dominance of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of office-holders, and the party first intrusted with its machinery could be dislodged from power only by an appeal to the reserved right of the people to resist oppression which is inherent in all self-governing communities. Two years ago this revolutionary policy was emphatically condemned by the people at the polls; but, in contempt of that verdict, the Republican party has defiantly declared, in its latest authoritative utterance, that its success in the coming elections will mean the enactment of the Force bill and the usurpation of despotic control over elections in all the States.
Believing that the preservation of republican government in the United States is dependent upon the defeat of this policy of legalized force and fraud, we invite the support of all citizens who desire to see the Constitution maintained in its integrity with the laws pursuant thereto which have given our country a hundred years of unexampled prosperity; and we pledge the Democratic party, if it be intrusted with power, not only to the defeat of the Force bill but also to relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure, which in the short space of two years has squandered an enormous surplus and emptied an overflowing Treasury, after piling new burdens of taxation upon the already overtaxed