Our Presidents and how we make them

by Alexander K. McClure

In a Republic like ours, where the citizen is the sovereign, and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign and the people should possess intelligence. The free school is the promoter of that intelligence which is to preserve us a free nation, therefore the State or nation, or both combined, should support free institutions of learning, sufficient to afford to every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education.

We earnestly recommend that prompt action be taken by Congress in the enactment of such legislation as will best secure the rehabilitation of our American merchant marine; and we protest against the passage by Congress of a free-ship bill, as calculated to work injustice to labor by lessening the wages of those engaged in preparing materials as well as those directly employed in our shipyards.

We demand appropriations for the early rebuilding of our navy; for the construction of coast fortifications and modern ordnance, and other approved modern means of defence for the protection of our defenceless harbors and cities; for the payment of just pensions to our soldiers; for necessary works of national importance in the improvement of harbors and the channels of internal, coastwise, and foreign commerce; for the encouragement of the shipping interests of the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific States, as well as for the payment of the maturing public debt. This policy will give employment to our labor; activity to our various industries; increase the security of our country; promote trade; open new and direct markets for our produce, and cheapen the cost of transportation. We affirm this to be far better for our country than the Democratic policy of loaning the Government’s money, without interest, to “pet banks.”

The conduct of foreign affairs by the present administration has been distinguished by its inefficiency and its cowardice. Having withdrawn from the Senate all pending treaties effected by Republican administration for the removal of foreign burdens and restrictions upon our commerce, and for its extension into better markets, it has neither effected nor proposed any others in their stead. Professing adherence to the Monroe Doctrine, it has seen, with idle complacency, the extension of foreign influence in Central America and of foreign trade everywhere among our neighbors. It has refused to charter, sanction or encourage any American organization for constructing the Nicaragua Canal—a work of vital importance to the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine, and of our national influence in Central and South America, and necessary for the development of trade with our Pacific territory, with South America and with the islands and farther coasts of the Pacific Ocean.

We arraign the present Democratic administration for its weak and unpatriotic treatment of the fisheries question, and its pusillanimous surrender of the essential privileges to which our fishing vessels are entitled in Canadian ports under the treaty of 1818, the reciprocal maritime legislation of 1830, and the comity of nations, and which Canadian fishing vessels receive in the ports of the United States. We condemn the policy of the present administration and the Democratic majority in Congress toward our fisheries as unfriendly and conspicuously unpatriotic, and as tending to destroy a valuable national industry and an indispensable resource of defence against a foreign enemy.

The name of American applies alike to all citizens of the Republic and imposes upon all alike the same obligation of obedience to the laws. At the same time that citizenship is and must be the panoply and safeguard of him who wears it, and protects him, whether high or low, rich or poor, in all his civil rights, it should and must afford him protection at home and follow and protect him abroad, in whatever land he may be, on a lawful errand.

The men who abandoned the Republican party in 1884, and continue to adhere to the Democratic party, have deserted not only the cause of honest government, of sound finance, of freedom, of purity of the ballot, but especially have deserted the cause of reform in the civil service. We will not fail to keep our pledges because they have broken theirs, nor because their candidate has broken his. We therefore repeat our declaration of 1884, to wit: “The reform of the civil service auspiciously begun under the Republican administration should be completed by the further extension of the reform system already established by law, to all the grades of the service to which it is applicable. The spirit and purpose of the reform should be observed in all executive appointments, and all laws at variance with the object of existing reform legislation should be repealed, to the end that the dangers to free institutions, which lurk in the power of official patronage, may be wisely and effectively avoided.”

The gratitude of the nation to the defenders of the Union cannot be measured by laws. The legislation of Congress should conform to the pledge made by a loyal people, and be so enlarged and extended as to provide against the possibility that any man who honorably wore the Federal uniform shall become an inmate of an almshouse, or dependent upon private charity. In the presence of an overflowing treasury, it would be a public scandal to do less for those whose valorous services preserved the Government. We denounce the hostile spirit shown by President Cleveland, in his numerous vetoes of measures for pension relief, and the action of the Democratic House of Representatives in refusing even a consideration of general pension legislation.

In support of the principles herewith enunciated, we invite the co-operation of patriotic men of all parties, and especially of all workingmen, whose prosperity is seriously threatened by the free-trade policy of the present administration.

The first concern of all good government is the virtue and sobriety of the people, and the purity of their homes. The Republican party cordially sympathizes with all wise and well-directed efforts for the promotion of temperance and morality.