We blame men for bribing legislators; yet sometimes they are in the position of the fellow who is “stood up” by a footpad, with the demand for his money or his life.—San Francisco Star.
The pretentious Apes, in either finance, literature, religion or moral philosophy, are making faces at Thomas W. Lawson, of “Frenzied Finance” fame.
Making faces, through such mediums as Collier’s Weekly and others of that ilk, is all they can do. The weekly tasks of a half-dozen of such writers, the rapidity and the versatility of Thomas W. Lawson shows that he could walk all over them in ten minutes. The exhibitions of these hirelings exemplifies the old story of the frog trying to swell himself up to the size of the ox.—The Patriarch.
The Populist ideas are well to the front. It is difficult to pick up a magazine or newspaper of any kind now without finding favorable opinions of some Populist measure, particularly as to the reforms in voting and the management of monopolies. The Populists never stood so high in the respect and admiration of the people. It is a time when state and local committees should be up and stirring. Whenever and wherever an improvement comes, the Populists will be the kernel of the problem. The Populists will be required to furnish the working plans and should be prepared to receive their friends.—Joliet News.
It is a lamentable fact, but true nevertheless, that there is more absolute want and poverty in these United States than ever before.
Notwithstanding we have made so much cotton here in the South that we cannot sell it for enough to pay the cost of production, there are thousands in our Southland who are shivering with cold for want of needed clothing. Though our prairies have furnished trainloads of choicest cattle, our people are forced to go hungry or pay robber prices for meat. Our coal mines have yielded coal enough to warm every hut in all the land, yet thousands are freezing for want of fuel. Our charity associations are snowed under by the inordinate demands for help from the unemployed. Even in New York there are forty per cent. more idle men today than ever before.
We Southern people know but little of the effects of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few men; of the grinding poverty which prevails in the congested centres of population; of the lavish extravagance of the pampered spawn of plutocracy and its parasites. It will come to us later unless we set to work measures to check it at once.—Southern Mercury.