While the bacillus of populism is still at work in the Democratic Party, it has also attached the railroad arm of the Republican machine.—Our Standard.
Our readers will remember the article we printed a short time ago by Mr. Eltweed Pomeroy, showing how the voters of one ward of the city of Los Angeles, Cal., “recalled” an alderman charged with corruption. That was the first time in the United States the Recall has been used. About six weeks ago San Diego voted to amend its constitution by adopting the Initiative, Referendum and the Recall, and the Legislature has just ratified this. We understand that Pasadena has also just adopted the Recall, though it has had the Initiative and Referendum for about a year. Thus government by the people extends itself. The evils of democracy can best be cured by more democracy.—Independent (N. Y.).
Reports of suffering from poverty in London are harrowing. At a relief meeting on the 31st it was reported that 200,000 people in that city alone are living on the verge of starvation. In the midst of all this suffering there is something shocking, in spite of the evident good intentions of those in attendance, about the self-satisfaction of the luxurious persons constituting the relief meeting at which this report was made. The meeting was held in the house of a duke, whose great income flows unearned into his private coffers from the common inheritance of all Londoners. A duchess, whose family lives in luxury on incomes also wrung unearned from people who work, occupied the chair. Among those participating were other titled personages whose luxurious incomes are enjoyed at the expense of their starving fellows whose sufferings they had assembled to relieve. But all they proposed to do was to spend pennies here and there for sweet charity. Sweet charity! Yes, sweet; so sweet to those who dole it out, and so bitter to those who must humbly take it or starve. Not one word escaped the lips of any of this charitable assemblage in recognition of the element of justice. To know that 200,000 fellow men and women were on the verge of starvation excited their human sympathies; but that the starving horde were starving because privileged drones and titled parasites revel in unearned incomes, clearly manifest as is the relation here of cause and effect, did not concern the relief meeting. It was something like this that Tolstoy had in mind when with characteristic simplicity and directness he said: “The rich are willing to do anything for the poor people but get off their backs.”—Chicago Public.
The Democratic mule is dead.
The last echo of his heroic brays has died away.