I am by profession a lawyer and while I voted the old party ticket and supported all of its nominees, regardless of their fitness for the positions they were running for, I had a good patronage and was doing fairly well, but when I threw off the shackles and refused to obey the party lash, scores of my old friends withdrew their patronage and suddenly concluded that I had lost my influence with the courts and juries of the county, and joined in a hue and cry to ruin my business and by this means to force me to at least be quiet in reference to my political convictions. Some of my ancestors were Irish and some Scotch and I was born and grew to manhood in Kentucky, and of course the blood that runs in my veins and the atmosphere that I breathed in my young life combined has developed a disposition that revolts at coercion in matters of conscience and the right to speak and vote as I see the right to be.

However, I have lived these things down in a measure, and am still earning a living for myself and family in spite of persecutions, and I enjoy the privilege of occasionally reminding the hide-bound Democrats of their inconsistencies and of asking them what position their party occupies today and what its position will be in 1908. Of course they don’t know just where they are at now and no prophet could afford to predict where they will be even next year, and so they are mute and can only reply by a sickly smile.

I often wonder how much longer this rotten fabric can hold together. Of course a party with no fixed principles or common policies, can never succeed in gaining control of the government machinery and they ought not to, for no one can foresee or even surmise what the results would be with such a mass of inharmonious elements undertaking at the same time to steer the course of the ship of state. The Populo-Democrats would pull hard on the oars in one direction and the Republico-Democrats would strive to pull the vessel in the opposite direction, and of course the results would be “confusion worse confounded.”

I can see but one way of hope and that comes from the wide-spread disposition to condemn crimes in high places, and to break away from partisan bossisms throughout the land. This may be the breaking of old party chains that will ultimately result in independent political thought and action, and culminate in an era of honesty in the administration of public affairs and also in private dealings among men. At least I hope so.

PUTTERIN’ ROUND.
BY CORA A. MATSON DOLSON.

“Pretty old for work, I am!

Though I used to till my ground

In good shape as any one—

Now, I only putter ’round.