I know of nothing which has so brought home to our people a deep and bitter sense of disappointment in Democracy.

One of the great blessings brought to the South by Republicanism is a change from the utter apathy touching popular education once existing there to a feeling amounting almost to enthusiasm in its favor. No measure proposed for many years has met with more unanimous support in the South than the Blair bill. It was calculated to benefit the Southern people peculiarly, for the fund appropriated for educational purposes by that bill was to be distributed to the States on the basis of illiteracy, and this would have carried the great bulk of it to the Southern States. The sight of that measure slaughtered in a Democratic House of Representatives has done more than anything I know to awaken the Southern people to a realization that the narrow, jealous, and illiberal views of Federal power entertained by Democracy are unfitted to the changed conditions and necessities of the South.

I might multiply instances indefinitely, but the foregoing will suffice.

Prejudice against political affiliation with the blacks has undoubtedly deterred and still deters Southern whites from becoming Republicans. But this unreasonable prejudice is fast dying out. It cannot force men to remain in the Democratic party against their interests and convictions, any more than the fact that the negroes are nearly all Baptists can keep white men who believe in the doctrine of immersion from joining the Baptist Church. All that is necessary is a little time. Let me give some figures showing the advances which Republicanism has made with white men in Virginia in the last twelve years. My illustration is from Virginia be

cause I know her matters best, and in a border Southern State a movement of this sort naturally begins. Look at these sixteen counties in Virginia-counties containing 37,370 white voters and but 4381 blacks. In 1876 and 1880 they cast a Republican vote barely equal to the colored voters in their limits. Yet in 1884 they registered nearly 18,000 Republican votes, whereof 14,000 must have been white, and show a gain of 13,400 votes in sixteen counties. Let the Democrat who

boasts of a Solid South, and the Republican who despairs of breaking it, ponder on these figures:

The truth is, the South is beginning to find out that it needs Republican principles to achieve its greatest possibilities, at about the same time that the Republican party is beginning to learn how much it needs the South.

It shows that

This is a happy conjunction of knowledge. the South is broadening and expanding in every view; and it imposes upon the Republican party the duty of realizing that its principles, so admirably adapted, in the present and the future, to all sections of our land and all its people, are only marred and weakened by that class of persons who feel called upon on all occasions to thrust forward things of the past which are sectional and embittered, however glorious they may be.

In the approaching campaign it behooves every Republican, North, South, East, and West, whether in antecedents he was a Union man or a Confederate, to unite in making the Republican party what it really is, the only truly national party in America. The Democratic party is intensely sectional. Let not the Republican party fall into an error so odious.

A FAIR VOTE AND AN HONEST COUNT.

BY HON. JOHN J. INGALLS, U. S. SENATOR FROM KANSAS.

THE Republican party, in its platform adopted at Chicago, June 21, 1888, among other things, declares:

"We reaffirm our unswerving devotion to the National Constitution and the indissoluble Union of the States; to the autonomy reserved to the States under the Constitution; to the personal rights and liberties of citizens in all the States and Territories in the Union, and especially to the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign-born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections, and to have that ballot duly counted. We hold the free and honest popular ballot and the just and equal representation of all the people to be the foundation of our republican government, and demand effective legislation to secure the integrity and purity of elections, which are the fountains of public authority. We charge that the present administration and the Democratic majority in Congress owe their existence to the suppression of the ballot by a criminal nullification of the Constitution and laws of the United States."

Why was such an emphatic declaration of these political axioms necessary, and what is the foundation for the indictment against President Cleveland, and his supporters in the House of Representatives?

The answer requires a brief review of the record of the Democratic party in national elections.

Long before the Republican party was organized, the Democracy entered upon a systematic career of frauds upon the suffrage, to which it has persistently adhered, and to which its success is alone due. It has never been sustained by an honest majority of the votes of the American people, and is now in power by revolutionary and unconstitutional methods, as

intolerable and despotic as those which prevail in the most degraded nations of the earth.

The Presidential elections of 1844, of 1852, and of 1856 were carried for the Democracy by corruption and fraud. Failing in 1860 in their nefarious attempt to nationalize slavery, and defeat Lincoln, the Democratic party rebelled rather than submit to the will of the majority, lawfully and peaceably expressed at the polls, and deliberately presented the issue of dissolution and civil war.

In the election of 1844 the vote in the Electoral College stood, Polk, 170; Clay, 105. New York, with 36 electoral votes, Georgia, with 10, and Louisiana, with 6, making 52 in all, were counted for Polk.

In the House of Representatives, on the 7th of January, 1845, ex-Senator Clingman, of North Carolina (who is still living), delivered a speech upon the Democratic frauds in that election, in which he declared that the States above named were carried by corrupt assessments and levies upon officials in the custom-house in New York, by the illegal naturalization of foreigners, and by frauds upon the suffrage.

A similar condition of affairs he alleged prevailed in Maryland, fifty men in Baltimore alone having been convicted of double voting, who were subsequently pardoned by the Democratic governor. In New York City above 7000 foreigners were naturalized, many of whom had not been in the country for six months, whose votes were cast for the Democratic candidate.

He alluded to the Empire Club, of New York City-an important Democratic auxiliary-characterizing it as "an assembly of gamblers, pick-pockets, and persons under indictments for murder and various crimes." A conspiracy was formed to secure through this organization 14,000 illegal votes for Polk, but in consequence of difficulties that were not anticipated they were able only to secure 11,000. The sailors on several ships-of-war in the harbor of New York were unlawfully directed to participate in the election, and were so unacquainted with the duties required of them that they voted in the wrong district, in consequence of which a Democratic

member of Congress from Brooklyn was defeated, and his colleague in New York, on the opposite side of the bay, was elected.

Polk's apparent plurality in New York over Clay, notwithstanding the fraudulent votes cast, was but 5106.

Mr. Clingman further alleged that voters were transferred from Philadelphia to the city of Albany, in pursuance of this conspiracy. In the county of St. Lawrence more than 1500 fraudulent votes were cast, making a total of above 20,000 ascertained illegal voters in that State alone. He averred that in four counties in Georgia more fraudulent votes were cast than the declared majority of Polk in that State, which was 2071.

Clay was undoubtedly entitled to the electoral vote of Louisiana, and it was subsequently clearly established by testimony that the State was carried for Polk by a gang of New Orleans ruffians and repeaters who were taken on a steamboat to the voting-place of Plaquemines Parish, where they cast 701 votes for the Democratic electors. Upon the face of the returns the Democratic majority was 699.

There is no fact in history more clearly established than that in 1868 New York was carried for Seymour by the most shameless and systematic frauds perpetrated by Tweed and his confederates in crime. The State was largely Republican, outside of the city of New York, where such spurious majorities were manufactured by the Democratic officials, who had all the election machinery, that the verdict of the people was apparently reversed and the mercenary misrule of Hoffman and Tweed continued, until public indignation was aroused by the plunder of the revenues, the prostitution of the judiciary, and the corruption of the suffrage.

In 1876 New York was counted for Tilden by the repetition of the same depraved practices. A majority of the honest vote of that State unquestionably was cast for Hayes, but the simulated returns from New York City and Kings County were repeated, with the usual result. Many of the Southern States were also undeniably Republican, but the "Mississippi plan" was invented for that occasion, and by terrorizing and