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Show vl WHY THE THIRD PARTY MOVEMENT. I 1 We have been reading a magazine article on Hanna, Sibley and j Grosvenor. in which autograph letters that passed between those Republican leaders and Jom Arehbold of the Standard Oil company are reproduced. The evidence is convincing that the leaders of the Republican party were the political representatives of the big oil trust; that Standard Oil money in unlimited quantity was at their command, that in return, honest men in public lie were crushed j and the demands of the trust were enacted into legislation. ij We are almost forced to say that the heart of the once great, r, pure party of Abraham Lincoln has lost its warmth and ceases to l beat for the common people. In one of ,thc letters, Congressman Grosvenor, then up for reelection, re-election, appealed for aid aud received 1,000 in one contribution. 0n the recommendation of Sibley of Pennsylvania, vast sums were paid to senators and representatives. ITanna, had he lived, would have been elected president of the i United States. His election r. would ha.vc been tho direct result of two great forces at work within the Republican party one, the old system of primaries by which Ta't profited, the other the' corrjipl use of unlimited, money, supplied by "the interests." Yesterday we read in the dispatches' of Belmont's admission that he contributed $250,000 to the Democratic campaign fund when Parker was a candidate for the Presidency. The two old parties have been rotten to the core. By this we do not mean that the great bodj of tjie voters has been other than BQPudJnit the men who manipulate politics, who pull the strings from behind the scenes, whether Republican or Democrat, have been men like Hanna and Belmont, who deal in politics as a pawn broker deals in diamonds for profit Turning from the magazine and the press dispatches, our eyes rested on an editorial by Henry Watterson, in which Wattersou pictured Bryan as n demagogue, trickster, monoy-grnbbcr, base deceiver de-ceiver Our own opinion is that Watterson is a vile, low-minded man without one spark of genuine manhood; that he is the hired spokesman for men of the llanna-Bclmont stripe; that he cares more for money and vain-glorious achievement than for principle or his country's good. But when writers as gifted as Watterson begin be-gin to traduce men of high-purpose, the people grow confused and find it difficult to discriminate That is what has kept the Kaunas, the Sibleys, tho Grosvenors, the Ballingcrs, the Cannons, the tricksters, trick-sters, so long in power, and has made the battle for honesty in polities pol-ities so difficult. Many of the strong men within both the Democratic Demo-cratic and Republican parties have hoped to correct the wrongs by working within the party lines, but of late it has become evident to leaders in the movement, such as Roosevelt, that the corruptionists arc too strongly entrenched within their parties to be successfully combatted and as a result a third-party movement is now well under way. |