Show THE quadrennial SPASM the fourth year in the nations calendar is always a year of which thoughtful and sober minded americans are ashamed we nave haye state county and municipal elections more or less every year and they aro are conducted generally in a w way to make one blush for his country annis auvis and nud his kind but on the fourth year comes the universal clatter bellow and blare for in that year the country is in agony about the next president the newspapers which have shown during the three years preceding some faint glimp sings singa of sense occasionally now turn idiotic in a mius migs mass bosh drivel and lies are the food they ommer offer an intelligent public for some months continuously it is the eve of a presidential election and they have no room oar oan anything else there is generally nothing to choose from between one side and the other with perfect truth each can toll tell about eho ehe slaver and slane siane of the other sido llda the sort of stuff which their conductors imagine will influence intelligent voters I 1 is an insult to any people that claims to be semi civilized indeed t take ak e any one of our leading political papers re tomorrow to morrow and look at what it lays re before eforo its readers as argument for its own side and against the other and confess that no hostile european opinion of the american nation was ever so low as the opinion which must be entertained and is virtually expressed by our own political press than the political newspaper there is only one grosser insult offered to the american people in a presidential campaign and that is the stump speech A number of gentlemen with more or less power of lungs who are nerved by the desire to retain offices they now hold or to get others in the future go about the country making speeches for one or the other of the rival candidates the stuff of which they are delivered is beneath contempt they know it is themselves some of them at least when whon not delivering such speeches many of them are intelligent gentlemen tolerably educated with some reading and some power of reflection the moment they talo tale the stump they cast sense and moderation reason and truth to the winds they are trying to I 1 influence the masses I 1 and the opinion they entertain of the masses Is seen in the style of talk they hold with them there is no sight more pitiful than the bellowing gentleman senator of congressman on the stump in a presidential canvass none more mortifying to a man proud of his country than he and the crowd about him the speech the cheers the flags the brass band the measureless idiocy of the whole performance the good sense and 1 the r e good name of the nation are insulted and trampled upon and on tho the side alde of the speaker often knowingly his opinion could not be plainer if he prefaced preface each senseless yell for our bide side with the tho you aro are ail ali a pack of fools we Weare are once moro more in the middle of one of these national quadrennial fits in some respects it is disgracefully worse than any that has preceded it hitherto the weapons of these stupid contests have been only the tongue and tholen th ejen eien but the advance of art has now given givon us u the pencil and the gravert the illustrated papers have bave entered the field and the picture can be meaner fouler and falser faison than the pen or the tongue daro dare be at the sometime same time it is a weapon far more effective for tb the e voter who cannot read or cannot reason can usually gee eee the weighty argument of the picture iet lct let ure uro to the dem demagogue agogun has such a eg high h opinion ott oft of lie the voting intelligence of his enlightened fellow citizens that he will convince them by a caricature and having as low an opinion of their decency as of their intelligence he will make his hla caricature blasphemous there are no words capable of expressing the outrage on decency and common christian feeling perpetrated in one of these illustrated papers in a certain caricature of the temptation on the mountain and in another on the op fpx cosite side bide in a caricature of the the passage of the reh red bed sea there seeing seems beems to be e nothing in a presidential campaign sacred from the senseless vulgarity and foulness of a partisan press what shall be be done about it how long shall every sober and intelligent citizen blush for his country how long shall shail stupidity falsehood and vulgarity 1 run rampant every fourth year to the disgrace of a country that claims to be the foremost in the march of humanity tyl there liere is in one view no sight more sublime than that of a great pepie people calmly carefully and cautiously electing its fittest man and putting him at its head to rule and guide it ideally it is the grandest exercise exorcise of national conviction and national will one would suppose it would be done soberly rationally and with due sense of its importance wherever else we might find mere bluster and bellow one would expect not to find them in this national crisis certainly not to find intelligent people who on other subjects can read write write and reason taking gleave leave of their intelligence and putting their faith in this matter in humbug brass and lies but the people are not intelligent the people are influenced by noise and bluster gulled by falsehoods and led by tricks tricky cheated by pictures and banners processions professions process ions and cannon firing and influenced fluen ced by stump orators what would you have we must take things as we find them that this is the real opinion though they dare not express it of the demagogues who conduct campaigns there Is no question that the opinion is an untrue eatrue as it is insulting we honestly b believe elleve that large and increasing masses of the people are disgusted with the style of campaigning the demagogues patronize we believe also but even were it as true as the demagogues assume it would take nothing from the infamy and shame of their action for nothing educates a people like a free and intense political life Itis it is their right to be approached on political affairs with reason and truth the demagogue who approaches them with nonsense and falsehood insults them and degrades them he really despises tho thor voting cattle he leads and is at heart a traitor to the institution he pretends to love E every very act of national sovereignty and choice should bo be a lesson leleon in political knowledge to a free people issues should be discussed calmly rationally without personalities and seriously as they deserve the good sense the real patriotism and sound judgment of the people should be appealed to this all good men confess so much the more do we blame men who either through the press or from the stump assume that the people of this land are ignorant debauched and indecent and who approach them with talk writing or pictures which flatly put forth that assumption and are an insult to the people as they are a disgrace to the country kye kyo wo believe as it Is always darkest just before dawn so this present presidential canvass the vilest in its personalities the most senseless in its gabble and the most indecent in its conduct that the country has yet seen is the end the old method allow us at least to hope so the matter after all laau lajo the hands of the intelligence and and decency of the country people can if they will take this thia business out of the h hands ands of the disreputable fellows who run politics and who insist that a parcel men without character or responsibility and a set of newspapers without principle shall not periodically make the face of every american citizen burn for shame at the unspeakable disgrace done to his country and to the cause of free institutions everywhere for ourselves faith in the people is a foundation article of our creed wedo we do not believe them either stupid besotted or unprincipled we believe the land Is ia safe under god in their hands As a matter of fact it makes no special difference whom they choose to put in the highest places so bo healthy and strong and true truo athe national life that it can stand almost any kind of president congressman or senator and not know it is hurt that is ia the tho only explanation of our national exin exis to dayi days day bo much the more therefore are we indignant at a press aud aua a demagoguery ery that make a trade of patriotism lor for for an approaching pro aching such a people as if they were were no whit wi serno whit loftier or more steadfast of heart than a paris mob the tools of louis napoleon one day and of la commune the next the great calm long iong suffering patient american peo people viosta Vlosta e owning the land it lives on with hostages geb given to fortune and pledges to heaven in every household over the broad land is this the people gentlemen politicians to insult with your press and stump blatherskite your blasphemous caricatures and your lying personalities has the time not nob nearly come think you when they will appreciate the grossness of the insults you stupidly put upon them periodically periodically periodical lr in your campaigns I 1 when they will wil awake to your coarseness and insolence and do de you and unsavory carrion kites of your und kind shall go to your 0 own wn places new york church murch journal 1 t a |