Europe when he would inundate it like a mountain torrent from the Rhine to the Vistula. Strange animals got in. A hybrid thing, called a registrar, was it not-one-half Bashi Bazouk and the other half horse stealer or blackmailer, went about with his little thinggum-bob ballot boxes to cheat, to rob, to ensnare, to betray, to disfranchise the Bourbon Democrats. These registrars had armed guards. They knew a mule on the other side of a mountain. Fine, fat Durhams made their mouths so water as to cause one to think mad dogs had been about. It was not the drooling and dripping of mercury, but the vims of carpet-baggery, robbery and innate scoundrelism. In this condition this salivation was saturnalia.

The man who would not take the oath to forswear his people, his kindred and his blood was a Bourbon Democrat. So also was the man who defended his stable with a shotgun. So also were the men Bourbon Democrats who organized a body-guard for Frank Blair when on his blessed tour of enfranchisement, and smote the beggars and the bulldozers hip and thigh at Warrensburg and at Marshall. So also were all the people who would not put collars on their necks and chains around their ankles.

Then there came another day when all this hierarchy of looters, proscriptionists and thieves was tumbled down in one working and squirming mass together. The blue-bottle flies had found their carrion, and from that hour to this the carcass has never known a resurrection.

Hence, when a term is to be applied of particular odium, as is supposed by some of these leavings of the old carpet-bag_days, the person so banded against is called a Bourbon Democrat. Hence also the virulence with which Morehouse is being attacked, and Glover and Claiborne and many more who are in the field as candidates upon the Democratic ticket.

Very well! It is an honor higher than the grand cross of the Legion of Honor itself. Hunted, proscribed, shot at, robbed, overridden, swallowed up, who is on top to-day? The Bourbons, bless God, as they are understood to be by their Republican revilers. And look at the hands of these very same Bourbons. Are they not clean? They never stole a railroad nor appropriated money that belonged to some office of trust and responsibility; never broke into churches, never murdered a righteous minister of the gospel, never drove off other people's mules, horses, oxen, sheep, hogs and cattle in droves, never tore jewelry from the ears and fingers of women; but it is on top, we tell you, with victory on every one of its banners which flies to the wind, a president in the White House and Blaine, the speckled gentleman, betwixt the devil and the deep

sea.

A VERY PLAIN REMEDY.

[Kansas City Times, February 26, 1889.]

Representative Democrats from all portions of the State have just met in St. Louis to consider the ways and means of a practical and thorough reorganization of the party. Any political caucus or convention which the Hon. Champ Clark, of Pike county, presides over and addresses, commends itself at once not alone to the confidence but to the active support of the entire Democracy of Missouri. Young as he is, he is possessed of that kind of progressive ardor and all prevading faith which removes mountains. In the lares and penates of his political household there are only the gods of his fathers. The results of the late election showed all too plainly that the

Democratic party in Missouri was sick-sick enough to call in a doctor. Its malady came from a tampering with too many poisons. It had wandered far afield from the spot where stood many of its ancient landmarks. It had stopped too long to dally with Circe, and all too long to make love to the Sirens. Wolf tracks might be seen all about its premises. Many of its gods were mere pinchbeck or putty. Its leadership went by the name of nincompoopery or no good. It was everything for men and nothing for principle. The old guard was forced in many instances to give place to conscripts. About many of the camp fires there was either dearth, desolation or absolute night. Some of its martyrs were stoned, some of its saints were crucified, and some of its heroes were put to death.

Change appeared to have laid its polluting hands upon everything that should have been held sacred and inviolable. Men who had never been Democrats aspired to gushing and garrulous supremacy in the way of organization Political tramps-pointing to a certain glib unction of speech as prima facie evidence of their right to fill pulpits and pose as meek and lowly preachers of the gospel of Christ-got thick among the chinaware and the crockeryware of the Democracy, and did more devilment in one year than so many bulls of Bashan could have done in ten. Emotional women -sometimes unfrocked and always unsexed-got among the one suspendered, and so ogled and ogled and so manipulated and manipulated them, that in three days they brought each to the verge of insanity, so making him scowl at his wife, his companion for forty years, the blameless mother of six grown up children, with a hideous expression of carving-knives and strychnine. Laws, that the people had been living under peacefully and prosperously for forty years, were changed with the rapidity of the figures in a kaleidoscope. Each session of the Legislature exuded from its lowest depths, which is demagogy, cartload upon cartload of ointments, unguents and healing things, so that the plan of salvation might be done away with, and the great marquee of the millennium pitched upon the blue grass about the capitol buildings. The courts also took a haud from the lowest to the highest, and as a result of all these came gloom, disgust, sullenness, an indifference almost suicidal, an apathy which froze like a Dakotian blizzard as it fell, a great pulling apart from a lack of cohesiveness, a great falling away because of a scowling demoralization black as a night with a tempest in it-and, finally, an almost overwhelming defeat at the polls.

We name no names and we make neither a crimination nor a recrimination. We have simply pointed out the wounds upon the body of the Democratic party-yet all unhealed and bleeding-and cry aloud for that blessed balm we know to be still somewhere abiding in this our political Gilead.

And now whatabout a remedy for it all—a remedy for organization at its ebb, discipline shattered, querulousness and fault-finding everywhere, four congressmen lost, a bare working majority in the Lower House of the Legislature, and some splendid Democratic parties torn from their hitherto steadfast moorings and given over, rudderless and dismasted to the wreckers and spoilers of the great political deep?

A very plain remedy is nigh at hand-come back to first principles. The present general assembly of Missouri, Democratic in both branches, can do this vitally necessary and inestimable work. Resolutions are all very well in their way, but, like fine words, they butter no parsnips. Such meetings as the one just held in St. Louis,

if they do no good can at least do no harm. The masses, however, want acts not words. If the present general assembly will show to the State that it is a dignified, economical, practical body, opposed to every form and feature of experiment in legislation; proscriptive in no single degree and in no single given direction; willing to live and let live; that it means to purge its lobbies free from the hateful yet ruinous presence of a swarm of gad-fly cranks of all sexes, nationalities and political predilections; if it will quit meddling with old landmarks and cease to follow the teachings and advice of those who are never happy unless they are living in political chaos, and never well-fed, clothed or housed unless there is political dynamite and upheaval on every hand-if, in short, it will teach by example that the Democratic party of Missouri is what it once was-the protector of the poor man, the friend of the laboring man, a foe to proscription in all its Protean shapes, a zealous guard over the people's money, free from all manner of envies, jealousies and spites, a true lover of the Constitution, a stalwart champion of home rule and States' rights, despising buncombe, and setting its face as a flirt against every quack doctor of a demagogue peddling all sorts of vile legislative nosirums and specifics, the Democracy will rally to it en masse, reform its ranks, and go forward into the next fight with all of its old-time resolution and audacity. But there must be no backing and filling. The hour has struck when a new day is to be ushered in of either men or mice.

M. TAINE ON NAPOLEON.

[Kansas City Times, April 17, 1887.]

M. Taine, having in his own estimation, pilloried Victor Hugo, for all the future, has been writing a series of articles on the life and character of Napoleon Bonaparte.

M. Taine is a French literary charlatan, who carries the commune into literature and strives to pull down as many great names as possible, the better to propitiate the red Republicans of the faubourgs. It is not the first time in history that a rat has been known to attack an elephant-not the first time in history that little six-by-nine lucifers have risen in revolt against the living God and been kicked into perdition for their audacity.

Indeed, among a certain class of authors the writing of sacrilegious things is looked upon as the frank license of superior skill, and the formulating of blasphemous speeches the strongest sort of evidence that behind the sacrilege and behind the blasphemy there is a genius that might illuminate and entrance the world.

To this class belongs Henri Taine. It is positively painful to see him drag his crooked and crippled limbs up to the assault upon the mighty Corsican. Why so feeble an assailant should choose for his pattering and inconsequential blows so huge a colossus is only to be accounted for upon the supposition that notoriety, even though it be of the infamous sort, is better than no notoriety at all. Possessed perfectly of this spirit was Eratostratus, the Ephesian, who burnt the famous temple of Diana, and Randolph, who pulled the nose of Andrew Jackson.

Red republicanism never had a master in Europe until Napoleon came. He organized it, drilled it, armed it, equipped it, and then served it out as food for gunpowder. Jacobin bones were left on every battle field from Moscow to Waterloo. He found the crown of Louis XVI. rolling in a gutter of blood, and he picked it up, cleaned

it, and put it upon his head. To keep it there he had to make war. All the kings in Europe coalesced to kill him, and to save his own life he became a king himself. That necessitated army after army, and who so well qualified to fight as those old Septembrizers, those old Dantonian butchers of the Abbaye, those old cut-throats of the Cordelier club who apostrophized the guillotine as a beautiful woman, and wrote sonnets to its knife as to a coquettish maiden.

Napoleon knew the who.e savage lot better than any other man in all France, and he managed, first and last, to get the great bulk of them killed. Their lineal descendants to day are such rabid Republicans as Taine, Madame De Remusat, Jung, and a whole host of other third-rate scribblers, who imagine that they can put out the light of the sun by lighting two-penny tallow candles.

And how do they seek to blacken the fame of the great Napoleon? How does this despoiler of the dead, Taine, seek to do it? By adverse criticisms of his genius as a soldier? No. By logical discussions of his capacity as a commander-in-chief? No. By showing wherein he failed as a ruler, a lawgiver, an emperor, the conqueror of Europe? No. By comparing him unfavorably to Cæsar, Hannibal, Marlborough, Frederick the Great? No, but by dwelling upon the venial sins and shortcomings of his personal character. He delights to tell how Napoleon gave way at times to paroxysms of ungovernable temper. How he swore at his secretaries, pinched the ears of his aids de camp, roared out at Josephine, abused his marshals, broke furniture, threw his clothes in the fire, insulted ambassadors, kept five or six mistresses, would not brook contradiction, did not know what patience was, cared nothing for music, could not spell, did not know French, never read a book, abominated plays, persecuted Madame De Stael, put on theatrical airs, was the terror of courtiers, and the overbearing despot whom all about him feared.

And is this not a wonderful way to sum up the life and character of Napoleon Bonaparte? To gossip about him in the style of an old woman; to tell of the little faults and foibles of poor human nature; to become his valet in order to see him at his toilet, in his bath, when he is relaxed, when he has nothing else to do except to make himself disagreeable; to leave out the Italian campaign, the Austrian campaign, the Prussian campaign; to say nothing of the Alps-where the eagles of the mountairs and the eagles of the standards touched wing and wing and soared together; nothing of Montenotte; of Lodi, of Arcola, of Marengo, of Austerlitz, Wagram and Jena, of Eylan, Friedland and Borodino; nothing of the raft upon the Niemen, the peace of Tilsit, and three monarchs at his feet pleading for the bare right to reign. And yet M. Taine calls all this interminable stuff of his about Bonaparte's boots, temper, toilettes, idiosyncracies of various kinds, and what not, an accurate and critical summing up of the life and character of the greatest soldier, the greatest lawgiver, the greatest administrator and the greatest ruler in all ways to make a nation powerful that the world ever produced

The desire of the red Republicans to bring imperialism into disrepute may be all very legitimate and desirable, but why send a rat to attack an elephant? Were there not others of the earth altogether earthly to be carped at and picked to pieces? It takes a god to destroy a demi-god. No pigmy of a man, much less such a man as Henri Taine, chained Prometheus to the rock and summoned the vultures from the sky to prey upon his vitals. For work like that the forger of the thunderbolts had to apply his hands. The garru

lous Frenchman has simply lighted his two-penny candles in front of that tomb under the dome of the Invalides, and proposes to put out the sun of Austerlitz.

THE STATUE TO CALHOUN.

[Kansas City Times, April 27, 1887.]

South Carolina did well yesterday when she unveiled the statue which had been erected to the memory of her foremost citizen, John C. Calhoun. That he was the strongest man the South ever produced in many intellectual ways, no Northern man doubts; that he was the strongest man the nation ever produced in many intellectual ways, the North will never admit. As parties exist at present; as long as sectional lines remain as rigidly drawn as they are to-day; while the memories and the events of the Civil War still go to make up the standard whereby public men are tried, analyzed, and given a place in contemporaneous history, Calhoun, colossus though he was, can never leave his mighty impress upon much beyond the confines of his own immediate section. The day will come, however, when he will be dealt with as an American in the broadest and fullest acceptation of the term. Not as a South Carolinian alone, not as a Southern man alone, not solely as a States' rights man, but as a citizen of the entire republic, born to its institutions, the eloquent advocate of its safest policies, the fearless exponent of its best thoughts, the most inspired expounder of its wise institutions, and the most prophetic statesman a nation ever had to warn it of its perils, and point out to it the dangers that might be averted if it were true to its own interests and to the civilization which called it into being.

The orator of the occasion was well chosen. The Hon. L. Q. C. Lamar, both by education and sympathetic political training, was thoroughly equipped for the work he was expected to accomplish. Without feeling it or knowing it, perhaps, the great South Carolinian had been his model in more ways than one. It was in these qualities alone, more than in any other, the orator says, was to be found the cause of his unparalleled hold upon the love, reverence and trust of his people. "His," he says, was the greatness of a soul, which, fired with a love of virtue, consecrated itself to truth and duty, and with unfaltering confidence in God, was ever ready to be immolated in the cause of right and country."

In an article of this sort, or even in an article of any kind in this day and generation, it would be time thrown away and effort wasted to attempt a criticism upon the intellectual side of Calhoun's character. As well discuss light, or heat, or germination, or the sun's rays, or the ebb and the flow of the ocean. As the advocate and the champion of States' rights, both in their essence and their purity, he never had an equal. None who ever lived in this country approximated him in luminous power and unanswerable logic. He was never ornate. He stood in speaking as some vitalized figure carved from marble. The stream of his discourse flowed from him as some calm, clear, yet resistless river. Many replies were made to his arguments in favor of this States' rights interpretation of the Constitution, but answers never. On one memorable occasion Mr. Webster is reported as saying, in connection with a speech Calhoun had just made in defense of State sovereignty: "It may be replied to, but it can never be answered. Sir, it is unanswerable."

Secretary Lamar's address is quite full and satisfactory. He does not present Calhoun in any new light, but it brings him out