“At the Point of the Bayonet.”
EVERY day makes it plainer that the policy which the Democratic party has chosen to submit to the public judgment in this campaign, is not one of administration merely, but of absolute and forcible revolution. It proposes to reverse all the national legislation of the three last years, to subvert the reconstruction which the country has approved, to disperse organized State governments by the bayonet; by the same means to reinstate those who for the highest crime against the Commonwealth have been temporarily disfranchised; to deprive hundreds of thousands of new citizens of the ballot, and thrust them back into a semi-enslaved condition—a project which cannot be accomplished but by the most sanguinary measures. Proclaiming a wholly arbitrary test of citizenship in color—a test involving caste and inconceivable injustice, which embraces the entire disaffected class, and excludes a large body of the loyal people—it announces that if its claim is disregarded it will appeal to “physical force” and place its candidate in the White House at the point of the bayonet.—Harper’s Weekly.