Oxford Democrat

New York Daily Tribune.

"A SORT OF MILDEW."

Dr. Alonzo Garcelon is the present Governor of Maine by virtue of having been third on the list of candidates voted for at the election in 1878, and having been selected by a Republican State Senate as a choice of evils between himself and Mr. Smith, the Greenback candidate. One cannot help wondering what sort of a man Smith must be, that Garcelon should have been preferred to him. Doubtless Garcelon has developed his capacity since the choice was made. Holding an office for which only a pitiful minority of the voters of Maine supported him, it is not strange perhaps that he should hold majorities in something like contempt. Being Governor in spite of them, why, he reasons, should he not continue so? Or if not he, some other representative of a beaten minority? And if the people of Maine have submitted for a year to the rule of a minority Governor, why should they not submit to the counting in of a minority Legislature, the election of minority State officers and a minority United States Senator? So Garcelon and his co-conspirators have counted out the Republican majority in the Legislature and made their arrangements to steal the State. All within the forms of law, of course, and upon technicalities which, with rolling eyes and hands upon their hearts, they vow they cannot conscientiously disregard. That a Republican Legislature was elected they do not deny, but there are i's not dotted and t's not crossed in the returns, which they say makes them by the Constitution "fatally defective." "We could not trample on the Constitution, you know," say they with a leer. And when their attention is called to a statute law which meets the case and empowers them to amend the technical defects, they answer at once, "Oh, that law is unconstitutional."

It is an old habit of these people to use the letter of the Constitution to stab the State. They tried it on a large scale in 1861, when they clamored that the Federal Constitution not only did not contain the principle of self-preservation, but that it actually offered a shield and defence to its assailants. But even under this claim of a constitutional right to defeat the will of the majority, it is not believed that they can sustain themselves.

The whole business has been characterized by such indubitable signs of a rascally plot on the part of the Governor and Council to steal the State: they all point so clearly to a premeditated purpose and prepared plan; and the coincidences are so striking and significant, that even upon their technical defence they feel that the weight of public opinion is overwhelmingly against them. They have been especially called upon to explain the remarkable fact that the returns have been found fatally defective only in such cases as would result in the defeat of Republican candidates. The latest effort in this direction is in a letter from Governor Garcelon, published yesterday, in which he says:

"Every year there have been defective returns rejected—that is, not counted—for non-compliance with constitutional or legal provisions." He neglects to state the fact that this is the first time in the history of the State that a legally and fairly elected majority in the Legislature has been reversed upon such technicalities: perhaps because it is so well known. "But this year," he adds, "in addition to the usual occurrences in this direction, a sort of mildew or epidemic seems to have infected several of our larger cities." "A sort of mildew!" Well, we should say so. And he might have added that it was "a sort of mildew" that was engendered in the filth of the office of Eben F. Pillsbury, the chief functionary of the Maine Democracy, and its expectant candidate for United States Senator. It was sent out from there like the yellow fever germs which another Democrat, now Governor of a State, undertook to distribute throughout the North during the war. It went in the form of blanks for returns, printed under Pillsbury's directions, in a manner purposely intended to mislead returning officers, so that there should be just these technical defects upon which this gang of conspirators could defeat the will of the majority and steal the State.

It was Garcelon and Pillsbury and the rest of the gang who used the opportunities of their official positions, who set these traps and put on them the seal of the State. And now that they think they have sprung them and caught their victims, when anybody comments upon the singular circumstance that all these defects turn to the advantage of the fellows who discovered them, and asks an explanation, this man Garcelon looks up a moment from the grand larceny he is trying to consummate, and says: "Oh, it's a sort of mildew!" Maybe it is: but it is "a sort of mildew" that is much more likely to rot the party that invented it than to damage those whom it was intended to infect.