Clarksville Weekly Chronicle

The present paper is written in ignorance of the result in New York, but with serious misgivings about it. There has never been an election in this country in which the right was so plainly on one side and the wrong on the other, but there has never been one where the wrong was so powerful and the right so weak. The success of the Conkling-Kelly combination means that the taxpayers of the city, in the name of the Democratic party, and those of the State, in the name of the Republican party, shall be bound hand and foot and placed helplessly at the mercy of the office holders of the two parties respectively. If the Democrats are beaten, it will be with a proud record, for they eliminated and defied the corrupt element in their own party at the known risk of defeat, and in that case the Republican party will have identified itself with all that is most disreputable in New York politics on both sides and obtained power against the better elements of both parties combined. We confess that we write under the influence of the belief that this will be the result. New York has too long been under the dictation of its machine politicians to leave the result doubtful when both machines combine by direct contract, the terms of which are the tenure of the State offices by the Radical politicians and of the City offices by the Tammany directors, and the multiplication of offices, the piling up of salaries and contracts, and the profuse expenditure of public money to increase the number of employees.

The position taken by the administration, in the late canvass, goes to the extreme of ignominy. Mr. Cornell, the Republican candidate for Governor, was dismissed from the New York custom house by the present administration for the reason openly avowed that his retention in office would render necessary reforms in that department hopeless. The department was corrupt, fraudulent and extravagant, and those evils could not be cured unless a change in the personnel of the office could be made. So said Messrs. Hayes, Evarts and Sherman, and their saying so was taken as a declaration of war by Mr. Conkling, whose appointee Cornell had been, and who had dictated his nomination for Governor. A war has raged between the Conkling and Evarts sections of the Republican party, from the first year of Hayes' administration to within six months of the present time, when a reconciliation of conflicting elements was agreed upon for reasons satisfactory to the parties concerned, and Hayes, Evarts and Sherman came, like whipped hounds under Conkling's lash, and exhausted their oratorical powers in pleading for the man whom they had themselves branded as too corrupt to maintain in office, if any show of reformation was to be attempted.

We see no hope for decency in government, if such a conspiracy is successful.