Wichita Eagle

It is pretty generally conceded on both sides that the states north and south, with the exception of Indiana, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, will go as they went in the election of 1884. The four states named represent sixty-six electoral votes and of these the Democrats must receive forty-eight to elect their ticket. They claim that they will carry all of them, the only foundation for the claim being the circumstance that they carried them four years ago, not realizing, or ignoring, the fact that the situation now is radically different from that attending the contest of 1884.

In that contest they luckily chose for the second place on their ticket Thomas A. Hendricks; by all odds the strongest and most popular man in that party in Indiana, while the Republican ticket, matchless as it was in its personnel, was placed at disadvantage in that state and was it surprising that the matter of state pride should turn the scale where it was so evenly balanced? This year the state of case is exactly the same with the Republican ticket and party in that state, except that the peerless statesman and soldier heads the ticket instead of being placed second. Thus situated it is idle to talk about Indiana being a doubtful state. It is as certain to go Republican as its right and left hand neighbors - Ohio and Illinois.

In New York, four years ago, the Democracy went into the campaign flushed with the success of Cleveland of only a few months previous in the race for governor, and with all sorts of pledges for the reform of abuses in the government which they succeeded in making a great many people believe really existed but which, in fact, existed only in the fertile imagination of Democratic leaders. Besides this and like Indiana the great state of New York was not represented on the Republican ticket, while costly dissentions prevailed in the party in the state throughout the campaign. But despite these conditions the Democrats succeeded in pulling through with a mere skeleton of a plurality- less than twelve hundred. This year the situation is almost as completely changed in New York as it is in Indiana. The Democrats go into the campaign with the same leader they had four years ago, but how different the circumstances. The popular estimate of the man in that state, as it is out of it, has undergone a complete revulsion in consequence of his broken pledges and administrative failure generally. In contrast with the Democratic embarrassment there, the Republican party was never in better shape for an aggressive campaign. There are no dissensions, no scisms, no personal bickerings, but a united, harmonious and confident party, with as clean and able man from among on the ticket in the person of Levi P. Morton as exists in the country. With such conditions who doubts that the Republicans will sweep the Empire state like a tornado?

The Democrats might carry New Jersey and Connecticut and it would avail them nothing, as it would still leave them thirty-three votes short of the necessary two hundred and one. But they will not carry these two states, nor one of them. With the question of protection vs. free trade the issue, and those communities the most immediately interested of any in the country in the outcome of the issue, it would appear ridiculous to class them even as doubtful.