The Ottawa Free Trader

THE NEW YORK STRUGGLE.

The New York Sun, in its pungent way, hits off to a dot the inner significance of the great senatorial contest now in progress at Albany :

Mr. Conkling and his friends can now appreciate the difference between Garfield and Blaine and Hayes and Evarts. We have continually warned the stalwarts that the little finger of Blaine would be heavier than the loins of the fraudulent administration, and that when it should be laid upon them the bones would crack. When we saw Mr. Conkling and the imperial leaders ostentatiously performing the ratification of the treaty of Mentor, we told them that they were staking their fortunes upon the hazard of a loaded die: that Garfield was not a covenant keeper; that after they had faithfully performed their part of the contract, Mr. Blaine would draw his pen through the remainder of the instrument and make Garfield spit on it. He has now done just that; and not stopping there has so used the patronage of the administration as to detach Mr. Conkling's summer friends in the senate, and make temporary exile seem better in his eyes than the constant humiliation which seemed to be in store for him.

We now again warn Mr. Conkling that if he expects any sort of moderation at the hands of the administration in the fight at Albany he will be disappointed. Mr. Blaine means war. When he seized the custom house—the key to the situation—he proclaimed that purpose once for all. The power of patronage confirmed Robertson. It swept the majority of Republican senators from their natural place beside Mr. Conkling in defense of the rights of their own body, and it will be used just as remorselessly at Albany. Hayes and Evarts have departed into that obscurity whence Mr. Conkling should never have permitted them to emerge. Garfield and Blaine are a different kind of men. The president has the immense advantage of having been elected, and the secretary of state knows something about practical politics. Mr. Conkling's machine has been all-powerful in this state; but we shall be able to judge of its real force when it meets another machine running in an opposite direction on the same track.