Oroville Daily Butte Record

The Unprincipled Tricksters.

The reckless, unprincipled and insane public plunderers, who, having failed in their efforts to purchase the bench of this judicial district for their unscrupulous chief, as officers' commissions are purchased in the English army, are now resorting to chicanery, deception and fraud to accomplish the foul usurpation they have in view. With a depraved treachery to everything bordering upon the spirit of Democracy, these special bill operators--these jobbers and speculators in the public revenue--place the name of their unprincipled and plundering chief in the democratic ticket as the regular nominee of the party, with the hope and expectation of deceiving the Democracy into his support. Their lying posters, containing the name of Jos. E. N. Lewis as the regular Democratic nominee for District Judge, flood the country. The Democracy have not nominated this thieving bill operator Jos. E. N. Lewis, to sit in judgment upon the rights of men. The unpurchasable men who composed the Democratic Convention, knowing his many acts of aggression, and his special legislative attempts to make the tax-paying public contribute to his private interests, and knowing the plundering charges he had proffered against the county for office rent while occupying county buildings, and for land to which he had no title, --remembering too, that his grasping and avaricious nature, had led him to appropriate land belonging to others, and that his august person was indignantly hustled from the premises by the owner, (Major Graham)--and remembering that his fence still surrounds "Chinatown," land that has been occupied by Chinamen for six or seven years--remembering these thieving, plundering and unprincipled acts, the honest laborers and tax payers composing that convention, passed his prayers and entreaties by as the idle wind, and scorned his proffered gold, accumulated by speculations in the public revenue. The Democracy presented no such man for judicial honors. It was left for those whose interests are to be advanced by such unprincipled operations. Let the people be not deceived, by their base trickery.

To aid in practicing this deception upon the people, Lewis has stocked the district with presses purchased by himself, and presided over by men of easy political virtue, and who are destitute of truth, morality and common honesty. In the face of the public acts of Judge Lewis--with the full knowledge of his land-grabbing operations in Oroville, and his illegal and oppressive suits against our citizens--ejecting them from their possessions and appropriating their improvements, until compelled to release his illegal grasp by the Supreme Court--with the full knowledge of his iniquitous and unprincipled career, his organs proclaim to the public that Lewis is a moral man--a man of choicest intellect and high-toned character--of great experience and perfect honesty--an able lawyer and uncompromising opposer of fraudulent land claims--a man of purity, whose political course was wonderful in its consistency --a man who like Brutus, is absolutely glittering with honor and sparkling with brightest lustre. Such is the character given Lewis by his corrupt and venal press, while his every act hurls back the foul deception and proclaims the intended fraud. He has prosecuted every fraudulent land suit in the county, in which he could obtain an interest, and even endeavored to filch the public plaza from the county by granting parties permission to build upon it. When such men as Lewis-- men who annually enter our Legislative halls with plundering bills--aspire to be clothed with judicial honors, it is appropriate that they should descend to the damp, vaults of the dungeon, for reptiles base enough to preside over his purchased organs, practice their base deception upon an unsuspecting and a generous public, that the tide of venality and corruption may flood the land, and usurp the judiciary.