The Willimantic Journal

INGERSOLL AND DEMOCRACY.

Col. Robert G. Ingersoll is not only radical and fearless in his religious views, but equally expressive when he turns his attention to political matters. Recently, while he was making a speech, a man in the crowd yelled out "What is the matter with the Democratic party?" That man, if a Democrat, was sorry that he spoke for this was Ingersoll's prompt reply:

"What is the matter with the Democratic party? I will tell you, my friend. The Democratic party was born under the planets that were in opposition. It lives in the objective case. Like a mule, it has no pride of ancestry; no hope of posterity. It never originates anything. It shines by borrowed light. It has never been united in honest wedlock, but lived for years in open adultery with a harlot called slavery; lived with her until she died of corruption, and was buried amid the sobs and groans of her paramour.

The atmosphere that surrounds democracy is full of noxious vapors that breed moral pestilence and death. The sun never shines through it; vice seeks its shadow, and corruption grows under its influence. Springs of purity are never found in democracy. Its waters are torpid, lifeless-covered with scum with which stagnant pools and moveless waters always offend the eye of man. The soil which democracy has cultivated has failed to yield harvests of value to the nation, but has given crops of worthless weeds and briars.

"Democracy has no love of country; believes in states instead of a nation: drives loyalty from its doors and welcomes in treason to its habitation; holds the deed of our soldiers and sailors as naught; strives to blacken the names of our heroes; weeps over the lost cause; hates the blue and loves the gray; stabs loyalty in the back; binds up the wounds of treason, and speaks words of hope and comfort to its devotees; applauds when helpless blacks are stricken down in the south, and caresses the hand red with innocent blood; denies the right of American citizens to make homes for themselves in the south; justifies the man who shoots them down or drives them out.

"Democracy is a curse to the land, the source of our bitterest woes; the haven where vice finds friends and crime its apologists and defenders. Democracy is original sin let loose to rend and destroy; is the spirit of evil filling the swine of the land; the incarnation of unholiness; the child of the devil; its home should be in that outer darkness where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Such, faintly pictured, my friend, is what is the matter with the Democratic party."