The Paducah Daily Sun

"FREE SILVER, OR BUST."

The recent aggregation of free silverites and 16 to 1 devotees at Frankfort adopted a platform which started off as follows:

By the Democracy of the state of Kentucky, in convention assembled it is Resolved, First--That we hereby reaffirm our faith in the principles set forth and enumerated in the platform adopted by the Democracy party in national convention held at Chicago in July, 1896, and we re-adopt said platform as the platform of the Democracy of Kentucky.

The rest of the platform is consistent with the above and is true Bryanism. The famous Chicago platform with all of its revolutionary ideas is again adopted by the Kentucky silverites and upon it they will make their fight. Speaking before the convention Joe Blackburn said:

"You have another duty to perform besides the nomination of a candidate--the adoption of a platform. We already know what that will be. It will be an unqualified, unconditional endorsement of the Chicago platform. I trust the committee will go further and take the silver plank from the platform and endorse it separately, making it as strong as human language can. It is the corner stone of Democracy. The fight has just begun. The guillotine and the gallows is the proper retribution for the traitors to the party."

What few sound money Democrats that went to the convention were not allowed even standing room and the name of Senator Lindsay was greeted with hisses and howls. As in their state convention omitted nothing that would emphasize their detestation of the Sound Money Democrats.

Speaking of this action of the late convention, the Louisville Evening Post says:

The effort to unite the Democratic party in Kentucky on state and local issues has failed. In their acts and in their utterances be boss-ridden Democracy, speaking through the lips of its master, has declared to make war on harmony, with all the violence and with all the vulgar vituperation of the brothel orator who assails virtue. Free silver is again to be the shibboleth, not of the Democratic party, but of a lost remnant of that organization.

If the silver leaders are right, if their "descent dream" be in fact not a delusion but a reality, then we are in for still harder times and still lower necessities. It we have such a period of disaster and despair neither of the three parties will oppose free silver; it will come of itself.

On the contrary, if the Republicans will get the tariff out of the way, and remove the difficulties legislation has interposed to the expansion of commerce and the revival of industry, we will have a steady improvement of business, increased investments, wider markets, and an unprecedented demand for the now idle labor and capital.

We believe this returning prosperity, this revival, this coming of good times will so relieve the poor, will shed so far its benefits, will so arouse the lethargic rabble, that the calamity howler will be looked on as a lunatic, and if he escape the asylum it will be only on promise never to run for office again.

The reaction in politics will be as great as the reaction in commerce and industry, and the pyramid of the free silver "war" will be split into a thousand fragments.

The blatant demagogues ready to elect Bradley senator, and to assign Carlisle to eternal damnation, those demagogues who preached a new gospel of devastation in 1896, with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other--those organizers of defeat, controlled the convention of Lilliputians at Frankfort, and silver is to be the one issue in every election, from constable to clerk.

It is to be a "free silver or bust" campaign once more, here in Louisville as well as in every county of the state. It is the flag, not of Democracy, but of Populism, which was raised at Frankfort, and that flag has always gone to defeat in Kentucky, and will go to defeat once more.

The only way to save the party for future service is to separate its unholy alliance with Populism, its fiercest of foes.