Dodgeville Chronicle

Grant or Greeley

Notwithstanding the great National Conventions have been held and nominations made, the Chicago Times is without a candidate. It is of the opinion that Grant's administration tends too much towards centralization; favors protective tariffs, subsidies and monopolies, and ought not to be continued. It however refuses to support Mr. Greeley and asks. "Is Mr. Greeley a less dangerous man than Mr. Grant, in view of the centralizing tendency of the times? Personally he is not. Personally he is a far more dangerous man, in just the proportion that an active is more dangerous than a passive agent. No man in the land has more warmly and persistently advocated the paternal theory of government. If he believes in anything, it is in the power and the right and the duty of central government to promote the general prosperity in a variety of ways by legislation, and with all zeal, and to the utmost of his ability, and with the fiercest intolerance of opinions differing from his own, has he advocated the exercise of that power. His faith in legislative omnipotence is the key to this strange mystery of his character. Holding, as he does, to the central doctrine, every question resolves itself in his mind into one of expediency, and hence he has been everything by turns and nothing long, according as his views of expediency have changed. To-day advocating personal freedom for the negro, to-morrow advocating restrictions upon the freedom of exchange. To-day advocating peaceable secessions to-morrow advocating the most vindictive measures against those who attempted to secede. To-day pleading for amnesty to-morrow clamoring for military government. These wild inconsistencies are explicable only upon the supposition that the doctrine of governmental omnipotence is the cardinal doctrine in his political creed. The doctrine being the essence of centralization, Mr. Greeley is beyond all questions a more dangerous man personally than General Grant, in view of existing tendencies. There would be nothing to hope, in case of his election, except from the conservative influences to which he may be subjected."