The New Orleans Daily Democrat

THE MEANING OF THE PROSECUTIONS.

The indictment of four individuals in this State for forging election returns has created a strange and significant sensation throughout the country. In many quarters it has been received as if it were the first movement of a revolution. If it had been a coup d'etat, to be followed by the overthrow of the existing government and the installation of a new administration, the clamor could not have been greater nor the discussions more wild and excited.

Not only this; the most far-fetched theories of these prosecutions have been given currency by our own press, and these have been seized upon by the press of the country, reproduced, colored and exaggerated, to the injury of this State and the probable embarrassment of the administration of justice. The Times and Picayune have taxed their imaginations and ingenuity to invent fanciful and sensational origins and theories of the prosecution. In one column we are told the Tilden Democrats and Blaine Republicans have instigated them from New York and other points in the North and in the next we learn that Packard and Pitkin are at the bottom of the whole business. One paper startles the country by the information that Stanley Matthews and John Sherman are also to be indicted as coadjutors of the Returning Board, and the other mixes up Democrats and Republicans, Hayes and Thurman, and Blaine, Gov. Nicholls, State officers and notes to the Grand Jury, in one fearful, unintelligible and inexplicable mass.

Every theory, in short, possible or impossible, of the indictment of Wells and associates is suggested by the Times and Picayune, and produced and commented upon by the Northern press hostile to us, save the plain and obvious one that lies upon the surface of things and which may be seen by any man of common intelligence.

It is believed throughout the United States that the members of the Returning Board committed the crime of forgery; that belief in this community amounts to a firm, positive and unalterable conviction. So universal and positive is this conviction that no man could discharge the duties of Attorney General of Louisiana or District Attorney of Orleans, or of a member of a grand jury, and ignore it, or fail to institute a rigid inquiry into the facts, without violating his solemn oath of office and becoming himself a perjurer.

The interests which were involved in the matter, in relation to which these men are believed to have committed forgery, are of the highest import to the people of Louisiana; they concern the highest and most valued rights of a free people, and they concern the good government and prosperity of the State.

The statute defining the crime and fixing its penalty is clear and unequivocal, and in conformity with that which exists in every enlightened, law abiding country.

With these facts open, patent to every man in the State, and for that matter in the United States, where is the sense of going outside of them to find sensational and absurd reasons for these prosecutions? When it is obvious that the law officers of the government and the Grand Jury could not fail to prosecute four men, notoriously of bad character, for the crime of forgery without themselves becoming perjurers, what public end can the press serve by attributing to the officers of the law bad, or political, or interested motives for the discharge of their duties? When, assuming that the Attorney General, District Attorney and the members of the Grand Jury were honest men, it was impossible for them not to prosecute these malefactors, why go out of the record to find impossible reasons for their action?

The Northern and Western press will take a more intelligent view of this business if it will discard the wild and baseless theories of our contemporaries and look for themselves at the bottom facts. The prosecution of the members of the Returning Board is simply one of the results of the re-establishment in Louisiana of an honest, vigorous, law-enforcing government. Under a government which hangs murderers as ours does, and a single court of which, in one term, convicts upwards of a hundred murderers, house-burners, perjurers and thieves, four men whom every man, woman and child in the State believe to be guilty of a felony, will necessarily, in the very nature of things, be vigorously prosecuted.

We are glad of it; our contemporaries here and abroad should be glad of it; the President should be glad of it, for it is a manifestation of a hearty vigor in the administration of the laws of a State which has long been the refuge, the home, nay, the paradise, of political vagabonds and thieves. It is an inspiring indication that the filthy robberies of the State are about to be ventilated and that the noxious atmosphere which for ten years has poisoned them is about to be expelled by the sweet air of heaven.

This prosecution, indeed, is a measure to be commended by all good citizens, for it is necessary to the preservation of the honor of our State and to restore our manners and our virtues.