Shepherdstown Register

The Late Presidential Election.

The New York World says of the result of the Presidential Election as follows:

The cause of this deplorable discomfiture lies much further back than the nomination of Mr. Greeley. It was doubtless a mistake, even under the circumstances which existed last May and June, to take up Mr. Greeley; but the real source of weakness was in the circumstances themselves which rendered such a nomination possible. "The cause of the cause is the cause of the thing caused." If the democratic party had not been reduced to a feeling bordering on despair by previous untoward events, it would not have tolerated for an instant a candidate whose whole past history represented everything which was hostile to democratic ideas of the philosophy, functions, and limitations of government. The true explanation of this defeat is not to be found in the nomination of Mr. Greeley, but in that previous letting down of party hope and spirit which reconciled our national convention to an act of sheer desperation.

Most unfortunately the explanation is too easy. The wings of the democratic party were clipped by the astounding frauds and corruption of the Tammany ring. Had it not been for the shameful exposures which cost us the State election last year, we should easily have succeeded in this presidential contest. The Tammany frauds were the source of all our woes. New York was the chief citadel of the democratic party; and it is creditable to the moral sentiment of the country that the hideous revelations of last year brought the democratic party into disrepute. Had it not been for the weakening, prostrating effect of those revelations, the democracy, with all the omens in its favor, would have disdained to go outside of its own organization for a candidate. It is not Mr. Greeley's nomination at Baltimore, but the previous demoralization which rendered such a nomination possible, that has cost us this election.