Springfield Weekly Republican

Mr Dawes Advocating Gen Butler's Election.

Mr Dawes kept his engagement with the Salem republican meeting, Tuesday evening. His speech was substantially that previously delivered and already published, supplemented, however, with a few practical applications to the case of the sixth district republican voter. He is still clear that the supreme duty of the hour is to rally around Gen Grant, to sustain the party, and-in particular-to keep the republican delegation from Massachusetts "unbroken." This is the explanation he puts forward of what would otherwise strike most Massachusetts people as a very singular and surprising phenomenon-viz., the appearance of Henry L. Dawes upon a Butler platform to exhort the republican voters of the sixth district to return his colleague to the House. "Men," he told the Salem folks, "were nothing." He had differed with Gen Butler about several matters in the past. He knew very well what unfriendly critics would say about him; what construction they would put upon his course. But he was there to urge them to return Gen Butler to the House because he thought it vitally important in this crisis that Massachusetts should send a solid republican delegation to that body. Unity was safety. And so on.

It is true, though Mr Dawes appears not to have mentioned it to his Salem audience, that Gen Butler is committed up to his eyes to those very financial heresies from which Mr Dawes denounces one of his most eloquent arguments against a democratic restoration, and that he advocates a policy toward the South the adoption of which Mr Dawes once thought would set the country adrift upon a stormy sea and in a black night. It is true that Gen Butler has done more to debauche politics than any twenty democratic congressmen put together. It is true that he has brought such disgrace upon the commonwealth of Massachusetts as has never befallen her before at the hands of any of her servants. But he is a republican, he has been nominated in a regular manner by a republican convention, he rallies around Gen Grant, and Mr Dawes, taking everything into consideration, thinks it vitally important that he should be re-elected. It only remains now for Mr Dawes to appear in the adjoining congressional district, and advocate the election of Dr Ayer, in order to save the country from dissension and the breaking out of the rebellion, to make complete his recantation of all political independence, earn full title as a party slave, and probably gain a United States senatorship at the expense of his personal manhood.