Lancaster Daily Intelligencer

Hypocrites and Pretenders.

It is gratifying to see the United States
Senate display such a tender conscience as
it discloses in the rejection of Collectors
Chase and Pillsbury! These appointees
of President Cleveland are cast out be-
cause some of the senatorial pretenders
affect to believe they were ring-leaders
in one of the most infamous frauds ever
perpetrated, an attempt to count out a
lawfully elected governor of Maine.

Now the truth is those two
men
are intellectually, morally and politically
the peers of
fully
half
the
senators whose votes
were
thrown
for
the defeat of their confirmation in the
Senate. Granted that in the Maine elec-
tion case they stood upon the technicalities
rather than the equities of the situation,
this is not really so bad as Sherman, Ed-
mands, Hoar, Evarts, and the rest of them
did in the electoral contest of 1877. The
especial vileness and villainy of that trans-
action was that one principle of law was
applied in one case and a different one in
another; that the alleged equity controlled
in one instance while the extreme letter of
the law was appealed to in another; when
the returns suited, the face of them was
taken, and when they did not the conspira-
tors were quite willing to go behind them.
When fraud had been made triumphant
those who had engineered its success be-
came its prime beneficiaries. Stoughton.
Noyes and Kasson took share in the best
places abroad; and Evarts and Sherman be-
came the chief ministers in the new ad-
ministration at home; and every mean.
low, dirty scamp who had bribed and lied
the great conspiracy through was paid out
of the executive patronage and the federal
treasury. No Republican senator's voice
was raised against their confirmation, and
in all that long, eventful struggle only the
votes of Representatives Seelye and Pierce
were cast against their party's adherence
to wrong and its protection of crime.

The opposition to Pillsbury and Chase is
not a sign of conversion: it is un-
mitigated hypocrisy.