The writer of these Recollections has been a Republican
as long as there has been a Republican party, and has probably loved
the party as well as it has deserved. This party, as is well known,
has assumed to be "the party of moral and religious ideas." Now I have
known, in cases not a few, men to be nominated for office by this
party--men who were respectable and Christian men, and they have
told me, and they have made the confession with shame and
humiliation--that the party managers have come to them and said, "You
are assessed so much for campaign expenses." The pretext was, that
this was for legitimate campaign work; and yet they knew that the
pretext was a lie, and that it was to constitute a corruption fund, to
be put into the saloons. And these men were thus made candidates, to
give respectability to the saloonkeepers' party, and, though they did
not go into the saloons themselves, they must pay toll to the devil
all the same.
It was under such circumstances that this boy, who had been raised in
our neighborhood, but had grown to be a man, and had entered upon
public life, now became a center of attraction to the
hale-fellows-well-met of the saloon and the caucus.
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