[Marse Henry Complete by Henry Watterson]@TWC D-Link bookMarse Henry Complete CHAPTER the Thirty-First 9/19
Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead or the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populist party is dead.
That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden.
The principles of government which they laid down and advocated have been for the most part obliterated. What slavery and secession were unable to accomplish has been brought about by nationalizing sumptuary laws and suffrage. The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic Senators and Representatives from the South and West who carried through the prohibition amendment.
The _coup de grace_ was administered by a President of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved the Federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution. The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State rights.
The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, the way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essential functions and the erection of a Federal Government more powerful than anything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream. When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than by character.
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