Dr. Nelson Voted against the Interests of Every Man in Cortland County Who Wears a Hat

The Cortland News, Friday, May 11, 1883.

Lessons for the People.

   Last Friday night the [State] Legislature finally adjourned, there being no more offices or public plunder within reach of its rascally fingers. Although there is usually some excitement and disorder in the haste and desire of members to get their favorite measures to a final passage during the last hours of the Legislature, no previous Legislature has ever turned itself into a pandemonium and let loose so much loaferism and rowdyism as did this one during the afternoon and evening of Friday.

   As it is usual for great criminals to make a hasty exit from this life on Friday, there was clearly an aptness in the public body now defunct, of which we speak, so far recognizing the custom as to take the same day for its own taking-off. One day of the week having already become cursed by custom, it was well not to soil the chronicles of another.

   Yet from this piece of rascality which has just made its exit from the halls of the State it has for four months been disgracing, there are some lessons to be learned. Among these we suggest that there is an addition to what might be called the philosophy of politics, in that we learn that political tidal waves, like the tidal waves of nature, throw up on the shores of time nothing but flood-trash, the presence of which engenders miasma and endangers the lives and property of the people.

   The people may also learn that the great Republican party, which has always been found on the side of the people, and through which the people have been able to effect an honest civil service in all its branches—all that has ever been effected or asked for in behalf of temperance and of good order in community; an administration of the prisons that has not only made them reformatories, and teachers of a better life to the criminals, but has made them self-sustaining and relieved the taxpayers from any burdens on their account; a dealing with the great moneyed corporations that has given the people the benefit of railroads and telegraphs and at the same time prevented the ambitious leaders of those corporations from overthrowing or trampling upon the rights of the people, that the Republican party still has a useful mission.

   All can now see plainly that the Democratic party has not changed for the better, and that its pretenses of civil service reform, anti-monopoly, temperance and the like, were frauds and shams by which it sought to divide the Republican party, and thus enable its own leaders to seize and make spoil of the people's trusts. The people may also learn that the men in each county, who last fall went about claiming to be quasi Republicans or no party men, but to be great reformers who publicly thanked God that they were not like other men, and drew men out of the Republican party to vote for temperance, for anti-monopoly, and for civil service reform, that the Democratic plans might thus succeed, were no more than political judases who were so working to earn the money contributed to Democratic success by the railroad magnates and the rumsellers.

   In Cortland county the Standard ring of political jumping jacks, who played the hypocrite with so much noise and parade last fall, shouting for temperance, civil-service reform and anti-monopoly, have now no condemnation for the legislature that passed a free-rum bill over Republican opposition; that refused to submit a prohibitory amendment to the constitution to the people as urged by the Republicans; that tried to abolish the reforming labor in State prisons which made them self-sustaining; that made itself the tool of the elevated railroads and monopolists in spite of Republican warnings; that publicly declared its principles of civil-service reform to be to legislate Republicans out and Democrats in. By denouncing those acts they denounce themselves for making them possible, but the people will remember all.

The Member from Cortland County.

   When the people of Cortland county consider the course of the late Legislature and take pains to inquire as to whether their representative was in Albany and what he did there, none but those who stood squarely up for the Republican candidate last fall and refused to assist either directly or indirectly in Dr. Nelson's election have any reason to congratulate themselves. The interests of his constituents have apparently been secondary to some other consideration—we know not what—as a basis for his action, for nearly every vote of his on important questions has been contrary to the sentiment or interests of the large majority of the people of this county.

   In the Sprague and Bliss contest for a seat from one of the New York districts, although a majority of the Democrats as well as all the Republicans upon the committee appointed to investigate the matter reported that Sprague was fairly elected and should be given the seat, yet Dr. Nelson, at the beck of Tammany, voted to allow Bliss to retain the seat, and thus to overthrow the election. We believe that a large majority of the people of this county believe in fair elections and will disapprove of this partisan act.

   He voted against the people's interest in voting against the bill to reduce the fares on New York elevated railroads from ten to five cents. That bill was supported by nearly every member from New York city, and would have afforded great relief to the poor people of that city living up town and working down town, and still left a large profit to the companies. No man in Cortland county was interested to have Dr. Nelson vote in favor of those great corporations.

   Although he owed his election to the fact that the Standard Ring had paraded the county exhorting the people to vote for “temperance” (!) and thus drew votes enough from the Republican candidate to make Nelson's election possible, he shocked not only the ultra- temperance caucus but all lovers of law…in voting for free-rum and in voting against the submission to the people of a constitutional amendment prohibiting the sale of liquor as a beverage.

   In the interest of the hat manufacturers of New York and the river counties, and against the interests of every man in Cortland county who wears a hat, taxpayer or not, he voted in favor of abolishing the manufacture of hats in Clinton prison—the principal industry carried on there—which will make an expense to the State of $100,000 after the present contracts expire.

   Again, in the interests of those desiring to monopolize all the industries now carried on in the prisons, and make them all to be again supported by the taxpayers, he voted against the interest of every citizen of Cortland county in favor of the bill to prohibit contracts for those manufactures in all the prisons. He can not claim this to be in the interest of workingmen, for the manufacturers and not the workingmen asked it, and he was sent to represent the interests of Cortland county.

   We will give him credit for voting for the bill to prevent frauds in primaries, but even that would seem like a thrust at his friends of the Standard Ring, who, last fall, printed and sent into the Cortland caucus the tissue ballots, that then for the first time appeared in Cortland county politics and made the restraint of law seem necessary in such places.

   In all the schemes for legislating out present officials to make room for appointees of the Democratic Ring he has been found voting for that ring and carrying out the new gospel of civil-service reform, which does not wait for a vacancy in the usual course, but legislates the incumbents out and the Democrats in.