The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1896. DANGEROUS LEGISLATION.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 106, 2 November 1896, Page 2

The Feilding Star, Oroua & Kiwitea Counties Gazette. Published Daily. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1896. DANGEROUS LEGISLATION.

The desire of giving a fictitious value to silver by legislation is causing intense anxiety among the better in formed of the public of tbe United States of America. One of the ablest of American journalists, Mr Alden, in an article contributed to the Nine teenth Century, frankly states that he is haunted with the fear of a new civil war of secession. After referring to tbe war of 1861-5 into which tbe Northerners allowed themselves to drift, be says " The American people have been blind to the steady growing danger that the Federal Government may, at no distant day, fall into the hands of the Silverites, and that the Eastern States will then, be compelled to choose between utter ruin and withdrawal from tbe Union. . . . Tbe average Western American is a man of unbounded energy, unbounded self-conceit, and unbounded ignorance. It is to the ignorant West that the United States owe the Greenback folly, the Protectionist delusion and the silver craze. American optimism shirk 3 the confession that the West dislikes the East." Of the near future he says, "The probabilities are at present in favor of the election of McKinley. But a defeat of the Silverites this year simply postpones their I victory for four brief years. . That the free and unlimited .coinage of silver means the utter ruin of \kne> J&jjsp goes without saying. When the Silverites gain possession of the Federal Govern, meat tip* East must submit, with what gr*qe it can #»ster, to complete and hopeless bankruptcy, w\t must withdraw from the Union, and deavorto j»aintain its indepe.udenc.e byartefi." There is no mistaking the

his subject and thoroughly understands the people whose aims and interests he • discusses. There is a hope certainly j that the better sense of the whole nation may prevent such a dire calam- , ity as another devastating civil war. | Still, on the other hand, there always , exists the danger of a conflict where ] innate selfishness and greed accentuate a hatred which is. unfortunately, i known to exist between two great sections of the people of the United States, whose blood has not yet been fused into a common nationality. Should the fears of Mr Alden be justified by after events the conseqnences will be too terrible even to conjecture, entailing as they must a dreadful loss of life and the total destruction of the accumulations of the industry of the past thirty years. Legislation for one class at the expense of another is always fraught with danger.