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Kansas University Weekly.
In 1867, in flagrant defiance of the constitution and over the President's veto, Congress placed ten southern states under military rule, reduced them to subject provinces, opened the way to misgovernment therein, and then, with an irony worthy of the politics of those shameful days, declared that before these disfranchised states should be entitled to representation in Congress they must adopt new constitutions subject to the approval of that body, and elect legislatures to ratify the fourteenth amendment. That is to say, these states should be treated as states and not as states at the same time; as states good enough to vote for the amendment, but not good enough to vote in Congress. If the central government may do this what may it not do? Carried to its logical results it means the virtual absorption of the chief functions of sovereignty in the national government and the reduction of the states to insignificance
The greatest blow that has been aimed at the constitutional rights of the people in recent years—a blow designed to destroy home rule by concentrating still more power in the Federal government, to magnify the Union by dwarfing the states, was the notorious Force Bill. It was proposed through this revolutionary measure that the Federal government should have control of the "supervision, counting and certification of the election of members of Congress," and that the people of the several states should no longer be trusted to perform these functions which had been exercised by them unquestioned since the foundation of the government. The bill proposed to place at each of the sixty thousand voting places at least three supervisors of election, who should derive their authority from the Circuit judges. The argument that as these judges held their offices for life they would be thereby removed from partizan influence was a delusion and a snare. The American people can never forget the action of the Supreme Court judges associated in the Electoral Commission of 1876, and so long as they remember the now admitted theft of the Presidency they cannot be made to
believe that these Federal judges would be impartial. Such an idea as putting the judiciary in control of the elections is repugnant to the Constitution. The very division of the governmental departments into executive, judicial and legislative meant that their functions should be separate, the "legislative to make, the judicial to construe and the executive to enforce the laws." To permit the judicial department to control the election of members of the legislative branch in the least degree destroys the intent and undermines the Constitution of our country. The scope and purpose of the entire bill was inimical to our rights and destructive to our liberties. The whole scheme was devised by a partisan majority in Congress for partisan purposes. If the courts had sustained the system it would have revolutionized the government by fear, force and fraud.
Concurrent with this "political drift" is the amazing class legislation in favor of consolidated capital. Of all centralization which threatens our liberties and menaces our peace this is the most dangerous. No man, who has observed the signs of the times, can note the encroachment of the money power on the rights of individuals without feeling that the time is coming when there will be a conflict between "plutocracy and the people." The voice of history must be heeded. The trusts of this country in all their greed or daring have no more moral right to capture and control the articles of "prime necessity" and force tribute from the people than the highwayman who halts a traveller at the point of a pistol and demands his money or his life. Take one instance: A wealthy Chicago man secured control of all the wheat in this country and advanced flour three dollars a barrel. After collecting four millions of dollars in "forced tribute from the people" he opened his corner, released the wheat, and the world, forgetting his theft from hundreds of starving and despairing families, praised him as the Napoleon of finance and trade. This deal will bear analyzing. Not one cent of this added profit went to the farmers