nicipal, need to be taught, by
constitutional limitation and a sound public opinion, that a citizen's
property is his as against every demand, except for a just, honest, and
economical administration of the government.

As helping reform and growing out of it, a reorganization of parties is
needed. The present parties have "played out." Parties are essential in
republics, but they should represent intelligent patriotism, be
organized on practical, living issues, and be vitalized by principles.
Who is wise enough to tell what differentiates the Republican and the
Democratic parties? What distinctive principles divide them? Who can
"locate" the parties on such questions as tariff, currency, expenditure,
civil service reform, character of the government, boundary between
reserved and delegated powers? Issues like secession and slavery, no
longer disputed or doubted, should have no influence in forming or
keeping alive parties. Obsolete shibboleths should not alienate those
who are otherwise agreed. A party not crystallizing around vital issues,
not having "the dignity of contention" for principles, becomes a machine
to put up A or put down B. The _ins_ and the _outs_ make now the two
centres of the dividing parties, which have become cliques and cabals
controlled by caucuses.

This is a most opportune season for reorganization of political
parties, and a readjustment on broad and living issues. It is wrong to
be carrying about the dead corpse of the past. A new generation has
grown up since 1860. The spirit of the age is not what it was two
decades since. The young men know next to nothing of Whiggery and
Democracy. To make secession, or slavery, or the "bloody shirt" a
rallying cry, is as absurd as to exhume the embargo or the alien and
sedition laws. The inertia of society is great, and men cohere from
traditions of the past. The reform bill of 1832 was long delayed in
England, in its practical results, because the statesmen of 1832
continued in public life. So now effete parties are kept alive for
partisan or patriotic ends by those who seem not to have realized that
we are living in a new America.

It seems a plain duty to gather up what survives of our constitutional
federal republic, of the labors of the past, and with a catholic spirit
to combine for reformation of abuses, for national conciliation, for
purifying parties, for saving the republic. A party equally of order
and of progress, in favor of retrenchment,