sixty, seventy, and
eighty thousand. With a Democratic administration installed at
Washington, and the power and prestige which that fact will imply and
apply in the local politics of the States,--and in no State more
powerfully than in Massachusetts, where the shifting body of Independent
voters, so-called, is largely made up of the Hessian element that will
incline to whichever side has spoils to bestow,--the Republican party in
order to hold Massachusetts will have to cultivate and strengthen the
alliance which it formed in the late election with the laboring class of
voters. It will have to revert to the sympathetic and liberal policy
touching all questions that affect labor, and the welfare of the working
people of the State, which marked the earlier years of its power. The
Ames family is linked in the popular mind with that policy. And justly
so, too! Oakes Ames was a true friend to labor, as well as one of the
most practical; and the fine instinct which guided him in making of
North Easton a model industrial community, where the happiest relations
of mutual confidence and support have subsisted between employer and
employed, he bequeathed to his sons, and to Oliver in an especial and
marked degree. It has been said, and there is no element of exaggeration
in the statement, that if all our large capitalists and manufacturers
could succeed in establishing the same rapport between themselves and
their employes which the Ameses have always maintained at North Easton,
the vexed problem of capital and labor would be solved; for there would
be no more conflict between them. Oliver Ames is held in the same high
esteem and almost affectionate regard by the working people of the Old
Colony district, where the interests of the Ames Manufacturing Company
are centred, in which his honored father was held before him. As the
father so the sons! When the time comes, and it is not far off, that the
Republican party in Massachusetts shall feel the necessity of getting
nearer to her common people, and, in order to retain its supremacy in
the State, of offering to their suffrages a man whose whole life has
been spent in close and friendly relations with her working-men, it will
be strangely blind indeed, to its opportunity, if it shall not turn to
the present popular Lieutenant Governor, and present the name of Oliver
Ames as one well fitted to lead the revival of Republicanism among the
working-classes, and certain, if presented to