of its history. What the country now stands most in need of, is parties without records. Only when such parties exist will it be possible to discuss and decide public questions strictly upon their own merits. Now they are decided in most cases upon side-issues more or less false, which in itself is a great misfortune.
There are many honest Democrats sincerely attached to the principles we advocate. They should now at last recognize the fact that their old party organization is too much encumbered with its traditions and its history to serve as an efficient instrument in carrying those principles into reality, or even to act as an efficient opposition where opposition is needed. Attempts will be made to reorganize the old Democratic party, but I believe such attempts will fail, as I think they ought to fail. It cannot be reorganized on anything like its platform of 1868. One of the great and most beneficial results of the last Presidential campaign, consists in the fact that there is no national party in existence now that has not distinctly in its platform recognized the results of the war as embodied in the Constitution, and a step backward in this respect is impossible. But if it is attempted to reorganize the Democratic party upon the basis of the Liberal program, sensible men, who have the ideas embodied in that program sincerely at heart, will at once discover that the means employed will be an impediment to the accomplishment of the ends contemplated.
TO E. L. GODKIN
Private.
How cruel you are! The Nation makes me responsible
for the disaster at Cincinnati, because I “had an
opportunity to retrieve it, and missed it.” The truth is that
