VOL. i. NEBRASKA CITY , NEB. , THURSDAY , SEPTEMBER 8 , 1898. NO. 9.
FUllIilSIIED WEEKLY.
OFFICES : OVERLAND THEATRE BLOCK.
J. STERLING MORTON , EDITOU.
A .TOUHNAL .DEVOTED TO THE DISCUSSION
OF POLITICAL , ECONOMIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL
QUESTIONS.
TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.
One dollar and a half per year , in advance ,
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Canada. Remittances made payable to The
Morton Printing Company.
Address , THE CONSERVATIVE , Nebraska
City , Neb.
Advertising Rates made known upon appli
cation.
Entered at the postofllco at Nebraska City ,
Neb. , as Second Class matter , July 29th , 1808.
BECAUSE THE The demagogy
GOVERNMENT of communistic
GAVE THEM speakers and the
LAND.
strategy of the
social culprits -who promote and organ
ize discontent among the citizens 'of the
United States have for many years been
making assaults upon the railroads of
this country. Railroad companies , rail
road managers and railroad properties
have been the especial objects of the
hatred of both domestic and imported
communists. Herr Most and Mr. Debs
never omitted any word of denunciation
which their vicious vocabularies con
tained when they indulged in oratorical
pyrotechnics. Nearly all the flap-doodle-
ism , and flabbergast of thorn-crowns
and crucifixions on golden crosses for
bleeding labor , have been evolved from
meditations upon the crimes of capital
embodied in railroads.
And in attempts to stir up wrath for
the stockholders and bondholders of
railroads , a very large per cent of whom
are estates , trustees of widows and or
phans , and trust companies the fact
that the government donated lands to
railroad companies is always made prom
inent as a reason why the government
may , can or must regulate rates on these
railroads. Because these companies were
given lauds provided they would con
struct certain lines of road , the govern
ment has the right saith Debs and
Most to fix the prices of the services
which these roads render to the people.
Laud grants to roads make the ser
vices of those roads forever subject to
enacted prices , regulated rates , by the
government !
Homesteads are granted to settlers if
they will locate upon raw lands and
nako them into farms and homes. And
f giving lands to secure railroads makes
he power of the government to fix rates ,
vhy does not giving lands to secure
'arms leave inherent in the government
; he right to establish prices for all the
products of those donated domains ?
low would a law limiting the price of
lornestead-grown wheat and corn suit
lie proprietors of such donated farms ?
if the railroads must bo regulated be-
; ause the government gave them lands
why should not homesteaders , by a
parity of reasoning , likewise bo limited
jy legislation , as to prices of all the
products of the lands given to them by
; ho general government ?
populists
HATE
IT.au ( * ° " e r C ° m
BUT GET IT.
munists teach hat
red of wealth as a cardinal virtue. To
acquire , to accumulate and conserve
capital is an atrocity. It is plutocracy
plundering the poor , whenever a citizen
reates , by indiistoy , sobriety , good
management and self-denial , enough
capital to hire mind and muscle to work
for him. Then it is that he becomes a
target and is denounced as a tyrant.
Then it is that he is lashed by the
tongues of those fervid lovers of "the
plain people" who prance up and down
the country proclaiming the greed and
wickedness of the capitalistic classes ,
and ' are also collecting money from
wage-earners with which to pay them
selves for malting an economic disturb
ance. They hate money , but get it by
any and every device except that of
honest efforts to earn money. Each one
of them denounces capital and capi
talists , and each one of them is ambitious
to get capital and become a capitalist.
They tell how hard the times are ,
and how close money is , and brag
of getting five hundred dollars for a
single speech full of froth and fallacy.
They talk of the limited libraries for
plain people and boast of sales , amount
ing to hundreds of thousands of dollars ,
for books like Coin Harvey's School for
Idiots , or that bigger volume of bigger
bosh "The First Battle. " They de
nounce monopoly and then seek the
monopoly of the gullibility of all the
emotional , ignorant people in the coun
try for the purpose of doing them out
of their ballots and their dollars.
/ Recall the waipaign of 1896 ! Re
read the prophecies of Bryan and the
other calamity forecasters as to the evils
.which . the defeat of 16 to 1 and its ticket
anjl the Success of the gold standard
w/jhild / inexorably precipitate upon the
A'jfuerican people.
pkl they not tell you that wheat prices
and silver prices were iiidissolubly and
forever married and that no power on
earth could ever divorce these commer
cial affinities ? Did they not even de
clare 16 to 1 a God-instituted ratio and
did not Senator Monologue Morgan of
Alabama preach to the senate by the day
upon the heavenly origin of the sacred
16 to 1 ratio and dogma ?
And what financial prediction among
them 'all has been verified ? What
prophecy of evil to agriculture , com
merce and manufacture made by those
oracles remains unimpeached ? _
Sparkling oratory , pleasing metaphor \
and even skillful elocution are as delic
ious as soft , soda-pop , fizzing drinks at
drug-stores in summer. But the intel
lect starves without some logic and the
soul sickens without some truth just as
the body would on no other sustenance /
than soft summer drinks. ' -
That populist exhorters and commuii- '
istic declaimers all aver their hatred of
thrift and its accumulations everybody
knows. And everybody but their im
mediate dupes sees and understands that
by mere words those exhorters and de
claimers would get money which suc
cessful men get by work and retain for
use as capital by good judgment , self-
denial and careful management.
To hate people who have earned and
saved a competence ; to array all the
thriftless against the thrifty ; to stir up
discontent and make antagonisms in the
social and industrial life of the United
States ; and at the same time to gain for
themselves political prominence and a
pecuniary competence is the object and
aim of ninety-nine out of every hundred
of the blatant advocates of populism ,
which is communisn only thinly dis
guised.
The conglomerate
REAFFIRMED
FALLACIES. ate political con
ventions of the
summer of 1898 take great pains to ex
plicitly reaffirm their faith in all the
money fallacies advanced by the St.
Louis convention of populists and the
Chicago convention of alleged democrats
in 1896. Those two bodies agreed that
year upon the sixteen-to-oneness of sil
ver and upon the dangerous diabolism
of the satanic gold standard. The only
difference between the Chicago conven
tion and the St. Louis convention was
