NATURALIZATION IN NEW YORK. 255 beaten by the sheriff for offering a whig vote. There being a large locofoco mob about the polls, threatening the few whigs who approached, the latter were obliged to leave, save in a few instances, without voting, so that the recorded vote of Plaquemines stood for Clay, 37; for Polk, 1,007! The locofoco majority in the state was 699; and if the vote of the Plaquemines precinct had been admitted to be as at the election of 1843, Mr. Clay would have carried the state. In his remarks at Faneuil Hall, on the result of the election Mr. Webster said : "I believe it to be an unquestionable fact, that masters of vessels, having brought over emigrants from Europe, have, within thirty days of their arrival, seen those very persons carried up to the polls, and give their votes for the highest offices in the national and state governments. Such voters of course exercise no intelligence, and, indeed, no volition of their own. They can know nothing, either of the question at issue, or of the candidates proposed. They are mere instruments, used by unprincipled men—and made competent instruments only by the accumulation of crime upon crime. Now it seems to me impossible that every honest man, and every good citizen, every true lover of liberty and the constitution, every real friend of the country, would not desire to see an end put to these enormous abuses." A reform, Mr. Webster added, was just as important to the rights of foreigners, regularly and fairly naturalized among us, as it is to the rights of native-born American citizens. The total vote in the state of New York, in the presidential election of 1844, was-for Clay, 232,473; for Polk, 237,588; for Birney, 15,812 in all, 485,808. The majority for Polk over Clay was 5,115; the majority for Clay and Birney over Polk, 10,632. In the city of New York, and the counties of Erie and St. Lawrence, the most remarkable increase in the locofoco vote was exhibited, and here the largest amount of fraud was perpetrated. For weeks before the election, the courts in the city of New York were crowded by the applicants for naturalization, sent there by the industrious locofoco committees. One of the daily papers gave the following account of a scene presented the day before the election: Yesterday noon, more than three hundred aliens had crowded about the doors of the common pleas in the city-hall, when, the room having been emptied through the windows, and the doors reopened for fresh admissions, such a scene was witnessed as has rarely been exhibited in an American 66 court-room. The doors were violently thrust in, and the avalanche of human beings came onward with such impetuosity, as to overthrow everything in its course. Coats were torn off, hats were trodden under foot, men were crowded and jammed until almost lifeless, and, in two or three cases, half an hour elapsed before they had recovered themselves sufficiently to speak. Outside of the court-room, the crowd of foreigners was clamorous for admission, and it required the physical force of six officers to make an opening for one of the judges. The court-room was filled and emptied not less than four times during the day, and among the crowd were a number of Irish women.' In the city of New York, notwithstanding an admitted defection from the locofoco ranks to the whig, the locofoco increase from 1840, was 6,361; in St. Lawrence county, it was 1,126, while the whig vote was diminished 131; in Erie, it was 1,359, while the whig increase was only 122. All the convictions for fraud at the polls in this election were upon one political side, as was all the presumptive evidence of fraud. In the city of New York, the conspiracy for swindling the people bore the marks of deliberate trickery and systematic corruption. There is one plain fact which is a conclusive answer to those who, in their ignorance, might question the assertion that the locofocos are the party which alone avails itself of these infamous outrages on the elective franchise. There is a simple remedy for the evil-a registry law. In the cities of Massachusetts, this law is found to operate as an efficient check to all illegal voting; and in Massachusetts, we see none of that inordinate increase in the locofoco vote, that was exhibited in other places, where no such restrictions are established. The facilities for illegal voting in the city of New York, are enormous. single individual, by dint of hard-swearing and adroit management, can vote at all the voting-booths in the city, numbering upward of sixty! A well-drilled band of a hundred men, might easily cast upward of a thousand votes in one day! A registry law is the only sufficient means of preventing the evil. Compel every legal voter in every ward to have his name enrolled on a printed list of voters some days previous to the election, so that time may be given to the ward officers to compare the lists, and A OPPOSITION TO A REGISTRY LAW. 257 satisfy themselves of their correctness, and you provide a safeguard against the profanation of the ballot-box. Which party has solicitously asked for such a safeguard, and which has repudiated it? Which party, after repeated exertions, procured a registry law, and which party, the moment they came into power, abrogated it with an indecent haste? The replies to these questions fix the stigma of fraud and corruption where it belongs. The locofoco party of New York, have ever shown themselves the reckless and inveterate opponents of a registry law. They denounce it as anti-democratic. And why? Because it takes the poor man from his work to go and register his name, and presupposes a certain amount of information on his part as to the requisitions of the law, for the absence of which information he ought not to be disfranchized. This is the sum and substance of locofoco argument against a registry law; as if it were undemocratic to secure the majority, by the only efficient safeguard, from being cheated, by requiring voters to go through the simple form of registering their names a fitting time before the opening of the polls! Although locofocoism may arrive at its conclusions by logic like this, it is obviously at war with sound democracy. The opposition which the party has always maintained in New York to a registry law, is proof presumptive that the charges of fraud brought by the whigs are not unfounded. The system of betting on elections, always objectionable, invariably operates in favor of the least scrupulous party. The money wagered is forestalled and parceled out among political hacks, whose pay depending on the successful result of their services, they are incited to exertions the most reckless to compass their ends. Let the whigs always beware of betting with their antagonists. "It is naught, and it can not come to good." The money foolishly lost in this way by whigs at the election of 1844, went to requite the services of thousands of those mercenary politicians who are ever ready to attach themselves to the party which pays the best. In the state of New York alone, there were cast spurious votes enough to defeat the election of Mr. Clay. In Louisiana, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, similar frauds were perpetrated on a smaller scale. Had the true voice of the majority of legal voters in those states been heard, the result would have been favorable to the whigs. But misrepresentation, brute force, and political immorality, prevailed. The subject is an ungracious one to dwell upon. The history of the frauds of 1844 is a dark chapter in our annals. Party profligacy then exhausted its resources in the attainment of its ends. We have already described with what renewed confidence and attachment the country turned to Mr. Clay after that defeat. "I have ben," he writes, the 25th of April, 1845, "in spite of unexpected discomfitures, the object of honors and of compliments usually rendered only to those who are successful and victorious in the great enterprises of mankind. To say nothing of other demonstrations, the addresses and communications which I have received since the election from every quarter, from collective bodies and individuals, and from both sexes, conveying senti ments and feelings of the warmest regard and strongest friendship, and deploring the issue of the election, would fill a volume. I have been quite as much, if not more, affected by them than I was by any disappointment of personal interest of my own in the event of the contest." XXIV. THE WAR ON MEXICO--FINANCIAL POLICY. THE public acts of Mr. Clay exhibit unequivocally the principles by which he would have been guided and the policy he would have pursued in the event of his election. They are the principles and the policy to which the whig party owed, and continues to owe, all its cohesion and all its power. A triumph without them would not be a whig triumph. It might benefit a few office-seekers and professional politicians here and there, but it would be barren of all good to the people at large. In the opinion of Mr. Clay, the policy of the country in regard to the protection of American industry seemed, previous to the election of 1844, to be rapidly acquiring a permament and fixed character. Yielding to the joint influence of their own reflections and experience, the slave states were fast subscribing to the justice and expediency of a tariff for revenue, with discriminations for protection. At such an auspicious moment, beguiled by the misrepresentations which proclaimed Mr. Polk as equally a CONSEQUENCES OF THE ELECTION. 259 friend to the tariff with Mr. Clay, the great states of Pennsylvania and New York, both friendly to the protective policy, allowed it to be perilled and impaired by the ascendency of a hostile administration. The distribution of the proceeds of the sales of the public lands, was another measure which the triumph of the whigs would have secured; and if the great national inheritance of those lands is not wasted in a few years by graduation and other projects of alienation, it must be through the adoption of a system kindred to that which Mr. Clay has consistently advocated. Internal improvements, the removal of obstructions from our rivers and harbors, the enlargement of all those facilities which contribute to the comfort, the prosperity, and the dignity of mankind, would have been embraced in that comprehensive and generous policy which has always found a ready champion in Mr. Clay. Instead of a barren and unproductive war, the pernicious consequences of which will be felt to a remote prosperity, we should have had the money of the nation expended upon objects which would have been permanently productive and beneficent. In return for all the money and blood lavished in the unrighteous war with Mexico, what can we show? Territory, which we could have acquired by peaceful means at a tenth part of the expenditure! But what amount of unrequired territory, or of opulent spoils, could requite the desolation inflicted upon thousands of hearts by the ravages of war? "Why praise we, prodigal of fame, The rage that sets the world on flame? The brass may breathe, the marble frown; Ten thousand living trophies stand." Had the true wish of the country prevailed, we should have had no war with Mexico, no national debt, no repeal of the tariff of 1842, no sub-treasury, no imputation against us, by the united voice of all the nations of the earth, of a spirit of aggression and inordinate territorial aggrandizement. |