There are many good men in the Democratic Party.

But the strength of that organization in 1900, as it is to-day, was in Tammany Hall, in the old Southern leaders committed to a policy of violence and fraud in dealing with ten million of our American citizens at home, aided by a few impracticable dreamers who were even less fitted than the Democratic leaders to be trusted with political power.
The Republican Party, whatever its faults, since it came into power in 1860 has been composed in general of what is best in our national life.

States like Massachusetts and Vermont, the men of the rural districts in New York, the survivors and children of the men who put down the Rebellion and abolished slavery, saved the Union, and paid the debt and kept the faith, and achieved the manufacturing independence of the country, and passed the homestead laws, are on that side, and in general they give and will hereafter give direction to its counsels.

On the other hand their antagonist has been, is, and for an indefinite time to come will be, controlled by the foreign population and the criminal classes of our great cities, by Tammany Hall, and by the leaders of the solid South.
I entered the House of Representatives of the United States at the spring session which began March 4, 1869, at the beginning of Grant's Administration.

It then contained a very interesting and important group of men, the most brilliant and conspicuous of whom was, undoubtedly, Mr.James G.Blaine.