Lincoln's Party No More

Feb. 1914

Hundreds of thousands of American citizens paid tribute last week to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. To many of them who, entering upon the threshold of manhood, cast their first vote for that great man, there must have been painful thoughts of the decay and downfall of the party his election brought into power.

The Republican party in 1860 was the exponent of a great moral idea. As such it swept every northern state except one and elected Lincoln President by a popular plurality of 491,195 and an electoral plurality of 108. Fifty-two years later the Republican party, which had long ceased to be a party of a moral idea and had degenerated into an instrument of special privilege, crumbled to the ground. Only two lesser states, Utah and Vermont, gave their paltry eight electoral votes to the party candidate.

We do not believe, however, Lincoln would shed a tear, were he on earth today, over the party's downfall. It was a principle, not a party name, that he stood for. The Republican party of 1912 had the form but not the substance, the body but not the soul, of Lincoln's party. Lincoln's party ceased to be when selfish and unscrupulous men embezzled the prestige and throttled the principles of the organization. — Baraboo Democrat.