p. 59 | SPECIAL MENTION by Editor

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, January 22, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 4

SPECIAL MENTION.

By Editor

THE SITUATION IN MAINE.

Maine finds herself in a singular position. She has no legally elected Governor, and no legally formed Legislature; but the judicial branch of the government remains unimpaired. At the time appointed (Jan. 7), the Legislature was organized under the auspices of the Fusionists, many of the lawfully elected Republican members being entirely ignored. In voting for a speaker, a quorum was lacking, and one of the members, the Hon. Eugene Hale, made the point that all the voting was illegal.

On the 12th, the Republicans, in turn, organized, claiming that their object was to bring the matter before the Supreme Court of the State, that facts might be brought out, and a just decision rendered.

This has been done; but as the decision rendered was favorable to the Republicans, the Fusionists refused to accept it. Joseph L. Smith, the Governor elected by the illegally-constituted Fusionist Legislature, was at last accounts endeavoring to administer the government. He had issued an order relieving General Chamberlain of his command. The General has been acting as Governor and commander of the military. What the result will be cannot now be foreseen.

We indorse the following from the Christian Weekly of Jan. 17: “We care nothing for the mere party aspect of the Maine election. There are far higher considerations involved than those of party. It is a question whether honesty or trickery is to control our political affairs.”

The situation is peculiar, and a significant sign of the times. What will become of our boasted freedom, of our republican institutions, when the purity and freedom of the ballot box can no longer be maintained, and when the results of an election cannot be decided without the threat of an appeal to arms? In view of the Maine “muddle,” with some other similar ones that have preceded it, we are led to ask if our government is taking lessons of Louis Napoleon, whose coup d'etat of 1850 produced such brilliant results.

Before the crisis in Maine had reached its present stage of development, the Christian Union made the following pertinent remarks on the subject:—

“It is a wrong to the nation, and one full of danger. It looks like the beginning of a deliberate attempt to secure the Presidential election at every hazard; for if the electoral vote of Maine be added to the vote of the solid South, only forty more votes in the electoral college would be required; and they could easily be secured by the same methods. Republicanism rests upon the cordial acquiescence of all the people in the expressed will of the majority; and whoever assails this, mines under the very foundation of the nation. Whoever, Republican or Democrat, endeavors to defeat the will of the voters, whether by violence, as in Mississippi, or by purchase, as in Louisiana, or by technicalities, as in Maine, is a traitor to the Republic more dangerous than Benedict Arnold, and deserving as condign a punishment and as universal an execration. The Maine fraud is as much more dangerous to its life than the bombardment of Fort Sumter, as the attack is more insidious, and should be met with a popular indignation as universal.”