The Republican Party
many years but which at the end entered into a decline and saw the very work which it had vainly striven to do performed by the two great parties against which it had indiscriminately waged its futile warfare.
With this instructive record of minor party inefficiency and failure before them, American citizens would be blind indeed if they did not perceive the path of duty. That duty is to choose intelligently and on principle between the two great parties which alone are capable of patriotic efficiency; to affiliate themselves loyally with the party of their deliberate choice; and to participate actively in its management and conduct. It is generally recognized to be the duty of every American citizen to vote at elections. Similarly it is the duty of every one to participate in the primary elections of his or her party. If citizens of the Republic were generally to abstain from voting we should expect the affairs of the country to be neglected and abused. So if members of a party abstain from interesting themselves in its direction it is bound to suffer abuse. It is from such neglect on the part of citizens that the evils of party management have arisen.
No rational and loyal American citizen thinks of asserting his "independence" of the Republic or of setting up a rival government. Even if he wishes to have changes and reforms made in the government, he seeks to make them "from the inside." Since, then, it is the established principle of the nation that its government shall be conducted through the agency of two major parties, it becomes scarcely less incumbent upon citizens to recognize those parties, to exercise their political activities in them and through them, and, if ever they desire changes in them, to make them "from
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