er it an exclusive privilege for one portion of the
community to have the _means of education in colleges_, while
another is restricted to common schools, or, perhaps, by extreme
poverty, even deprived of the limited education to be acquired in
those establishments. Our voice, therefore, shall be raised in
favor of a system of education which shall be equally open to
_all_, as in a real republic, it should be.

Finally the resolutions told what the Workingmen's Party thought of the
bankers and the banking system. The bankers were denounced as "the
greatest knaves, impostors and paupers of the age." The resolutions went
on:

As banking is now conducted, the owners of the banks receive
annually of the people of the State not less than two millions of
dollars in their paper money (and it might as well be pewter
money) for which there is and can be nothing provided for its
redemption on demand....

The mockery that went up from all that was held influential, respectable
and stable when these resolutions were printed, was echoed far and wide.
They were looked upon first as a joke, and then, when the Workingmen's
Party began to reveal its earnestness and strength, as an insolent
challenge to constituted authority, to wealth and superiority, and as a
menace to society.

RADICALISM VERSUS RESPECTABILITY.

The "Courier and Enquirer," owned by Webb and Noah, in the pay of the
United States Bank, burst out into savage invective. It held the
Workingmen's Party up to opprobrium as an infidel crowd, hostile to the
morals and the institutions of society, and to the rights of property.
Nevertheless the Workingmen's Party proceeded with an enthusiastic,
almost ecstatic, campaign and polled 6,000 votes, a very considerable
number compared to the whole number of voters at the time.

By 1831, however, it had gone out of existence. The reason was that it
allowed itself to be betrayed by the supineness, incompetence, and as
some said, the treachery, of its leaders, who were content to accept
from a Legislature controlled by the propertied interests various
mollifying sops which slightly altered certain laws, but which in no
great degree redounded to the benefit of the working class. For a few
bits of counterfeit, this splendid proletarian uprising, glowing with
energy, enthusiasm and hope, allowed itself to be snuffed out of
existence.

What a tragedy was there! And how futile