Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 12.djvu/349

 POLITICAL PARTIES IN OREGON 341 did not claim that the Democrats should furnish all the means for the war or even do all the fighting. It was bluntly inti- mated to the Statesman that the proposition that the minority is free from obligation to support the Government except upon the condition that it should rule the majority, was the doctrine of the secessionists. Hoel then addressed himself to his fellow Republicans. He told them that they had elected a President and that he himself intended to remain a Republican until traitors should learn that the success of an opposition party was not an excuse for rebellion. The Republicans, he said, had done nothing to make themselves odious. They were loyal, they were in the ascendency in Oregon if any party was, and a due regard to their principles, their past labors for the good of the country, made without pay while others were growing fat in office, demanded that they have something to say as to the way and manner of forming a new Union party. The Republican party was declared already to be a Union party and Hoel asserted that if a new one was to be organized for the purpose of accommodating the prejudices of other Union men, and to divide the offices, he claimed as much right as the Statesman to say how it should be formed. He was for a Union arrangement, through the Republican convention, by conference or otherwise, but not for a direct Union party, in which politicians who had all to gain and nothing to lose, would come up as leaders. Many Republicans had learned from past experience to be suspicious of overtures from Democratic sources looking to- ward coalition. They remembered that their party organiza- tion had long been obstructed and delayed in Oregon because of unnatural alliances with opposing factions. At last they had achieved that distinct party organization and it had proved its power. And now, just when the time had come to enjoy the spoils of victory so long hoped for, they were asked by their old opponents to cast off their political affiliations for the good of the country. It is hardly to be wondered at that the motives of those insisting on the scheme of a Union party were ques-