.348 HISTORY OF THE GRANGE MOVEMENT; OR, 



of Iowa. I have had hundreds of copies of papers sent 

 to me with marked articles criticising this so-called re- 

 port of my Winchester speech. Allow me to say that 

 the words ' blood and anarchy ' never came into my 

 speech. I didn't say I would take my boys and go to the 

 State capital and help ride the villains out on a rail, 

 although I believe they deserved it. If I had mentioned 

 it, I wouldn't have said more than that I believed they 

 deserved it, but I did not say it. I did say, and this is 

 my very language and mark now, for I want to be 

 particularly honest, what my remarks were I said, in 

 referring to the manner in which our legislators had 

 betrayed our trust and sold out our rights and interests 

 again and again, that they were elected to carry out 

 certain purposes, and had failed to do so over and over 

 again, and that the interests of the laboring and produc- 

 ing classes of the whole country, not merely of this 

 State but of the whole of the United States, had been 

 sold out over and over again to monopolists of every 

 sort and character ; and I added, there is no law on our 

 statute books by which we can reach them and punish 

 them for that crime of betraying the laboring people of 

 the country. I said I was very much inclined to adopt 

 a punishment suggested by an indignant friend of mine 

 when our legislators adjourned last Winter after voting 

 to come back and spend another Winter and take 

 another half million out of our pockets which we had 

 to pay in corn at twenty cents a bushel, which punish- 

 ment was to treat the members to a coat of tar and 

 feathers and ride them out of their counties on a rail. 

 Now see how you can make a speech read when you 

 take expressions that were uttered at least an hour 

 apart and put them into a sentence. What I said about 



