Looking Behind and Looking Ahead: Election Day Editorial from Hawaii, 1888

Pacific Commercial Advertiser: Monday, November 5, 1888

The choice of an executive and a legislature by the votes of the people to be ruled, cast in an orderly and peaceable manner, can never be to anyone who looks below the surface of things, other than an interesting and suggestive spectacle.

But when the result of the election is to be the choice of the rulers of fifty millions of the most intelligent and enterprising people of the world, and the deciding for four years of the public policy of one of the great powers of the earth, the occasion rises fairly into the region of the sublime.

When we reflect that on the same day, at the same hour, throughout a region extending thousands of miles from ocean to ocean, millions of men are assembling at thousands and even tens of thousands of places, in crowded cities and quiet country villages, far up on mountain slopes and out on wide and breezy prairies, beside the rattle and whirl of busy factories and in secluded mining camps to decide such vast and possibly far-reaching issues by the quiet and simple process of dropping little pieces of printed paper into a box, we realize, in some measure, the vast progress the world has really made in substituting the peaceable processes of law and reason for the reign of violence and brute force.

When we remember further, that the result of this election, whatever it may be, will be accepted and submitted to, quietly, peaceably and as a matter of course, we are inspired with a new faith in the possibilities of human nature, and feel that those who wrought and suffered for the establishment of popular government and liberty under the restraints of self-imposed law were not constructing an edifice of cardboard and cobwebs, but erecting an enduring temple upon a foundation of solid rock.

The election of President of the United States; the fact that there is such an occasion, that it is so vast, that it is conducted as is, and has such results is full of encouragement for all who desire the enfranchisement and elevation of their fellow men.