The action of the Young Republican Club of Brooklyn in refusing to indorse the nominations for Governor and Lieutentant-Governor made by the Saratoga Convention has had an effect on “practical” politicians decidedly out of proportion to the numbers and influence of the voters composing that organization.

The protest made by the Young Republicans of our sister city was much less emphatic than may be heard any day wherever members of the party chance to discuss its position and its prospects.

A Republican must keep himself very jealously secluded from his fellow-men in these days to be ignorant of the fact that dissatisfaction with the work of the party convention is loud and deep.  He must be a person of extremely sanguine temperament if he can gather from the expressions of public opinion in town or country anything calculated to encourage a belief in the election of Folger and Carpenter.

He may, as the office-holders and office-seekers do, cherish the hope that all this sullen discontent or open revolt will, in a week or two, give place to a revival of the old party fealty.  But of the fact that at least one-half of the Republicans at this end of the State have distinctly repudiated the State ticket of their party, he can have no room to doubt.

But yet it is only when this state of feeling finds modified expression in the formal resolutions of an organized body of active and aggressive Republicans that it acquires consistency and power, and projects a visible shadow over the plans for the campaign.

The reason is not far to seek, and the lesson to be drawn from the influence wielded by such a body as the Young Republicans of Brooklyn is a very instructive one for Republicans everywhere.

Their organization is respected and feared because its motives are unselfish, its conduct courageous and its methods business-like.  The club is not composed of men who make politics a trade, who seek in party service a passport to public position, or who endeavor to justify their fitness for office by the manipulation of primaries or the packing of conventions.  In fact, the club is an organized protest against the supremacy of just such persons in party politics.

The club does not content itself, like certain estimable reformers in this City, with resolving that such and such men or methods ought to be opposed, leaving the protest like a wind-blown seed to find its place and time for germination.  It follows up its resolves with active and well-directed labor.  It organizes public meetings, it makes personal appeals to voters, it sends its members to distribute ballots at every polling-booth in the city.  It is not afraid to challenge the decisions of the regular party conventions, for it can meet the “workers” on their own ground.

It could neither be cajoled nor threatened into the support of a machine candidate for Mayor last year, for it was confident of its ability to prove that the majority of the Republican Party of Brooklyn were on its side.  It could not be frightened by any disaffection among the practical politicians who sullenly recognized the necessity of letting the club have its own way, for it had all the machinery ready for an active and thorough canvass without seeking aid from the regular organization.

A body like this, disinterested, resolute, and ready for any amount of electioneering drudgery, necessarily wields an influence not at all dependent on the personal eminence or even the numerical aggregate of its members.  Half a dozen such organizations in the chief centers of population in this State would do more in one year to paralyze the office-holding interest in politics and to render abortive any kind of personal dictation than all the counsels of perfection which can be addressed to politicians to the end of time.

We shall never have a decent City Government in New York till we get together and keep together such a body of young men, who, neither holding nor desiring office, are willing to take their share of the active work of politics simply for the public good.  Intelligent and self-respecting Republicans will never have their wishes heeded, here or elsewhere, till they either take hold of the party organization themselves or place in competition with it an organization equally well fitted to bring voters to the polls and provide them with ballots when they get there.

It seems a simple enough affair, and it is undoubtedly a good deal simpler than the interminable talk and intrigue of those who would lead one to believe.  But it needs a certain sacrifice of personal ease and comfort, some little drain on the mental and physical energies, and some slight pecuniary sacrifices, while its reward is simply the consciousness of having done, perhaps under the spur of rather pleasurable excitement, the duty of a good citizen.

How hard it is to get the better class of the voters of our great cities to combine for such a purpose as that which is subserved by the Young Republican Club of Brooklyn no one who has watched the reform struggle of the last 13 years need be told.  That it is even harder to keep out of such organizations the leaven of self-seeking and the dry-rot of venality and cowardice, is demonstrated by the numerous examples from Citizens’ Association downward.

But the example of Brooklyn stands as a challenge and a stimulus to young Republicans, and old ones, too, throughout the State to prove that the American instinct of self-government is not less vital nor the American hatred of political despotism less intense than it was when the institutions were founded which we are called on to maintain.