Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 August 1882 — What Our Republican Congress Laughs at. [ARTICLE]

What Our Republican Congress Laughs at.

It is very amusing—very. It makes the politicians laugh, even if the judicious grieve. When Butter worth made some remarks on the floor of Congress so indecent that they would hot be permitted to appear in the Congressional Record , and ladies were warned from the galleries, his colleagues laughed heartily. Mr. Butterworth was so peart and pleasing and blackguardish that they were compelled to hold their sides, they laughed so much. When the Vice President elect of the United States, now its President, described at a Delmonico dinner, in honor of Star Route Dorsey, by what persuasive arts of corruption that sweet gentleman had saved ludiana, the tables were set in a roar. It was so highly diverting. When Senator Ingalls described the River and Harbor bill, by which it is proposed to take twenty millions of dollars from the treasury to aid in the re-election of Congressmen, as “the annual shame, scandal, and disgrace of American legislation,” the Senate burst into a loud guffaw. Their part in the perpetration of the annual shame, scandal and disgrace, never so much a shame, scandal and disgrace as this year, moved their risibles. It is possible that the sober sense of the country may be shocked at this laughter. It is something too long and too loud. It comes in at the wrong time. There really isn’t anything funny in obscene jesting, in election frauds, or in legislative stealing. The electors’ turn may come one of these days.— Chicago Times. Robbing the Cradle and the Grave. Mr. Jay Hnbbell is really cruel. We have before us two of his political assessment circulars of which he and the Congressmen acting with him ought to be ashamed, no matter how little they are inclined to blnsh at the general run of the business in which they are engaged. One of these Republican assessment circulars requires $6.20 from a little boy 12 years old employed in a navy yard at $1 per day. This little boy, whose name for obvious reasons we decline to give Mr, Hubbell, is an orphan, 12 years old, employed as an errand boy, and whose small pay is the support of a widowed mother and one or two children. The other of Mr. Jay ‘Hubbell’s circulars calls for $7. It is directed to an old man over 80 years of age, also employed in a navy yard and receiving 81- 25 per day for such light work as sweeping and other matters which a man of his years can attend to. This poor old fellow does not even have constant employment. He averages about 100 days’ work in the year. Yet of this old man, tottering to the grave and over 80 years of age, Mr. Jay Hubbell, in the name of “the party of great moral ideas,” demands the payment of $7. Will not President Arthur, will not Secretary Chandler step forward in the name of' common decency and take Mr. Jay Hubbell’s hands off the throats and out of the pockets of children and tottering old men? Is there no sense of shame, no power of indignation left among our public men ?— New York Herald.