Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 October 1883 — BUTLER. [ARTICLE]

BUTLER.

The Gritty Old Governor of | Mass. Cavassing the State —Making it Red Hot for the Radicals. £Ex f ,racts from bis Taunton Speech r ****** Now, what does he say is the trouble? What have I done? He makes but one assertion, and that is Tewksbury. He says that I have disgraced the State, and that he has only gathered it up from the newspapers. [Laughter.] Let us see how I have disgraced the State. He says says I have put it into the powjer of Southern men to bother Mr. Hoar with my argument, and that it is a disgrace, and that he will be troubled with my argument for twenty-five years if he is kept so long in the Senate.— )Laughtcr.) Well, I know Mr. Hoar never could answer an argument. [Great laughter.] When Massachusetts was slurred in the Sena?e, Mr* Hoar SAT THERE LIKE A WHIPPED CUR. [Laughter.] But I can give Mr. Hoar and Mr. Frye, and anybody else an argument in answer to all this. Tewksbury is not Massachusetts. It grew corrupt, and when you found it out you promptly changed it and cleaned it. [Great applause.) They agree Tewksbury was bad. They did turn them out. They confessed judgment- The judgment of the Committee was one thing when they had the responsibility of saving the Republican party. The judgment of the Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity was another thing; they had to save themselves. (Laughter.) Now, what was this infernal pamphlet Mr. Frye talked about? It is simply an official verbatem copy of my argument made before the Committee of the Legislature upon the testimony bro’t before that Committee in the Tewksbury hearing.. That is j all there is of it, except there is some well executed pictures of the scenes that the testimony discloses. This is the day of illustrated books, and any man who will not illustrate a book is not very likely to get it read, and therefore the argument was illustrated. Now, every portion of that argument is trn e. I can convince you of that. lam an old lawyer, to begin with, and I was talking to a tribunal that had heard all the evidence, and had the record of the evidence before them. The counsel of the Marshes was sitting there to correct me if I misquoted the evidence. That I was not interrupted by him but once and the Chairman but twice shows that I spoke correctly when I said that testimony which I quoted was undisputed. There was enough undisputed testimony in that argument to sink a THOUSAND MARSHES AND A THOUSAND TEWKSBURYS. (Great applause.) What is it that was undisputed? that old paralyzed men were jumped upon and pounded until their bodies were laid away to be taken to Harvard; that insane women were maltreated and abused until they died, and their bodies hauled away; that men and women were starved; that seventy-one out of seven-ty-two children died there within a year; and that the death-rate continued for years and years, until at last four years ago they took away all the children from Tewksbury because none could live there. And what is the apparent answer to that? Why, they said they were sickly children md could not live any where. Very well. What did you take them from Tewksbury for if they would die anywhere else? — They live now. They are farmed out in families and live very well. No doubt about children living. Tewksbury is as healthy as Taunton. There is Ino low ground to throw out

bad gases. There are no marshes outside to put forth miasam. [Great laughter and applause.] More than that, for twenty-eight years the bodies of the majority of the people who died in Tewksbury, men, women and children, 1 have been sold for sl6 and sl4 apiece, and for eighteen years there has never been kept single record of a single body,! where it went or whose it was, j who got it or who cut it up. THAT HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR TWENTY-EIGHT YEARB. For ten years there has been a record kept, but when I called for it I was told by Thoirfas J. Marsh, “Yes, I have the record here in my pocket, but ycu can’t have it.” I appealed to the Committee. They said it must be produced. He got up, through his counsel, and said he would not produce it. It was the record of the dead of the Commonwealth, had much they were sold for. But he looked the Committee in the face and said, “I won’t produce it.” The Governor asked him to produce it. The Committee of the Legislature demanded it, and I then moved that the Committee ask the House of Representatives to pass an order that he should go to Jail until he did produce it. [Great applause.] What was done with it. That order laid over four or five days until Thomas Marsh could lobby the Legislature and say,' “Don’t make j me produce it. It will kill the Republican party.” [Laughter.] They simply voted that he should not produce it. — It was the most disgraceful legislative act that was ever done under heaven, and it is a disgrace to Massachusetts that nothing but a future Legislature can wipe away. (Great; applause.) And Thos. Marsh had power enough, even in his disgrace, to get himself elected delegate to the Republican Convention at Music Hall, and he was there voting for your j candidate, George D. Robinson (Hisses.) He is *J. Marsh’s candidate. (Laughter.) His nomination was made unanimous by his vote (applause,) and he had his BOOK IN HIS POCKET AT THE TIM* I have no doubt. (Great laughter and applause.) And the better element, as they called themselves (laughter,) the perfumed gentlemen [renewed laughter], the men that are very, very clean in their shirts, were sitting down there in that assembly side by side with a man whose clothes were bought by the money which came from the sale of dead bodies and smelling all over with the charaal house of death, He is a specimen of the men who are chosen now in these days to Republican conventions, where Boutwell and Sumner and Wilson used to sit as delegates. (Great laughter.] Now, my friends, I want you to think about this. I told the people last year that, if I could get hold of the books of the State, I co’d show you where corruptions were. — I got hold of the insurance books by driving out the insurance man. (Laughter.)— I then had my attention called to another thing. More than twenty odd towns in this State made complaint to me as Governor that they could not get their pay for tne care of paupers that belonged to the State to care for. They had been to the Board of State Charities agent, and they could not get •their bills settled, and some of them ran back ten] or eleven years. Well. I began to look into these amounts. 1 saw every year large sums of money appropriated for that purpose and large sums of money expended. I wanted to see where those sums of money went to and why the towns were not paid. And when I asked for the books at that office, the Board of State Charities, Thomas Talbot sent me a letter saying thar I could not have them.