Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1885 — Illiteracy In High Places. [ARTICLE]

Illiteracy In High Places.

A noble example of illiteracy in high places was furnished a few years ago when “Gen.” John McDonald, of St. Louis, was appointed to the important position of Supervisor of the vast revenue district composed of the States of Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, and lowa. At the time of his appointment McDonald cculd write his name in a rude and scarcely legible way, but that was the extent of his chirographic accomplishments. He could not write at all beyond scrawling his signature. He oould read, however, and he artfully concealed from most people the fact that he could not write. He had a habit, whenever it became necessary for him to communicate with any one in writing, of making the excuse that his hand was lame, and on that plea got some one else to write for him. Before the war McDonald had been a “runner” on the St. Louis steamboat wharves, and then the keeper of a livery-stable. During the war he was cashiered for timidity, to use a mild word, while Colonel of the Bth Missouri "Volunteers, a regiment of river roughs. Yet Buch is the influence of cheek combined to a certain jaunty and magnetio air, which was a marked characteristic of McDonald, that he prevailed on President Grant to intrust him with one of the most responsible olfioes in the revenue servioe. As might naturally have been expected from such h man, he repaid his benefactor by organizing the gigantic whisky ring that brought so muoh discredit on the administration and landed him and his co-conspirators in the penitentiary. To show how "assurance sometimes fortifies ignorance, this same man hired a reporter to write a book, to which be attached his own name, and he took the trouble to convince every unsophisticated person he met that he “wrote every word of it.” After his whisky-ring troubles were ended MoDonald married the “Sylph,” the woman who figured so mysteriously in the history of the ring, and she has since taught him some of the rudiments of oliirograpby. Cor. Philadelphia Times. . Dress does apt give knowledge.— Triarjfr { . m __