Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 June 1889 — Public Office a “Private Perquisite.” [ARTICLE]

Public Office a “Private Perquisite.”

Democrats will not entirely agree with the President’s Republican correspondent, who writes to the Chief Magistrate: “Montana would be reliably Republican if your son Russell had broken his neck, his back, burst a blood-vessel, or died a respectable, natural death soon after your inauguration as President. It was the impertinent intermeddling of your sou in Montana politics that assured the Democrats control of our Constitutional Convention. ” The error in this statement is not the intimation that the President’s son has boon guilty of “impertinent intermeddling,” but the assumption that, under any circumstances, Montana might have been “reliably Republican.” The Territory for years sent a Democratic Delegate to Congress, and there is reason to believe that the majority of its people are of that political faith. The predictions of Mr. Harrison’s complaining correspondent are entitled to more confidence than his exposition of causes. “At the next election, ’he says, “the Democrats will elect their candidates and have an excess of 5,000 votes. We occasionally hear news from the East that there is some expectation of Russell B. Harrison being chosen to represent Montana in the United States Senate. If you entertain any such hope, Mr. President, please abandon it and save yourself from disappointment.” That is' frankness of the brutal order, but its truthfulness should excuse it. The corresponent charges that the President “conferred tha appointment of Federal officers in Montana” upon his son, as “a private jierquisite, to be disposed of as he saw fit." There is no occasion for surprise in that. Appointments to Cabinet places have been disposed of by the President “as a private perquisite.” One of these places is held by his law partner, who is expecting immediate transfer to the Supreme bench. Another is occupied by an old “chum,” who has no other known qualification for it. A relative of the Chief Magistrate holds an important office in Tennessee; and his personal friends are picking up fat places in all quarters. No such exhibition of nepotism and the abominable vice of paying personal obligations with public trusts as Mr. Harrison has given in his brief Presidential career has been known since the days of Hayes. —Chicago Globe.