Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1889 — ANONYMOUS BLACKGUARDS. [ARTICLE]

ANONYMOUS BLACKGUARDS.

Senator Morrill of Vermont is the father of the existing protective system. The high tariff, so he has said in the senate a hundred times, insures the farmer a profitable home market for his products. How it has affected the agricultural interests of his own state are shown by facts recently brought to public attention by the Vermont authorities. We quote from the Springfield Re puolican: In the town of Reading, for example, there are 4,000 acres of contiguous farming lands which have been abandoned and can be bought for from $4 to $1 an acre. Of this tract one -half is in farms of from seventy to 200 acres, many with buildings, and the other half is divided only by tumbling stone wall and marked by old ruins of a former civilization. In Chelsea, the county seat of Orange county, there is a farm of 200 acres that can bought for SIOO, buildings and all. The soil is said to be good and the grass such that it has “lodged” for this season. Another farm of 300 acres with good buildings, was recently sold for $l,lOO. — From Vershire, Straford and Chelsea comes the information that there are from thirty-five to forty farms, contiguous or nearly so, which are abandoned and unoccupied. Many of them have good buildings and could be purchased for $5 and I•ss an acre. The state of Vermont, in short, is covered with abandoned spots where once an adequate and independent subsistence was dug from the soil. Vermont certainly presents a striking example of the beau ties of the high tariff-home-market theory.

The school book trust is again flooding the mails with printed attacks on the new school books. Nobody as. sumes any responsibility for these document;s they are not dated nor signed, and they are entitled to no more consideration than sensible people are accustomed to give anonymous letters. The man who anonymously attacks the re* putation or credit of another, in letters sent through the mails, or in other ways is popularly regarded as a coward and a poltroon. These designations are applicable to Van / ntwerp, Bragg & Co. of Cincinnati, who are the authors, printers and circulators ot the vile stuff referred to. Their criticisms upon the new books are, as a matter ot fact, dishonest and puerile. Most of the alleged errors they specify in the readers and geographies are not errors at all, but are sustained by the very authorities in the departs ments to which they are assigned It may be of interest to people who do not understand to what lengths the average school book man is capable of going when he is trying to injure the books published. by a competitor, to know that Van Antwerp, Bragg <fe Co.’s attacks upon the Indiana readers are mildness itself when compared with their publications against the readers of D. Appleton & Co. before that house joined the school book combine. We have some of their circulars on the Appleton readers before us, and they are far more severe and a good deal more vicious in tone than those which they are now circulating in Indiana against the new books. When it is remembered that, a few months after these anti-Apple-ton circulars were perpetrated, Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co. entered into an agreement with the Appleton house, by the terms of whicL they were to “stand together” in resisting any attempt anywhere to displace the books published by either, it will be seen that their hullabaloo i. ‘We

sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Indiana books, in the judgment of the leading educators of this a»d other states, compare very favorably with the best school books published. They are not flawless, of course, but in all the essentials of a good and serviceable series of text books, they are up to standard. The scurrilous attacks made upon them by the school book trust under the shelter of anonymity, will serve no other purpose than to illustrate the unscrupulous and utterly despicable methods which the trust is iu the habit of employing. A msnxotrMHM) minister, lately dead, Having engaged to publish a sermon, *as waited upon by the printer with the first proof, which, of course oontained the tenet, in which a most singular mistake was made. The text was from the Becond chapter of Job, “ Skin for t>kin { Si, all that man hath will he give for life.” The printer’s blunder consisted in substituting a w for the / in the last word, which presented a very different meaning from the original text The minister smiled at the mistake, and simply wrote on the margin, “N. B. This depends upon oiroumstancea. H