Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1900 — Page 4 Advertisements Column 3 [ADVERTISEMENT]

Several hundred taxpayers of Fayette county, Ohio, have petitioned Common Pleas Judge Hidy, requesting the appointment of a committee of three to investigate the books of the county officers of Fayette county for the past ten years. * The Tenth district republicans unanimously re-elected T. J. McCoy of this city, for district committeeman at the meeting held, at Hammond on Tuesday. The various committemen will meet at Indianapolis next Tuesday to elect a state chairman. A Greensburg dispatch to the Indianapolis Sentinel says: The county commissioners today made arrangements to employ A. E. Johnson of Indianapolis and Edwin F. Hedges of Lebanon as experts to make a non-partisan investigation of the county offices This investigation is made in responce to the demands of the taxpayers of Decatur county. The board of commissioners’ affairs will be investigated at the time.

The supreme court has just ruled in a case of much importance as it involves the right of county commissioners to employ tax ferrets. Several months ago the Richmond board employed a ferret, but were enjoined from paying him for his services. The case was carried to the supreme court, where the lower court was sustained. It was then taken before the supreme court a second time, with a petition for rehearing. This has just been denied, ending the proceedings.—Ex. The protectionists’ theory that while protective tariffs might at first somewhat increase prices, they would result in lower prices just as soon as the infant industries were once well established, is hardly borne out by facts. Take the wire and nail industry for example. No one will contend that this is not a firmly established infant, and yet this trust has increased the prices of its product to the consumer alarmingly within the past year. In January, 1895, the price of wire nails in car load lots at Chicago was 95v6ents per 100 pounds, in January, 1899, the price was $1.59, and at the close of the year it had been increased to $3.53. In January, 1895, the Chicago prices on barbed wire was $1.90 per 100 pounds; in January, 1899, it was $2.05, and at the close of 1899 the price was $4.13. It should also be borne in mind that the American steel and wire trust is exporting vast quantities of its output to foreign countries and selling at much lower prices than to the home dealer.

L. A. Rizer of Delphi, who was an elector on the Palmer and Buckner gold standard ticket in 1896, has been selected as secretary of the republican county committee of Carroll county. These gold standard fellows made strong claims to being the only genuine, simon-pure, z name-bio wn-in-the-bottle democrats in that campaign, but the fact that many of the loudest of them, including Billy Bynum, the bell-weather of the flock, have since gone boldly into the republican fold, is proof sufficient that their democracy was never from principle. A man who ever was a democrat from principle could not possibly join the republican party at this time, when tariff-fostered trusts and combines have the people by the throat, jnst as we long ago predicted they would, and when the foundation principles of republican government are being undermined by the present administration’s foreign policy. A man who will leave the democratic party now and join with McKinley, Hanna & Co., with their newfangled ideas of government by force and not by epnsent, their secret foreign alliances, their covertly expressed sympathy for England as against the struggling Dutch republics in South Africa, has never been —and never can be, a true democrat, because he hasn’t a proper conception of a government of, for and by the people.— White County Democrat,