Jasper County Democrat, Volume 8, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1905 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. Special Cor respondents to The Democrat: This administration is making a heroic effort to do the right thing in cleaning out graft in federal departments and getting as good a record aa it can with regard to bona fide returns on the salaries it lays out. But there seem to be fresh troubles in the way as soon as any troubles have been disposed of. The latest edict that will cause the department clerks of Washington a lot of trouble for months to come is that which will put back their pay days (they have two each month) three or four days per fortnight. Now it may be thought by the outsider that a government job is a private snap. And it is in a good many respects for the man who does not want to soil his hands and who would rather work in a fine granite building with electric fans and ice coolers in the corridors than to do clerks’ work in a plain factory building. But the edict as to the pay days is going to hit the holders of many government jobs very hard. It takes about all a government clerk can make to live in Washington in a style befitting his assumed position. There is a lot of cheap social emulation in the Capital and the most government clerks would rather live in a good house in a good quarter where they can hardly afford to pay the rent than to take more modest quarters and save a little money. The result is that the most of them live from hand to mouth and at the end of the month usually have to brejik into the baby’s bank to get out money to pay their car fare down town on salary day. They have been used to having pay days on the 15th and 30th of each month and their grocers and landlords have been used to having their bills settled on those days. But this has involved an anomoly. The division chiefs who have to certify the payrolls on which the government checks are issued, have been in the habit of doing so several days ahead so that the rolls could get through the Treasury Department and get back with the money in time to pay out promptly on the fifteenth, and thirtieth. But this necessitated swearing to the payrolls for two or three days work that had not yet been done by the clerks. Now the order comes that the division chiefs are not to swear to the payrolls till the tale of days is finished and the clerks have earned all the salary that is coming to them. Also the chiefs are to be able to certify that the clerks in question have been at their desks and have done the work, that they have not been off on suppositional sick leaves and have really earned the money that the government is paying out. This is going to hurt the consciences of a lot of division chiefs as well it might. It is also going to put a lot of clerks behind with their rent and their butchers’ bill. And more than that it is going to strike off a whole lot of sinecures from the payroll if the order is carried out in the letter and spirit. There are a good many clerks to committees that never meet, private secretaries to various officials whose hardest work is to walk to the department and draw their salaries, and clerks on the regular rolls in the departments who on account of pull are able to be at their desks about half of the time and then not do any work to speak of. These will all suffer with the honest, bard working clerks, and there are a good may of these who will be mightily inconvenienced by having his pay day delayed half a week or so out of each month. t t t There ia more individual trouble brewing between the Secretary of the Treasury and the Surgeon General of the Marine Hospital Service. Of course it is known that the Marine Hospital Service is a branch of the Treasury Department just as is the Light House Board and the Life Saving Service. But the Marine Hospital service is a very important branch and has of late years been getting farther and farther away from the Treasury in the matter of independent action. The latest trouble in that direction has called out another investigating committee which has discovered what the Secretary of Treasury knew already, namely that the Surgeon General of the Marine Hospital Service has gone over the Secretary head and gotten legislation by Congress without the approval of the Treasury Department. It was only in the matter of the merging the offices of chief clerk and disbursing officer in the service. But it was done without authority, and as the

Marine Hospital Service has just had satisfaction of seeing its voucher clerk arrested for raising vouchers to the amount of about 120,000 the Secretary of the Treasury thought it was a good time to call down the Surgeon General. And he did. What the the outcome of the fight will be no one knows. t t t The Secretary of War will find hia bands full when he returns to Washington. He will undoubtedly be called upon to make an investigation of Panama affairs, for the country has been flooded of late with reports of the bad conditions on the isthmus and the way the work is not getting done on the canal. He will have to organize a campaign for Philippine free trade, there will be a report to the President on the Chinese boycott, action will be necessary in the Taggart case, which has stirred up the army from end to end. And above all there will be the question of re-establishing the post canteen in army garrisons. This is a subject that it will take a lot of moral stamina to handle, and it is possible that the Secretary will elect to let it drop. But army officers as a rule say it ought to be done.