Jasper County Democrat, Volume 11, Number 79, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1909 — ILLEGAL USE OF PUBLIC FUNDS. [ARTICLE]

ILLEGAL USE OF PUBLIC FUNDS.

Practically everyone in Jasper county knows the fight The Democrat has made during its eleven years of usefulness for the benefit of the general taxpayer, and the ineffectual efforts that have been made by its enemies to drive it out of business because of its w r ell known position against graft and steals of every kind and character. A part of this effort has been directed toward keeping of public printing to which this paper was entitled, from it and giving it to the so-called Democrat Sentinel, a sheet that is a libel on the name “newspaper” and which is not taken nor read by twenty-five democrats in the entire county; that no ( one subscribes for, reads or advertises in—for not a merchant or business man in Rensselaer advertises in its columns or has done so for j^ears. The law is that certain legal notices of a public character shall be published in the "two leading newspapers in the county representing the two political parties casting the greatest number of votes at the last preceding election,” the object being to place the matters published jsefore the greatest possible number of taxpayers of the county-r-the people who pay the expense of county government and who have a right to know where their money goes—as nearly every family in a county subscribes for and reads a county seat paper, either democratic or republican, and this law is supposed to give everyone an opportunity to, read such notices. By reason of the action of certain republican officials in this county, the democratic taxpayers of Jasper county have heen and are being deprived “of their rights and The Democrat is deprived- of the legal advertising to which it is entitled. During the almost eleven years The Democrat has been doing yeoman service for its constituency, and the general public as well, it has been repeatedly endorsed by the democratic county central committee as the leading and only recogniced democratic paper in Jasper county. During all this time

not a democratic officer having a legal notice required to be published in a democratic paper—and we have had during this time a county clerk four years and from five to eight township trustees—has been made in any other paper than The Democrat. Every official call for district, county, tojynship or city conventions have been made only through The Democrat. Its advertising columns have been filled with paid advertisements by all the leading business firms of Rensselaer, and at times by merchants in other towns in the county. It has by several hundred a larger paid subscription list than any other paper printed in the county and probably 100 times greater than the sheet in which these peanut politicians make the publications to which The Democrat is entitled—for we do not believe it has two t dozen paid subscriptions all told,

In view of all this, the action of the county commissioners last in ordering the financial statement for the past year made in the so-called Sentinel is most reprehensible. They knew when they made such order that they were deliberately violating both the spirit and letter of the law, which is intended to give publicity rather than secrecy. These men have a right to spend their own private funds as they please, but as public servants, handling the money of the tax-paying public, we do not believe they have a right either legal or moral to defraud a part of the people of the county in this way.

The county central committee is the only tribunal that has any authority to say what newspaper represents their party, and the fact that The Democrat has been time and agalh endorsed as such, that democratic county conventions have so endorsed it by resolution without a dissenting voice; that every democratic official for years has and still is regarding it as the only paper in Jasper county representing their party; the fact that it is a NEWSPAPER in all that the name implies, ought to convince any honest man or any court of justice that its claims are just and should be respected. We can get along without the few dollars these officials are wrongfully withholding from us in their efforts to set themselves up as greater than but the readers of The Democrat are entitled to this legal news that is being given elsewhere in an effort to annoy and cripple our news service, and the matter has reached a point where we propose to test the question in the courts and determine whether the officer is superior to the law which created him and can say this or that is so, because they chooses to say it is so. We regret to be forced to lake this step, but it seems the only recourse we have to get our rights, and the matter will be fully tested. So‘far as we know Jasper county is the only county in Indiana where a newspaper has been compelled to tfcke this-step, but there are few counties That have been blessed with such narrow-minded officers—or political bosses who control such officials—as Jasper.