Jasper County Democrat, Volume 12, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1909 — TO BE CLEANED AND KEPT CLEAN. [ARTICLE]

TO BE CLEANED AND KEPT CLEAN.

Senator Beveridge visited Indiana long enough recently to have his teeth fixed and to look over a new house that he has been building to give color to his claim of residence in the state. He has been in Indiana so little during the last several years that there was a growing doubt whether he should still be credited to the state. The Republican politicians are casting about for a chairman for the new state committee next winter. The Beveridge faction seems to be taking it for granted that the next chairman will be a member of their crowd. Doubtless this assumption Is based In the fact that Mr. Beveridge controls all the federal patronage. A nice, fat oflice Is always enticing to the Republican politician. Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador at London, has given another display of wealth and toadyism that must be sickening to all of bls decent and self-respecting countrymen. The English people are too polite to say just what they think about Reid’s efforts to outshine even royalty itself. This country needs a Democratic president for many reasons, and one of them is that it would rid us of the humiliation brought upon the land by such sychophants as Whitelaw Reid. The Republican party cannbt pass any sort of a bill in congress without creating a lot of new and high-salar-ied offices. The tariff bill Is no exception. It carries with It the creation of a customs court to be composed of several members at $7,500 a year salary, and a commsslon to advise the president how and when to add 25 per cent to the tariff duties, the members of which will draw perhaps SIO,OOO a year each. As the “sacred principle of protection" must be preserved, all of the members of this court and commission will, of course, be protectionists. The bringing of Thomas Taggart's name into the infamous Ella Glngles trial at Chicago was most unfortunate. However, the rattle-brained, sensation-loving creature might have implicated hundreds of other prominent men just as easily as she did Mr. Taggart. Her story was weak and without foundation-, even her own attorneys disbelieving her. Mr. Taggart and his excellent family can rest assured that not an intelligent man or woman in the state believes the Glngles girl’s story for a moment. —Starke County Republican.

Perhaps her own attorneys did not believe the cock-and-bull story told by this girl-—in fapt no one of ordinary intelligence could- If a lot of Chicago idiots had not raised 'considerable money for her defense it is scarcely likely that Pat O'Donnell, a Delphi product who went to Chicago some years ago and was later arrested on the charge of jury bribing in the Windy City, would have worked so zealously for the girl. Her story was silly and unreasonable from the beginning, and it lias been so thoroughly refuted by irreproachable witnesses that not a shred of it remains. The girl has not been so much to blame as O'Donnell.

Some of the Republican papers of the state are charging that Governor Marshall was actuated by partisan motives in the steps he has taken to straighten things out at the Jeffersonville reformatory. This is silly Tor several reasons. In the first place these , papers ought to know that Governor Marshall took nothing into consideration except what was best for the institution and its inmates. It has been known -for a long time that the reformatory was not being managed as it should have been. It was entirely a one-man affair or perhaps a two-man affair, as Whitaker and Barnard, who were superintendent and assistant superintendent, seem to have run everything connected with the institution just about as they pleased. As soon as a new trustee was appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy caused by the expiration of another man’s term, Whittaker and Barnard took fright. They knew better than anybody else. They did not ask for an investigation or accept the opportunity for an open hearing which the governor offered, though it is said that the governor was in possession of facts damaging to their management and that they knew this was so. The fact of the matter is that the governor has been much more con-

siderate of the feelings of the men in charge of the reformatory than most mem in his place Would have been. He is determined that the Jeffersonville institution shall be made clean and kept clean, a policy that will be applied to every other institution and to all of the state’s business. So far as politics is concerned, it comes with bad grace from any Republican newspaper or politican to even mention it. Our institutions are under a “bi-partisan” management. But that has been only a theory. The “bi-partisan” business did not, apparently, go beyond the appointment of two Republican and two Democratic trustees for each institution, below them the management in most places was wholly Republican. At Jeffersonville under Whittaker and Barnard about ninety-five per cent of rhe employes were Republicans. Politically, the management was unfair and partisan in the extreme. This condition ought to be changed or else the “bi-partisan” law should be repealed.