People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1895 — About Gresham's Successor. [ARTICLE]

About Gresham's Successor.

Cleveland Took a Doctor and Secret Service Men. STATEHOOD OF OKLAHOMA. Populists Are Plentiful in Massachusetts and More a Hatching. CRISP'S CROOKED COINAGE convictions. Washington, June 1, 1895. Positively disgusting to ordinary people was the indecent haste with which the politicians began speculating as to who would succeed the late Secretary Gresham the very moment his death was announced. The fact that the law gives the President thirty days to fill the vacancy makes this ghoulish haste all the more inexcusable. To the credit of the President and members of his cabinet, be it said that they took no part in these discussions. It was really a grief stricken party that accompanied the remains of Secretary Gresham to Chicago, and, outside of the family, the President appeared to be the most stricken of them all. President Cleveland took no chances on that Chicego trip. He had been somewhat unwell for several days before he started, so he took Dr. O’Reilly along with him, allowing it to be supposed that it was for Mrs. Gresham’s benefit that he did so. The special train was also quite liberally sprinkled with heavily armed secret service men, but the reason for their presence is not so apparent. If Mr. J. M. Hale, chief deputy U. 8. Marshal, whose headquarters are located at Guthrie, Oklahoma, and who is now in Washington on official business, is not mistaken, the boomers of statehood for the territory will not be heard from by the next congress. He said on the subject: “The weight of Oklahoma’s sentiment is against statehood. What you might call the ‘outs’ are in favor of it. but the main body of the people are not anxious of that score. It is to be doubled if Oklahoma makes any effort during the next conmess to secure admission as a state.”

Representative Maddox, of Georgia, who was a member of the congressional committee that accompanied the remains of the late Representative Coggswell of Mass., from Washington to Salem, where the interment took place, got some information while on the trip. He says of it: “Of course we did not talk politics at the funeral, but I was somewhat surprised when at Salem to notice the bills up for a populist meeting where the orator was going to speak for free silver, 16 to 1. I told Representative Waller and O’Neil, of Mass., that I had not supposed there were any populists in Massachusetts. They told me there were quite a number with every sign of there being more of them before they got through.” The silver men were glad to see ex-Speaker Crisp s card saying: “Ever since I entered public life I have spoken, and when opportunity offered voted for it. I still favor the free and unlimited coinage of silver by the United States independently at the ratio of 16 to 1-,” but some of them did not fail to recall several opportunities Mr. Crisp had and failed to take advantage of during the last congress to have aided the silver men in getting a square vote in the house on the question of free coinage. It was, of course, claimed by the opponents of silver that such a vote would have resulted in the defeat of silver: still, every intelligent man in Washington knew that the silver men would have forced a vote if they could, apd that Speaker Crisp might have allowed them to do so had he desired. It was current rumor at the time that '|4r. Crisp had promised President Cleveland not to allow a vote on free coinage to be taken in the house if he could prevent it without committing himself against silver. Ityvas known ail the time that Mr. Crisp represented a silver constituency and that he had upon more than one occasion voted for free coinage. Now that .the late Secretary Gresham is dead and buried everybody has discovered what a great mistake he made in undertaking duties so uncongenial to him in every way as those pertaining to the.office of Secre tary of state. Talleyrand, one of the greatest of diplomats, defined a diplomacy as “the art of talking.,, without- saying anyning.” Secretary Gresham had no liking for that style of social 1 fe which is so prominent a sea-

ture in the diplomatic world, although he was one of the most charming of men when in the company of those he liked, and his blunt style of expressing his opinions upon occasion made it simply impossible for him to talk all around a subject without saying anything, in the usual diplomatic style. The popular impression is that Secretary Gresham was, like the late Hon. Daniel Manning, President Cleveland’s first secretary of the treasury, and the late Hon. William Windom, who was secretary of the treasury under President Harrison, a victim of official overwork, although his physicians say it was pleurisy that caused his death.