People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1896 — The Seal Herd to Perish. [ARTICLE]

The Seal Herd to Perish.

Authorifitive advices from Washington announce the determination of President Cleveland to force congress to enact the currency legislation which he demands. He wants the greenbacks all retired, and a new national banking act by which the bankers will be furnished, free of any charge, whatever notes equal to the full face value of any United States bonds deposited with the secretary of the treasury. And bear in mind that the bonds will still draw interest just the same. If this legislation is not given, an extra session of congress will be called for that specific purpose.

Senator Vest in a recent speech on the resolution directing the secretary of agriculture to obey the law regarding the distribution of free seeds said frankly and plainly that he did not believe that Mr. Morton intended to execute the law, no matter how directly the will of the legislative branch might be esb pressed. “The democratic party,” said Mr. Vest, “hasbeen most unfortunate, not only in the dissension in its own ranks, but in the fact that the,devil, to use a western phrase, has owed the party a grudge, and has paid us in the secretary of agriculture. If that officer had taken a contract to make the party to which he ostensibly belongs odious with the farmers of the United States, he could not have carried it out more successfully.”

The Sparta (Georgia) Ishmaelite supported Mr. Cleveland with all its power and savage criticism of opponents, but this is what it says now, and what populist paper would dare to speak so plainly? Here are its anarchistic utterances: “The masses of the country have had since the last inauguration of Cleveland, on the 4th of March, 1893, a thousandfold better and stronger grounds for armed revolution than their forefathers for armed resistance to the tyranny of King George in 1776. What were the exactions of the stamp act and a tax of a few pence a pound on tea compared with thecontinent-wide confiscation and ruin through which Cleveland and Carlisle have made their way to the supremacy of national bank gold gamblers in the very temple of the people’s liberties?”

A bill before congress proposes that, unless England joins the United States in the preservation of the seal herds of Alaska, the entire herd shall be taken by the secretary of the treasury and the profits converted into the treasury. “It is believed,” says the accompanying report, “that it is Canada that is standing in the way and holding back Great Britain from co-operating with us in the preservation of the seal herd, and that when Canada sees that we propose to take summary measures to end not only the inhumanity that consigns thousands of young seals to slow starvation, but also the farce by which we are expending large sums of money to police Behring Sea, practically to aid her pelagic sealers in the work of exterminating the seals, she will not longer endeavor to prevent England from uniting with us in efficient measures to save the seal herds to the world.” It is estimated that 85,000,000 would be realized if the government should resort to the killing and sale of the skins of what seals are left. It is said that inasmuch as all the seal skins taken go to Condon to be prepared and dyed, giving employment there to nearly 50,000 persons, even Great Britain herself would be deprived of a valuable source of income to her own people should the inudustry be destroyed.