Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 April 1885 — HE WILL BE A FAILURE. [ARTICLE]

HE WILL BE A FAILURE.

Beacon* Why President Cleveland** A«»- j ministration Will Be * Great Failure. [Letter in Cleveland Herald.] A Senator of the United States, whoss pirme I can not give because our converxatiuh was a private ohe, said to me last night: “If lam notg:e.dly mistaken, this administration will bo the greatest failure , in bur history." “Why?” “I will tell yon why. Because it has of itself no cohesive elements, and because, founded by a great party, it is disregarding I the party, calling to its support unknown and inefficient men, and because all its views on public question are taken through the wrong end of the opera glass. There will always be two great parties in the United States, and one or the other of these is bound to rule from iitpe to time. When a President elected turns out to be a trimmer and attempts to hoe a middle row between the two greit party he is sure to fail. “He loses the support of his own party, and the other party, while'pretending to admire him, laughs in its sleeve and stabs him in the back. Cleveland so far has totally disregarded the Democratic party. The boys of the party, the great masses, the men who carry the banners, who influence the immense vote of the lower classes, are getting nothing, and they will surely knife Cleveland as soon as they get a chance. They will do it in New York this fall. Mark my words! The State will go Republican by more than 40,000, and there will be the same result everywhere an election is held. Grover Cleveland is cutting the heart out of the Democratic party, and if he goes on, and he probably will, the party will be nearly ruined by 1888. The Republicans are laughing at his administration now, and the Democrats themselves will laugh between their intervals of cursing before two years have passed. Look at this Ada Sweet m liter. Ada Sweet had been in office for more than a decade at a good salary. She expected to go out, and the Republicans expected her to go. Cleveland allows Black to write her a letter that puts his administiation in the hole of going contrary to its principles, and says in black andwhite that there is no cause for her removal. Then, again, that postmaster at Rome. The postmaster was guilty of a misdemeanor, and the President should have turned him out on that ground without a word. Instead, he puts out a letter of half a column to the country apologizing. The early rising and the carriage business is Another farce. Lamar, for instance, the most arrant demagogue south of Mason and Dixon’s line, makes a grand parade about selling S7OO worth of carriages, and on the next day spent more than that amount in fixing-up a private bathroom in his department for himself which would have been an extravagance in the days of Caligula, the Roman'Emperor, who fed his horses in marble troughs and shod them with shoes of gold. Even had this horse-selling reform been a good stroke, it fails because only one or two of the Cabinet engage in it; Vilas, the youngest man in the Cabinet, holds on to his horses, ns do the others, with the exception of Garland and Lamar. The people of the countty are not fools. Cleveland must do something if he would have their approval. So far his administration has been one series of mistakes, and it has failed utterly to show any signs of the reform it has promised.” “It has not turned the rascals out,” said I. “No,” replied the Senatorial friend. “It has not, and neither the President, his Cabinet, nor the people are aware where the rascality exists, in the departments. There is no doubt but that there is corruption, but this corruption does not exist with the heads of bureaus or the high-priced clerks. It is the middle men, and the fellows who get low salaries that do the stealing. These men hoodwink their chiefs and play into the hands of the jobbers. Cleveland is keeping these men in office, and is putting new men over them. Men, too, in most cases, whom it is far easier to deceive than the ones he has turned ofit. They are men who are new to Washington, and are totally innocent of the ins and outs of the departments and the capital., They go into the departments dependent upon the clerks under them for their knowledge of the departments, and the result will be that whatever rottenness there is will be covered, and that it will increase. This is but the history of the past. The President and Secretaries could not discover the rascality of Howgate, of the Signal Service, and of Carrigan, of the Navy Department, until hundreds of thousands of dollars bad been squandered. When their attention was called to the matter they did not give heed to it because some of the confederates of the thieves in office were busy shielding the culprits. There are many Howgates and Carrigans in office to-day. The removal of the Chief Signal Officer alone would have given Howgate a broader field on which to operate under a new chief, more ignorant than the one displaced. The removal of Surgeon General Wales would not have stopped Carrigan’s operations. During the campaign the Democrats claimed that the departments were rotten with corruption. Hendricks the Vice President, said on the stump that one-third of the clerks could be dispensed with without trouble. Now nearly two months have passed, and the departments remain as they were, and the clerks who have been cut off can be numbered x>n your fingers and toes. “Cleveland’s biggest mistake,” the Senator went on, “lies in his Cabinet. He is a good executive officer himself, but he should be aware that this country is too big, and it has too many ramifications for him to persona’ly supervise the whole of it. He should have the best executive officers in the country to help him, and should not rely on a set of dreamers, theorists, and impractical men who know little of business and lesu of the ins and outs of Washington departments and Washington men. ”