Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 July 1889 — WASHINGTON NOTES. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON NOTES.

The Government has demanded a rate of one mill a word from the telegraph companies. A report that Mr. Blaine is about to resign is denied. His health, however, is conceded to be poor. John 0. Morton, son ol the late ex* Gov. Morton, has been appointed Shipping Commissioner at San Francisco. The Sac and Fox Indian reservation in Kansas is said to have become the resort of thugs, thieves, murderers and horse-thieves, and efforts will be made to purify it It is not longer doubted that there will be ah extra session of Congress called for the Ist of November. The

President is said to have told several people who have called to bid him good-by, within the last few days, that he would call them, baek here in October. Thomas C. Mendenhall has been appointed Superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Henfy W. Diederich, of Indiana, Consul toLeipsic. Mr. Mendenhall is President of theJßose Polytechnic Institute at Terre Haute. The Pension Office recently granted a claim for a pension filed by George Hindson, but only allowed the attorney in the case $8 as his fee, notwithstanding he produced an agreement between the claimant and himself by which he was to receive $26. The attorney took an appeal to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, and in a long opinion, made public Thursday, the Assistant Secretary overrules the action of the Pension Office, and allows the full amount contained in the agreement. He says that the reason assigned by the Pension Office—that $8 was considered an equitable amount as a fee, taking into consideration the amount of money received on the certificate (sßo)—may comport with an appreciative sense of the client’s needs, but it has no recognition in any part of the Jaw bearing npon the agreement. This is considered a very important decision, affecting a large number of cases, and it reverses the practice of the Pension Burean in this respect. Assistant Secretary Bussey, of the Interior Department, has rendered a decision reversing the action of the Pension Office in rejecting the claim of Solomon Dudley, late private of Company C., First Tennessee Light Artillery. Dudley’s claim for a pension alleged that while using a gun-barrel for a poker at a fire, in making coffee for a squad of men near Nashville, Tenn., in February, 1865, it exploded and wounded him in the upper third of the right arm. The question in the case to be considered and decided, according to Mr. Bussey, is whether the claimant was in the line of duty when he was hurt or whether the wound was the result of culpable negligence on fiis part. Mr. Bussey holds that the soldier was performing a duty that was pioperly required of Mm when the accident occurea, and in using for a poker the apparently empty gun-barrel he did a natural and reasonable thing, The supposition, he says, that he (the soldier) used the gun-barrel for the purpose indicated in a careless or culpable way is not consistent with the promptings of self-preservation and can hot be fairly entertained.