Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 July 1889 — A RIP VAN WINKLE SERIES. [ARTICLE]

A RIP VAN WINKLE SERIES.

“Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tartar.” Stir up a trust aud you will scare out a democrat. The Anthracite Coal trust, the Standard Oil Company, the sugar trust aud all the other great and oppressive combinations of that kind are controlled by Democrats and they furnish bushels of boodle for the Democratic campaigns. The choice of L. T. Michener to lyt chairman of the Republican State Central "Committee gives universal satisfaction to the Republicans of the state. There is no man better fitted than he, to conduct to a successful conclusion the great coming struggle of 1890 for the redemption of Indiana from the infamous rule of the Gerrymander brigands. The Chicago papers are waxing very earnest in their agitation of the question of a World’s Fair, in Chicago, in the year 1892. The only rival candidate of Chicago for the fair is New York, which has more money than Chicago, but vastly less enterprise and public spirit The struggle for the location of the great event must take place iu CoDgress, and most JJwestern people will, naturally, wish for the success of the representative western city.

Speaking of his failure to convict in so many election cases United States District Attorney said the other day: “I am convinced that there is not so mnch corruption and fraud in our election's is generally believed. It has not been shown that voters are imported to Indiana from other states. Every man who has been accused of being an imported voter, has been able to show that, by intent or by associations, he had a right to claim Indiana as his place of residence. I do not believe that there is any great amount of corruption or fraud in oar elections.” ; - —WThere are a few honest Democratic editors in the land, and one of the ablest of them is John B. Stoll, of the South Bend Times. Speaking of the anarchistic howling and wailing now so prevalent in Democratic sheets he says in his Times: “The editor who deliberately proclaims that ‘day by day the condition of the working world grows more and more hard,’ simply advertises himself an ignorant demagogue who/mttber knows anything about the history of the past nor of what is going on in the living present The exact truth as to this country is that for the the industrious, frugal, thinking and calculating world the chances of getting along were never better than they are now." The newly formed Salt Trust 9 established and backed np by English capital, promises to be one of the most grasping and oppressive of the whole evil brood, i A a il • • i* .democratic press has no man to

say against the salt trust, directly, than it has against those other strictly democratic organizations, the Whisky Trust, the Sugar Trust and The Standard Oil Company. The reason for this profound silence is not far to seek: The prime organizer and intended manager of the Salt Trust is Wellington R. Burt, who was the democratic candidate for Governor of Michigan, last year, and who, like so many other democratic candidates, went around largely denouncing Trusts as Republican institutions. Organize Treats when you want money; denounce them when you want votes; is the Democratic method.

The Remington post-office has been raised to a presidential office, and the previous incumbent, Wm. Bunnell, has been reappointed by the President, and, under the four year rule adopted by the administration, he will piobably hold the fort until near the close of the present presidential term. From a political point of view the reappointment of Mr. Bunnell is unfortunato, as his incumbency is obnoxious to the great body of the Republican patrons of the office; not on account of any objections to him personally or to his method of conducting the office, but because his original appointment was made by the Democratic administration and wholly through Democratic influences. We believe that the rule adopted by President Harrison of permitting officials, against whom charges of misconduct or inefficiency can not be sustained, to serve for a term of four years, is a wise and prope r rule, made in the interest of good government, and although its practical application sometimes runs counter to local Republican interests, as in the case at Rem - ington, such cases are exceptional and not numerous enough to materially affect the good results of the rule, throughout* the country generally.

It is now no ways certain that Kemmler the Buffalo wife murderer, will meet death at the point of an electric dynamo. His attorneys have taken an appeal to the higher courts, claiming that the sentence of death by electricity is illegal, in that the constitution provides that cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted. The court has appointed a referee and the question as to the relative painfulness of death by electricity and also its certainty to kill in all cases, has been thoroughly investigated. Many electrical experts have been examined, and their opinions have been very contradictory, borne of them declared that death by a heavy charge of electricity was entirely painless while others thought such a death the most painful that could be imagined. Still others thonght that there was no certainty that a man killed by electricity would stay dead for any reasonable length of time; in other words they claimed that men seemingly dead clear through, from lightning or an electric shock, had been revived again, as good as new. This, last point would not be of much force if the doctors who cut up Mind Reader Bishop, before he was fairly cold, could be permitted to make an autopsy on the body of the man supposed to be dead from the electricity. Their scalpels wonld soon put him into suoh a condition that nothing less than the tramp of Gabriel oould call his scattered fragments together, and even that wonld hardly succeed, at the first blast

Many papers of the Democratic persuasion, as well as some Republican, are greatly felicitating the people of the state over the great saving to be effected by the use of the new text books, recently adopted by the State Board of Education, in obedience to the provisions of the new text-book law. The saving, on its face at least, will indeed be considerable, although there is no question bat that the operation of the lfcw will greatly increase the labors and, oonse-

qaentiy, the remuneration of the County Superintendents and Township Trustees, and it is a question whether the loss to the people in this respect wOl not go far towards neutralizing the gain from the use of the cheaper books. Bat even if it should be granted that the saving to the people at large be as great as the advocates of the new system claim, that fact, alone, will Hot prove that the adoption of the books was a good thing for the people. An entire set of the newly adopted books, consisting of five readers, two arithmetics, two geographies and one copy-book, will cost, tinder the prices established by law, $3.10. The corresponding books in the series now in nse in Jasper county cost $5.85, a difference of $2.80 in favor of the new books. The amount is quite a sum, truly, to be saved on the price of the education of a child, especially to the poor man. But if that saving is made at the cost of inferior, antiquated and badly compiled books, even though the comparative inferiority be moderate in extent, it would be , a veiy dear economy, even to the poorest of fathers, when thos made at the expense of his children’s education. A set of good readers, arithmetics, geographies and copy books may be,’ and probably are, too dear at a total cost of $5.85; but not nearly so dear as a set of inferior books would be, as a free gift, if the acceptance of the inferior books precludes the use of the better ones.

So-Called Indiana Readers Relate Only to Events and Literature of the Long Ago. Indianapolis Journal. It has been facetiously proposed to call the series of readers, the sample copies of which bear the imprint “Indiana School Book Company,” the Hip Van Winkle series, for the reason that the books are so far behind the times. The designation would not be sufficiently exact, for the lazy, goodnatured Dutchman of the village of Falling Waters slept only twenty years, while this series of readers appear to have drowsed nearly thirty. The complaisant gentlemen of the board that adopted these readers have made no claim that the fiist, second and third were up to the required standard; but they have given a hesitating indorsement to the fourth and fifth readers in saying that these higher text-books were acceptable. They made the dubious merit of these two books an excuse for taking the entire series. Neither the fourth nor the fifth readers of the “Indiana School Book Company” contain a line alluding to any of the battles for the Union or to any officer engaged on either side of that conflict. There is not a word of biography of any general, not a line abont the abolition of slavery, not a reference of any kind to Abraham Lincoln. The years 1861 to 1865, in which more history was made than in all others in the life of this nation, are ignored in these books. “They come from Missouri," said an educator yesterday, “and were made for that state, and the prejudices of the survivors of the Jesse James and Quantrell bonds have been respected, for the books have nothing to recall unpleasant memories of the lost cause.”

None of the great inventions and discoveries of the past twentyfive years are noted in either the fourth or fifth reader. The telephone, the phonograph, the great discoveries in electricity, marvelous feats of engineering, railroads that span great continents—none of these have any place in these books intended to instruct the young. There is in the fourth reader one chapter with the title, “Three Great Inventions." It tells briefly of the mariner’s compass, gunpowder, and the art of printing with movable types, and shows that all three are of Chinese origin. This would suggest that the reader itself, the matter in it having so little contemporaneous interest, might as well nave been compiled and printed in China. The same reader contains short biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Webster, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Horace Gresly and Andrew Jackson. The last president mentioned in this book is Andrew Jackson. It has forty lines of biography of Horace Greely, bat there is not one word as to his opposition to slavery or his services for the Union. It is a little remarkable, however, that Horace Greely should be m this Missouri

text-book at all, when it is recalled how the folks down that way used to Oh, for a shot at a Yankee school-teacher. And oh. for a crack at old Greely and Ueecher. The engravings in the fourth reader are ridiculously inartistic. On page picture illustrating a title, “Walking on a Fence,” that would make any boy laugh. The “fence,” as shown in the engraving, is about eighteen inches high, with but one rail, and that at the top. This rail is plainly shown to be six inches wide, and yet the boys, in the most awkward attitudes, are represented as walking it in great nervousuess and in imminent danger of falling off. The fifth reader selections are nearly all old, and were old thirty years ago. The nearest approach to saying anything relating to the late unpleasantness is in twentyfour lines on “Liberty of the Press,” an extract from the remarkable speech of Col. E. D. Baker, United States Senator from Oregon. The epeech was made bat a short time before his death at Ball’s Blnff, he being one of the first to fall in the battles for the Union. There were parts of that speech much stronger than the few lines selected, bat the wonder is that any of the utterances of that patriot should have got into this “non-partisan” text-book. The last reading lesson in the book, pace 347, is entitled “Crusader and Baraoen.” A note introducing the lesson says: “This extract is taken from Waiter Soott’s novel, “The Talisman.” Richard Coenr de Leon is the Christian knight and Saiadin, the Saracen warrier.” This is a brilliant bit of misinformation. Piobably nine out of ten fifth-reader echool-bovs could set the author of the book right and tell him that the Christian hsro in this boat was not Richard the Lion-hearted at all, bat the Knight of the Leopard, David of Scotland. There are other blunders m the book quite as bad. The members of the Indians School Book Company are probably successors in basin ess to that publishing house frequently referred to by the late George C. Harding, “the well established firm of Pnterbaugb, Eliphalet A Co., Hardscrabble, Ind.”