Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1896 — WHAT IT ALL COSTS. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WHAT IT ALL COSTS.

PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS TAKE A PILE OF MONEY. Total Expense ofthe NationaJConVentiort at St. Lonis Probably Between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 Where the Money Goes. ' * • -« ,An Enormous Expense, Few people have any idea of the cost of a great national convention. Time was when SIOO,OOO would have been thought a pretty high figure. In the old day’s, when Baltimore was the great national convention city, and half thd dc&"ftates were represented by proxies from Congressmen and others jn Washington, and When the convention met in theaters or halls and the members and visitors lodged in low-rate hotels and hoarding houses, no doubt conventions were held at much less cost than even the half of SIOO,OOO. But things are vastly different nowadays. Millions now figure where tens of thou-sands-were once thought big. . ColI’H; L. *Swords; sergeant-at-arms- f the Republican national committee, estimates the total cost of the St. Louis convention at over $3,000,000. First of all should be counted the straight expenses of the convention, borne by the Business Men’s League of St. Louis. These expenses amounted to about’ $150,000 at Minneapolis in 1892. The jeost of the hall alone at St. Louis is not far from $75,000, including cost of repairs after the tornado. Other bills to be footed by the Business Mep's League

include the expenses of the sergeant-at-armsmf varioim-4>rintiu& accounts, the cleaning of the hall, its lighting, fees for police and fire protection, big postage bills, and a thousand other things. Take 3,000 men as representing delegates, alternates and their following, add"the assistant sergeants-at-arms, the doorkeepers and the messengers, in all about a thousand, and the newspaper correspondents and reporters, and the total. shows 4.000.—1 f each one of_ these men spends SIOO in addition to his railroad fare—and this is a very small average—the total reaches $400,000. Include the expenses borne by the telegraph companies and the big press associations in getting ready to spread the news, the total expenses of the Business Men’s League and those directly interested Will not be a cent less than a round halfmiHion of dollars. Allowing 100,000 as d fair estimate of the number of strangers thronging to the convention city, and railroad tickets alone for such a crowd mean something like $750,000, and $300,000 a day follows for board and lodging. The. cost of maintaining headquarters, music, decorations 'and literature cannot come under SIOO,000. This is not all,,however, for neither the expense of sending the hews from St. Louis to the thousands of daily papers in the various States nor the cost of the thousands of private telegrams—a smaller, but still a considerable sum—has been counted in. It is not easy to estimate either of these sums, but it is not going too far, perhaps, to assume that all the expenditures due to the convention used up almost $4,000,000. If the $4,000,000 were to be paid out in dollar bills, and these bills were to be made into a carpet, it would be 1,000 feet long and 650 feet wide, covering an area of about fifteen acres, and the capitol at Washington, if placed in the middle of the carpet, would appear like' a toy house set on a big rug. Four million dollars in gold piled inra pyramid fourteeteach-way at

the base would be five feet high. Four million silver dollars would make a pyramid ten feet square at the base and fifteen feet high. The cigars smoked by the crowds, allowing five cigars a day, which Is not too many, for pa,ch man would make a pile of 70,000 boxes of cigars, and this pile would be about two and one-half miles high. Arranged in a tier of five boxes, side by side, the pile would be about 262 feet high, or within twenty feet as high as the top on the Liberty statue that stands on the top of the Capitol’s dome. Placed end to end, 3,500,000 cigars would reach 248 miles—or almost as far as from St. Louis to Chicago. At an average of Sl-3 cents, three for a quarter, these cigars would cost $291,666.

COST IN SILVER AND GOLD.

FIFTEEN ACRES IN DOLLAR BILLS.