Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1898 — SOUTHERN. [ARTICLE]

SOUTHERN.

‘The Rev. Sam,Jon.es will run for Governor of Georgia. Senor Dupuy 'de Lome was hung In effigy at Somerset, Ky. At Huntington, AV. A'a., Rufus Schaefer was assassinated before his own fireside. Lee B. McFarland, who defaulted in the sum of $43,000 from the Second National Bank, of Parkersburg, AV. Va., was sentenced to five years iu the penitentiary by Judge Jackson in the United States court. E. G. Mussey, a constable of Franklin township, Arkansas, was murdered 1 y ambushed negroes whom ho attempted th arrest, llis body was riddled with bullets. His murderers will probably be lynched if captured. The special Illinois Central train carrying homeward-bound delegates from Fittsburg and Baltimore to the convention of the International League of Press Clubs at New Orleans, stopped at Vicksburg, Miss., where the visitors spent some time in viewing the sights of the city. The delegation presented to Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Muddy, their host and hostess since the party left home, with a handsome silver set of some fifty pieces. Mr. Maddy is press agent of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Four hundred steel workers struck at the Bcnwood plant of the AVheeling, W. A'a., Steel and Iron Company against a wage reduction averaging 25 per cent. All of the men employed on tonnage jobs were heavily cut, some of them as much as 35 per cent. The smaller places were reduced in proportion. The strike promises to be as bitter ns the one that recently occurred at the big plant at Bellaire, across the river. Fruitless conferences were held at Benwood, but the company declared it was unable to offer anything better than the reduced scale against which the-men struck. The Benwood plant is one of the largest in part of the country. Booker T. AVashington, the prominent colored leader and educator of Tuskegee, Ala., in an open letter to the constitutional convention in New Orleans, La., after explaining the motives which prompt him to address the convention, among other things, says: “Since the war no State has had such an opportunity to settle the race question, so far as it concerns politics, as is now given Louisiana. The negro agrees with you that it is necessary to the salvation of the South that restriction be put upon the ballot. I know that you have two serious problems before you—ignorant and corrupt government on the one hand, and on the other a way to restrict the ballot so that control will be in the Bands of the intelligent without regard to race. AA'ith the sincerest sympathy with you in your efforts to find a way out of-the difficulty, I want to suggest that no* State iu the South can make a law that will provide an opportunity or temptation for an ignorant White man to vote and withhold the same opportunity from an ignorant colored man without injuring both men. Any law controlling the ballot that is not absolutely just and fair to both races will work more permanent injury to the whites than to the blacks. I beg of you further that in the degree that you close the ballot box against the ignorant that you open the school house. More than one-half of the people of your State are negroes. No State can long prosper when a large percentage of its citizenship is in ignorance, and poverty and has no interest in government.”