849

THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL,

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TRADES UNION LABEL COUNCIL
MEMPHIS, TENN.

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 1913.
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This is "United States" weather.
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The rain crow is the bird of the hour.
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A few days like yesterday will help
us out of "liquidation."
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"Painless dentistry" is a myth; it
is just a plain, unvarnished Ananias
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If Secretary Bryan goes to Mexico, will
he take his chautauqua circuit with him?
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It isn't politics that's "cursing Mexico;"
It's just old Hary Scratch and their ma-
larial climate.
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Maybe the drop in temperature is due
to the fact that our court officials have
all simmered down.
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OUR POOR STATE GOVERNMENT

What a miserable mess our people are making of state govern-
ment.

That the machinery of the state does not entirely collapse is
because of that well-defined coherency which men have discovered
exists in graft and in incompetency.

In the State of Mississippi an investigation is going on which has
already shown that the penitentiary system was fearfully misman-
aged, and which has also shown fraud and theft on the part of a
number of the minor attaches.

Against the head of the penitentiary commission there is an
indictment with a conviction. The ending of the jury in the one case
against Smith resulted from a trifling incident. But behind the
jury's verdict there seemed to be a further desire to hold him respon-
sible, to punish Smith for what some of his subordinates had done
and for other things he may or may not have done.

The other two commissioners have been indicted, and one of them
is on trial. He is an honest man. The thing he has probably been
guilty of is trusting too much to the integrity of others.

Those who have to do with convicts are lucky if they escape
wrongdoing themselves. If they themselves do not commit a sin
against society, they often become victims of what men call bad luck.

The very brutality of the occupation and the daily contact with
the sordid and the vicious seem to dull a man's sense of right and
wrong.

The great shame of Mississippi, however, is in the graft that is
being unearthed at the insane asylum. Robbing an insane person,
making them the victims of the greed of their guards or keepers is a
form of crime that has in it not only the infamy but the meanness of
cowardice.

The highwayman who sticks a gun in the face of another man
takes a chance. The burglar runs the risk of being shot. The train
robber knows if he keeps in his business that some day some man wil
call his hand.

But the grafter on the insane is a sneak. He takes small chances,
because the testimony of an insane person is incompetent.

Why is there grafting in the penitentiary system of Mississippi?
Why have under officials in the state government gone short?And
why are men robbing the insane?

Surely the standard of integrity among private citizens is as high
in Mississippi as in any other state.

It is because the government of Mississippi is, and has been
purely personally political. It is not even a government of a party,
but a government of factions.

Men do not hold office because they may be efficient, but because
they trained with that crowd which can best appeal to the popular
ear.

Men in Mississippi for years have been running for office because
they were McLaurin men or Money men or the reverse. Later the ban-
ner bearers were Vardaman and Williams or Vardaman and Percy.

The struggle was individual. The methods of campaign were not
instructive, but destructive.

The platform orator interested his audience not in what he pro-
posed to do, but what the other fellow had failed to do and what he
intended to do to him.

Measures of merit if taken up by one faction were opposed by
another. After the victors got office their appointive power was used
not to secure the greatest efficiency, but to reward those who had
been most loyal to them or to give a hostage for future success by
taking into their camp some strong and active fellow who formerly
had been recalcitrant.

It is charged and recharged that the mainspring behind these
indictments and these revelations is politics.

The enormity of the crime committed or alleged to have been
committed is lost sight of in considering whom an acquittal or a con-
viction would benefit politically.

Every faction in the state should carry on a crusade for the pun-