850

THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL,

[left column]
[logo]
TRADES UNION LABEL COUNCIL
MEMPHIS, TENN.

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 1913.
---------------------------------
This is "United States" weather.
---------------------------------
The rain crow is the bird of the hour.
--------------------------------
A few days like yesterday will help
us out of "liquidation."
-------------------------------
"Painless dentistry" is a myth; it
is just a plain, unvarnished Ananias
---------------------------------
If Secretary Bryan goes to Mexico, will
he take his chautauqua circuit with him?
--------------------------------
It isn't politics that's "cursing Mexico;"
It's just old Hary Scratch and their ma-
larial climate.
--------------------------------
Maybe the drop in temperature is due
to the fact that our court officials have
all simmered down.
---------------------------------
It was a neat little touch for the In-
ternational Bible Association to meet in
"The Land of The Sky."
--------------------------------
The new currancy bill does [rip in paper?]
be a cut glass affair, judging from the
way it is being handled.
---------------------------------
They are going to knock the secretary
of state out of that chautauqua circuit,
hat cocked or not cocked.
---------------------------------
New York alone, with its consumption
of 3,000,000 eggs a week, can keep
the old hen on the hump.
---------------------------------
In the Chinese troubles, Yuan Shi Kat
is likely to be served with the same
sauce he gave the emperor.
---------------------------------
The Richmond Times-Dispatch calls the
president's cabinet "Pandora's box." Who
is the "Hope" that is left in it?
---------------------------------
Jailing Mrs. Pankhurst, unjailing her
and jailing her again, seems to be the
chief occupation of the London police.
---------------------------------
Miladi says when she studies a rail-
road time table she always seems to ar-
rive two days before it's time to start.
----------------------------------
The Turks have retaken Adrianople, and
their excuse is "the Bulgarian atrocities."
Which has a queer sound to Christian
ears.
-----------------------------------
The American Optical Association has
selected St. Louis as its next meeting
place. Perhaps it just wants "to show"
Missouri.
------------------------------------
We came near saying to David Lamar:
"The grand jury'll git you if you don't
look out." And now it's gone and went
and happened.
-----------------------------------
They have imported a Chinese bug to
eat the New Jersey mosquitoes. Now
watch 'em hunt something the will eat
the Chinese bug.
-------------------------------------
From this distance it looks as if Huerta
Caranza De la Barra and Felix Diaz
each wanted to get up a little hades of
his own down in Mexico.
-------------------------------------
Surely Mr. Roosevelt must have in-
advertently mislaid his press agent. A
whole week has gone by and he hasn't
rippled over the first page.
--------------------------------------
Mr. Bryan is beginning to find out that
he is not expected to serve Uncle Sam
and the chautauquas. It is the old ques-
tion of two masters or one.

[right column]
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-
ishment of the wrongdoers, for clearing them and their sort out of
office, and then there should be a demand that those hereafter who
are to hold the minor offices should be appointed because of fitness
and ability and not because of nolitical affiliations.

In Tennessee we are tarred [fold in paper?]
that in Mississippi. The difference is in the form of the abuses.

Men in Tennessee have not defaulted, have not stolen outright
because the laws are so shaped that graft is legalized.

We have it in our enormous fee system.

We have it in the settlement of estates, where the law courts
seem to turn themselves into fee-making machines for lawyers, com-
missioners, receivers and other voluntary aids-de-camp in this post-
mortem ceremony.

We have the scandal of a back tax system. This system is not
flagrant in Memphis because the men in charge seem to have a still
unstifled sense of right and wrong.

In East and Middle Tennessee these back tax agents swarmed up
and down the country and have been a greater curse to the people
than were Sherman's bummers when they passed through Georgis.

Our government machinery, however, is smashed. There is
neither order nor system.

We have two election boards. Members of some of the depart-
ments in the state government are paid, others are not.

There is no real government in Tennessee.

The people get along because the majority of them are moved by
a desire to do the right thing.

The majority of our state and county officials are incompetent
and few of them are moved by that high motive of desiring to do
service to the state and to the people because the work is patriotic.

The state government of Tennessee, like that of Mississippi, is
to care.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Over in Arkansas we have had an epidemic of elections.

Joe Robinson ran for governor and Jeff Davis died. Then Joe
wanted Davis' place in the Senate and quit being governor before he
warmed his seat. And now he is in the Senate. This made other
regular elections and other primaries necessary.

Brundidge and [Hayes?] ran in a primary and the election was
merely a contest of fraudulant voting.

Half a dozen unnecessary elections in Arkansas in the last two
years have cost the people about $1,000,000.

Most of these elections have been brought about by politicians
jumping from one office to another.

In the meantime Arkansas passes from one scandal to another
of executive and legislative incompetency and inefficiency.
----------------------------------
Why these things in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas?
Because we elect men to office who best play the game of politics,
and the fitness of these men for the offices desired is a minor incident.

83527