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WATSON’S EDITORIALS
Bi*
Pat Calhoun ; Criminal.
It is doubtful whether any pen
itentiary holds a convirt who is
by nature more essentially a
criminal than Patrick Calhoun,
grandson of John C. Calhoun the
great and pure statesman of
South Carolina.
Wherever and whenever you
hear of Pat, the story is the same
—Rascality. Sometimes it is one
thing, sometimes another, but
Rascality is the burden of the
song always. He has a brother
and he lias a sister: and if their
public statements are credible,
Pat has robbed both his brother
and his sister. He has had asso
ciates, allies, friends and if the
word of these be worth anything,
Pat has indifferently swindled
them all. At sundry times and
places, he has had partners; if
the of these partners
be not mere idle breath, Pat* has
seldom had a partner that he did
not cheat.
Taking it into his head that he
would like to be a U. S. Senator,
in order that he might grow rich
upon the opportunities of his po
sition (as per Gorman, Democrat,
and Aldrich, Republican), Pat
bought the support of the two
grand moguls of the Farmers’
Alliance —Livingston and Mac
unc —and came down from New
York to Atlanta to receive the
goods.
The deal was so utterly shame
ful that it failed, by a hair’s
breadth; and Pat bad to realize
that the money he had paid Liv
ingston and Macune was one of
his bad investments.
Then he turned his restless
mind to the Central Railroad of
Georgia; and when he had fin
ished the business he had robbed
the stockholders of several mil
lion dollars. If we had had a
state administration and a p"bl c
sentiment that were worth a
pinch of snuff. Pat Calhoun wouhl
then have been arrested ns
a common thief and robber,
and sent to the penitentiary
where such men belong. In
Georgia, however, we are such
a poor-spirited lot of cravens and
party slaves that we will submit
to any sort of crime that is back
ed by a political clique and a few
newspapers—hence we nev°r lift
ed a finger in protest while Pat
Calhoun was robbing the stock
holders of the Central Railroad.
Once a rascal, always a rascal;
and Pat’s career nf crime at
length took him to San Francis
co, the Paradise of commerc'al
knavery.
Corruption being the order nf
the dav in San Francisco. TM
Calhoun waded into it up to his
WATSON’S WEEKLY JEFFERSONIAN
A Newspaper Devoted to the Advocacy of the Jeffersonian Theory of Government.
PUBLISHED BY
THOS. E. WATSON and J. D. WATSON,
Editors and Proprietors
Temple Court Building, Atlanta, Ga.
ATLANTA, GEORGIA, THURSDAY, JUNE 6, 1907.
chin. Bribing the local bosses,
just as he had bribed Livingston
and Macune, Pat got franchise
properties worth millions of dol
lars, without having to pay a cent
to the public to whom the proper
ty belonged. In this way, he was
rolling in millions without ever
having done a thing to earn
them, excepting to buy the boss
es who controlled the votes.
But the Reform waves that are
sweeping over the continent
caught Pat in the very act. The
bosses whom he had bribed
squealed. Then the Grand Jury
indicted Pat in fourteen different
cases.
Os course he ought to be sent
to the penitentiary. In fact, a
man who devotes his whole life
to evil, as Pat Calhoun has done,
ought to be put to death. We
punish with the extreme penalty
of the law many a man whose
crimes do less harm to society
than is inflicted upon us by such
persistent lawbreakers as Pat
Calhoun.
n * *
His Relvard.
The Southern Railroad will
soon lose one of its Governors.
Joe Terrell’s time is almost out.
The ten thousand dollars which
the Wall Street corporations put
into Joe’s campaign fund was
money wisely invested. This
third-rate country lawyer got to
be Governor of Georgia, and dur
ing the whole of his term his one
purpose seems to have been to
keep the lid on for the railroad,.
The Southern has had an easy
time manipulating the Central in
violation of the Constitution
which Joe was sworn to enforce
—but never a hand did Govern n
Joe lift against the violators of the
law.
The Centra! itself went into no
torious collusion with the Cotton
Seed < >ii Trust to drive out inde
pendent buyers—refusing to fur
nish them cars —thus forfeiting
its charter and aiding a rascallv
combine to crush competition n
the one hand while it robbed the
farmer on the other; but Gover
nor 'Ferrell was blind to th? law
lessness nf the Trust, and deaf ro
the complaint of those who pro
tested.
'Fhe Georgia Railroad, man
aged solely with a view to divi
dends for greedy New York mil
lionaires, fell into a disgraceful
state of physical unrepair, for
lack of the barest necessities in
the way of'sound cro«stm< a°d
decently adequate rails. Traffic
was interrupted all along the line
from Atlanta to Augusta, ami
thousands of dollars of damage
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Entered at Postoffict, Atlanta, Ga., January 11, IQO7, at tecand
clan mail matter.
inflicted upon the patrons of the
road.
Not one particle of help did the
people get from the Governor in
their fight against the insuffera
ble conditions which the foreign
ownership of our railroad prop
erty had brought upon us: If our
Governor had the .slightest sym
pathy with his own people in
their struggle to wrest justice
from these predatory foreign cot
porations he certainly kept the se
cret weli. Public indignation
aroused by the Augusta Herald,
The Jeffersonian, and other news
papers finally roused Manager
Scott out of his self-complacent
and insolent security, and we
finally had him dancing his sec
tion bosses tip and down the road
in a very lively manner, indeed
—but we got no aid, comfort or
countenance from the Governor
of Georgia.
Thank the Lord! his time is al
most out. May the State never
be disgraced with such another
corporation lid-sitter. Let the
Railroads now take their useful
servant, say to him, “Well done
thou good and faithful”—and give
him a nice, fat place under Hamp
McWhorter, or General Counsel
Thom.
That’s the kind of reward Joe
Terrell has been looking forward
to, during the whole time that he
was serving the Northern corpor
ations as Governor of Georgia.
He has made the lawless Wad
Street railroads a good Governor.
He kept the lid on beautifully.
He even offered to appoint their
lobbyist, Hamp McWhorter, to a
place on the Supreme Court of
the State. Let us sit back, now,
and see what Joe gets in his
sti -eking.
A good little boy, like Joe, who
has had his hosiery “hung up ’
for four years ought to get some
thing real nice.
And i'll bet he gets it.
•S
Fighting the Lalu.
Insolent railroad lawyers are
still amusing themselves playinr
with fire. To these high-headed
gentlemen, the badgering of sov
ereign states is an exhilarating
game. To call a halt on a Gov
ernor and tie the movements of
legislative bodies with Injunc
tions, is fine sport.
Let the corporations beware!
Sooner or later they are going to
monkey with the wrong man.
When they do, they will learn a
lesson thev will never forget.
There is no reason under the
sun why a Governor, and a state,
should allow corporation lawvers
to nullify statutes and paralyze
the public administration. There
is no reason under the sun why
a State should pay the slightest
attention to an Injunction issued
by a Judge!
The claim that the Fourteenth
Amendment meant corporations
when it said that no person
should be cFeprived of life, liberty
or property without due process
of law, is mere latter-day poppy
cock. In the 77 Georgia Reports,
our own Supreme Court scouted
that absurd contention twenty
years ago. The Fourteenth
Amendment applies to natural
persons, and everybody, who
isn’t paid to believe otherwise,
KNOWS IT.
All this nonsense about “Con
fiscatory” is a barefaced sham.
The claim that the entire prop
erty of the corporation is confis
cated, because the railroad book
keeper can cook up a statement
showing that if a proposed law
is allowed to go into operation
the corporation cannot earn net
profits, has no foundation in com
mon sense, justice, or history.
This arrogant assumption of the
power to nullify state laws, up
on the ground that they interfere
with net earnings, is the sheer in
solence of corporation encroach
ment.
When and where has Anglo-
Saxon law ever guaranteed net
profits to any kind of property?
Never has it done so. The
right, sacred and inviolable, to
net earnings was never even
heard of until these latter days,
when corporation greed began to
reach out for advantages which
defied the law and trampled upon
the rights of all other classes of
property.
M
Typographical 'Errors.
What a hair in the butter is to
the lady of the house, a mis-print
cd word is to the author. Just as
it is practically impossible for
the most painstaking housekeep
er to keep an occasional bug from
getting into the bedstead, or the
unexpected dead fly from showing
up in the coffee grounds, so it
is practically impossible to oblit
erate, annihilate, and forever ban
ish the typographical error.
Nevertheless, when I write a
book-review for my magazine and
have occasion to refer to General
Israel Putnam by the term of his
torical endearment, “Old Put,” it
disturbs my digestion considera
bly to see that the printer has
mad? me call him “Old Pot.”
Between author and printer
there is a quarrel which has com?
tumbling down the ages, and as
the printer has the last lick in ev.