Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

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 SUBSCRIPTION PRICE: SI.OO PER TEAR Advertising Rates Furnished on Application. 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.