Life — July 24, 1913 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JULY 24, 1913 VOL, 62 No, 1604 Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Cannon House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. J. A. Mitcnett, Pres’t. Na Western city, years ago, when the cook reported that the garbage man complained of the garbage, the lady responded: “What would the man hav Does he want a meringue on it? Just at this writing, if we could have a meringue on the news, it would be nice! For the news is so unsavory just now! A few stories of probity and decency and pleasantry spread upon the top of it for a few days would be grateful, we are almost sure, to a lot of readers. Instead of which we have a me- ringue of scandals, libels, slanders, and investigations, that take up the top lines in the papers: the lobby story, with David Lamar and Edward Lau- terbach working in it as reprobate clowns; the Cohalan investigation, in which as we go to press, a Tammany legislative committee is examining the record of a Tammany judge; the rapid- fire conflict between Sulzer and Mur- phy, with new charges every day, and, as if we had not dirt enough at home, from London the sordid story of a law-fight for a very dirty fortune. Lady Sackville, having won her suit, is reported to be ill at home. Ought to be, certainly! And yet there was more sympathy with her than with those “Scotts wha’ had a Wallace bled,” and wished to make the performance con- tinuous. She won. As the World puts it: A fortune wheedled from a king by his mistress; swollen by big legacies to a noble Marchioness from two corrupt men each claiming to be her father out- side wedlock; and transmitted by the A. Mitten, Sec’y and Treas. original of Thackeray's Marquis of Steyne, by a son as vile, and by a com- paratively decent bastard, comes to.a woman who in a previous suit defended her coronet by denying that her mother was married. No wonder Lady Sackville was ill. No doubt there was a good-deal of nausea elsewhere in England, and some remembrance of what old Alfred Wal- lace lately said about the rotten basis of the social structure. Our current scandals partly enumer- ated above at least are rather more cleansing than this. What happens to David Lamar is of small consequence because he is of no consequence, but the confession that was forced from him that he impersonated Congressmen over the telephone was interesting at least, and has made all the Congress- men mad, and has helped to put them on terms of suspicion with all the lobby, which is a good result and fa- vorable to punctuality in legislation. 7 2... we ie S for Judge Cohalan, it is hardly to be expected that the judiciary committee of the Hon. Charles Murphy’s legislature at Albany will see any very gross impropriety in a Tammany leader who had exacted a share of profits from a contractor, be- ing promoted to the bench. Neverthe- less the investigation of Judge Cohalan will have its effect in emphasizing what is hardly disputed, that Murphy is not a fit person to pick judges for New York, and that the preliminary political services that recommend men to be se- lected by Tammany for the bench are not services which may properly rec- ommend citizens for that preferment. I* may: be that Governor Sulzer in conducting a knock-down and drag- out fight with Tammany, is doing the public service for which, on the whole, he is best qualified. The Governor's most notable characteristic is his fer- vency. It was said of him at the time of his inauguration that there were al- ways live coals in his fire-box, and that if the right sort of political fuel were shoveled into him he might make a very blazing governor. So far, cer- tainly, his coals have stayed hot, and we could not ask a better test of his powers of combustion than they are having. With a Democratic governor at Albany and a Democratic President at Washington, and Tammany con- spicuously persona non grata with both, it must be asked more than ever what party Tammany belongs to. The an- swer is obvious: that Tammany be- longs exclusively to the Tammany party. If it is suggested that Sulzer is a devoted member and leader of the Sulzer party, that may be true, and yet the Governor be all the fitter for the work of a political mongoose to drive the snakes out of Fourteenth Street. After a while, maybe, with the Tam- many party and the Sulzer party and the Hearst party, all fighting earnestly and overtime, the Democrats in New York State may some day elect some Democrats to office. Y somewhat such a three-cornered process as that, the venerable Eastern question seems to be bumping along towards solution. The Balkan allies having cleaned up the Turks and come into joint possession of a large spoil, have fallen out over the division of it, and seem to be biting each other’s heads off with immense ardor and practiced dexterity, This is the game comicbooks.com