sr— INK SLINGS. —Babe Ruth has demanded one hundred thousand dollars as the price of his services to the New York Amer- ican base ball club next season. Babe’s fling in the movies might not have uncovered a potential screen star, but it evidently did give him a new idea of salary demands. —The Supreme Court of the United ‘States has put the seal of condemna- tion on Edward L. Doheny and Albert B. Fall, former Secretary of the Interior. They are the gentlemen who tried to get away with the govern- ment’s oil reserve and didn’t get their tracks covered well enough. ——1TIt may be noticed that the tariff mongers are enthusiastic in ap- plauding what the President said about the Farm Relief bill, and if the same language had been directed to- ward the tariff law, as it might have been, the farmers would have been quite as enthusiastic in praise. —To the contest for county offices that is to be staged next fall will now ‘have to be added another. Governor Fisher will appoint a successor to the late Judge Keller, but as he will serve only until January 1, 1928, a new Judge will have to be elected in No- vember. It is reasonably certain that whoever is appointed will be a candi- date for election for the regular term. —A lot of fuss is being made over the fact that Fannie Ward, at the age of sixty-one, is still successfully play- ing juvenile parts on the stage. Her latest characterization is that of a child of seven. Nothing so remarkable in that. “Lotta” played child parts wonderfully well long after she had passed sixty-one. The surprising feature of Fannie Ward’s act is the fact that she admits that she is that sold. —Haven’t we told you, time and again, that we haven’t lost faith in or hope of American youth. Beneath the veneer of cosmetics and the trouser legs that resemble the hoop-skirts of the Sixties the girls and the boys are just as true as were their grand-fath- ers and grand-mothers. Frivolous, flippant and jazzy as some appear to be the great mass of them are just sterling Americans in the making. They want to know and see and they venture often to the danger line, but rarely go over. At Lagrange, Illinois, last week, the High school scholars turned out and put over a campaign to prevent Sunday movies in the city. —What ever else might be said of Mussolini his newest edict is one that should command the respect and ad- miration of the entire world. He has created a new type of nobility in Italy. ~ Ancestry or birth has nothing to do with it. It is “the nobility of good conduc.” And its honors are to be conferred on rich and poor alike. With us good conduct is expected from ‘everyone, just as every person is as- sumed to be honest, but, unfortunate- ly, such assumption is too frequently wrong. Impropriety and dishonesty are so common that it has come to such a pass that candidates are often elected to office who claim nothing else by way of qualification than that they are honest. Mussolini's plan to force social recognition of people of good conduct, however lowly they may be, is a long step toward saving them from trying to “climb” at the sacri- fice of virtue and honesty. —Wednesday morning we opened 2 letter bearing a Somerset, Pa., post- mark and were reading the message it contained. Part of it was as fol- lows: “for another year’s subscrip- tion for my paper dear old letter from home, which brings its joys and its sorrows as the years pass.” We had not completed reading all of the card when the telephone rang to tell us that Judge Keller had been stricken. That is one of the kind of sorrows that we presume Mrs. Swartz referred to that the Watchman brings weekly to its readers. Often, we think, there are more of the sorrows than joys for our older readers. Their generation is fast drawing to its close and so many of those with whom they spent the happy, care free days of youth—the * days of friendships that memory adds lustre to in its golden years—have already reached the end of the journe) and there are few left. Indeed tha record of their passing is one of sor- TOW. —Writing from Scranton H. D. R. admonishes us that there is a pos- sibility of a paragraph we published last week coming back to haunt us. it was the one in reference to the ar- rest of A. Mitchell Palmer, in Florida, for driving a car with a 1926 license tag on it. H. D. R. advises us to “va- member the Republican papers on Vare.” This, of course, refers to what many Republican papers said about Vare in the primary campaign and their subsequent ridiculous at- tempts to eat their words. To impress the idea properly on us he enclosed a double column article from The Scran- tonian of February 27, which inti- _ mates that A. Mitchell has been in re- tirement for the purpese of emerging at the psychological moment as a can- didate for President—Gosh, what a sit- uation there would be, if Mitch came galloping out of the stable as a dark horse and won the race for the nomi- nation. We'd support him even if we died of indigestion from eating all we have said about him, and we've said a lot, but never once have we charged him with not being a Demo- crat. Demir A pV: RD 2 STATE RIGHTS AND FEDERAL UNION. VOL. 72." ‘BELLEFONTE, PA. MARCH 4. 1 NO. 9. Governor's Fraud Bills. If the plans of Governor Fisher on | the subject of ballot reform is fully | expressed in the four bills introduced | into the General Assembly, last week, the cause of political morality in Pennsylvania will not be improved by his interference. There is consider- | able merit in each of his bills and taken together, if rigidly enforced, | might achieve fine results. But every- thing of value to the cause was ex- pressed in other bills quite as well, and the danger is that because of the Governor’s sponsorship of these par- ticular measures, other reforms of equal if not greater merit will be side- tracked. The four measures will not guarantee honest elections and fair returns of the vote, however strictly enforced. The Governor’s bill making manda- tory the opening of the ballot boxes is fine, but there was a better one pend- ing on the same subject. The Gov- ernor’s bill restricting assistance to voters might be helpful but there is an infinitely better one pending. For example, the Governor’s bill restricts assistance to “voters who are physical- ly unable to mark the ballot and those unable te read.” Of course this throws the assistance open to the hundreds of thousands of voters in Philadelphia, of whom city treasury Mackey de- clared under oath, vote as they are told to vote by the ward boss. The other and better bill on the calepdar covering that phase would exclude them from assistance. The Governor’s bill on the subject of primary expenses is hardly in line with reform thought. It would “limit the expenditures of a candidate to ten cents for each of the highest number of votes for any office in the preced- ing election.” It would seem as if that were still bidding on the favor. But it might be worth a trial. His remedy for the evil of disseminating information is better because he cuts it out altogether while his proposed treatment of an equally obnoxious fault, the employment of watchers, is positively bad. He would limit the pay for such election day pests instead of limiting the. mumber. The class of men and womén concerned will take any amount given them. : If the evil of vote pollution were less securely entrenched in the centers of population in Pennsylvania, the four measures of legislation sponsored by the Governor might serve to eradi- cate it. The opening of the ballot boxes, for example, would reveal the fraud but in the absence of severe punishment it would not stop or even check the evil. The Governor has himself put a fair appraisement on the crime but makes no provision for ade- quate punishment. One of the other pending bills provides for a prison sentence ranging up to three years. That is not too severe a penalty and if the Governor’s bill for the opening of the boxes incorporated the three year jail sentence it would be better. The bill relating to the assistance of voters is practically destroyed by the provision which allows assistance to any voter who cannot read. A voter physically unable to mark his ballot may be as amply qualified to vote in- telligently as his neighbors. But the menace of assistance doesn’t come from such voters. It lies in the groups of illiterates in the centers of population who have no understanding of our system of government and dis- pose of their votes in bulk to the ma- chine politicians of the district. A provision of law denying assistance to voters who cannot read might be un- just to a very few, but even those de- prived of the ballot on that account would be recompensed by the good re- sult. The four bills sponsored by the Governor, supplemented by the ex- cellent measures sponsored by Senator Harris, now pending in the Senate, would afford a fabric of law that would be well-nigh impervious to fraud. Therefore, if the Governor's purpose is to advance his measures in conjunction with the Harris bills, which have the approval of the Pin- chot Committee of Seventy-six, he will be able to contribute much toward the purification of elections in this State. If his purpose is, on the other hand, to divert support from the Har- ris bills on the ground that his own bills serve the purpose better, he will work harm rather than good and set the cause of ballot reform back. ————p —Anyway the local merchants who were visited by the “Coal-oil Johnny” who was in town shopping, on Satur- day, had a grand time for a few moments. He made what otherwise appeared as a dull day take on a very rosy hue until they discovered that his supposed riches were merely brain- storm products. —It was necessary to send General Smedley Darlington Butler to § Lai make China behave. ' snernl ' « Darlington Haile. Veto of the Farm Bill. President Coolidge had so frequent- ly and with such emphasis declared op- position to the McNary-Haugen farm relief bill that he could not have ap- proved it without stultification. But the veto of the measure is not to be taken as conclusive proof that it ex- pressed vicious legislation. It had the earnest support of many able and pa- triotic Senators and Representatives in Congress and was opposed with equal zeal by nearly as many. There was little question of courage in the veto in view of these facts. It in- vited the opposition of the agricul- tural section of the country and com- manded the approval of another ele- ment of the electorate of probably greater force in the political equation. In his veto message the President declares the measure is “vicious, un- sound and indefensible,” and that it confers no benefits upon the farmer. He declares it would “work a direct and disastrous hardship to all non- agricultural elements of the nation, blast the law of supply and demand that fixes prices.” These are grave charges against an Act of Congress and he adds to them the prediction that the law would increase the cost of living and “reeks with unconstitution- al principles.” This last statement is on the authority of Attorney General Sargent, who holds that Congress has no right to curtail the President’s ap- pointing power and that price fixing has never been approved by the courts. There are two sides to this as well as other questions. The farmers of the West have been striving for years to get legislation that would serve them as the tariff legislation serves the manufacturing interests. Possibly some of the things alleged by the President against the McNary-Haugen bill are true, but they would be equally true if charged against the tariff law, which is now looting the public to the tune of billions annually in order to guarantee to the manu- facturers abnormal profits. In vetoing the farm relief bill Mr. Coolidge will have the cordial as well as substantial support of the beneficiaries of the { tariff legislation and no doubt he has estimated the value of each group. The United States will co-oper- ate with the League of Nations next month “in drawing up a convention on the manufacture of arms and muni- tions.” ‘This fact indicates that we are getting closer to the League. Commeotions in Washington. Quite a commotion was raised in official circles in Washington, the other day, because it was discovered that Senator Borah, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Rela- tions, had been indulging in some correspondence with the President of Mexico. Evidently the Senator had some doubts as to the accuracy of statements made by Secretary of State Kellogg in relation to the oil and other concessions in Mexico held by Americans. Instead of “going around the bush” in the customary diplomatic way, Senator Borah wrote a letter of inquiry to the President of Mexico and thus confirmed his sus- picions that Kellogg had grossly mis- represented the facts. All this occurred more than a month ago but did not reach the attention of President Coolidge until Monday of this week. Of course it excited his indignation. There is a tradition that all correspondence between this and other governments and between indi- vidual Americans and foreign govern- ments must be carried on by the State Department. It seems there is a law, enacted during the Washington admin- istration, making correspondence be- tween Americans and officials of other nationalities an offense against the law, and President Coolidge has not only cited that law but threatens to issue a proclamation denouncing the act of the Idaho Senator. Reduced to the last analysis it may be assumed that the President is not so greatly outraged because of the violation of the ancient law as he is chagrined because the Borah corres- pondence revealed the fact that the Scretary of State, probably with the assent of the President, had been caught in a willful and somewhat mis- chievous falsehood. Mr. Kellogg had stated to the Senate committee that only a small fraction of the American concessionnaires had agreed to the provisions of the Mexico constitution and the information obtained by Borah indicated that a vast majority of them had done so. The corres- pondence may have averted war with Mexico. ————p me a———————— The great success of Ann Nichols with “Abie’s Irish Rose,” is | gratifying, but it is to be hoped it will not “turn the heads” of a lot of girls who may imagine they have “something equally good.” RT AL de BON BL ray we wl Ee Harry Keller, Christian Gentleman. Another and most lamentable trag- edy has fallen in our midst. We cail it tragedy, for what else can the pass- ing of one so eminently useful in life as was the Hon. Harry Keller be. To be cut down just as he had entered into the duties of the highest office that the people of his native county could confer upon him, just when he had reached the goal that is the ambition of every man of his profession and to have the cup of hap- piness snatched from him in the twinkling of an eye is indeed inscruta- ible.. So much so that we might ries live to reincarnate the lives of worthy mortals and make them eternal in immortality. Judge Keller was a man of deep and abiding convictions. He brought a true heart to his work and from the i days when he entered with the zest of | youth into the sports of his compan- {ions until the moment he adjourned his last court we have known none who have more consistently exempli- fied them. In all things he charted his course with a well balanced, analy- tical and God fearing mind and kept it against every temptation. By nature he was a serious man, vet. he loved the leaven of occasional contact with the more frivolous, ebul- lient types of life. On the teaching of devoutly christian parents he built a charter so strong that he entered, fearless of taint, into any companion- ship and it is probably among those who havent seen with his eye that the nobility of his life has sown seeds for its greatest harvest. In a span of nearly half a century of conscious knowiedge of men and with more than usual oppc tunity to appraise those with whom we have been at times associated we know of thoughts of what we ought to be when the call comes. : To our mind Harry Keller is not dead. On Wednesday he merely wrapped the drapery of his judicial ermine about him and laid down to pleasant dreams. . Ged, give" the world Vision to get the lesson of such a christian’s life. i ———————— ——Cloture doesn’t seem to be popular in the Senate. On Saturday it was defeated twice and in one case, that of the Boulder dam, it deserved to win. tt —p fy = ———rs—— Move to Defeat Exposure. The opposition to the motion of Senator Reed, of Missouri, that the powers of the Slush Fund committee be continued during the recess of Congress reveals the scheme by which William S. Vare and others from just punishment for their political crimes. During the period since the investiga- tion was begun Senator Reed has been industrious as well as efficient. But he early discovered that it would be impossible to complete the task with- in the life of the Sixty-ninth Congress and asked for the impounding of the ballot boxes of Philadelphia and Pitts- burgh. But upon a subsequent motion that the boxes be opened and canvass- ed, the opposition developed. Of course the ballot boxes of Phila- delphia and Pittsburgh in storage in Washington will not help the process of tracing fraud. Without the author- ity of the Senate the Slush Fund com- mittee will not have a right to open the boxes and count the votes. In the absence of this right the returns of the election in Pittsburgh and Philadel phia, as made by the election boards, will stand. The power of the Slush Fund committee dies with the expira- tion of the Congress that created it and unless it is extended by a vote of the Senate all the time consumed in the investigation is wasted and all the valuable work accomplished is lost. That is a sacrifice which the Republi- can machine asks to save crooks. Senator Dave Reed, of Pennsylva- nia, the friend of William 8. Vare, who i said before the nomination last May | that the election of Vare to the Senate | would “be disastrous to the industries ; of Pennsylvania,” led up to the pres- jent situation by aquiescing in and | agreeing to everything until a situa- tion arose in which his opposition might prove fatal. Then instead of | acquiescing he objected and summon- ed to his help all the administration ' supporters in the Senate. The issue i will be determined within a day or two and upon the vote of the Senate stands the chance of punishment of Cunningham and his crooked com- i rades. It also reveals the insincerity jo Republican professions of reform. i ET eS pen—— | ——To an outsider it looks as if the Senate has been monkeying with Tom Cunningham, but he will probably get all that is coming to him in the en FO in nEban, but he will wrakan? rebel at death were it not that memo- | none who have more fully fulfilled our ! years more Pennsylvania widows and the Republican majority hopes to save ! ; An Appeal for a Larger Mothers’ As- : sistance Fund. A bill providing for a State appro- i priation of $4,000,000 to the Mothers’ { Assistance Fund for the biennium 11927-1929 has been introduced in the House of Representatives, at Harris- . burg, by Mrs. Lillie H. Pitts, of Phila- | delphia. The bill, which is designated {as H-722, was referred to the House | committee on Appropriations. | In urging full legislative support of i the proposed $4,000,000 State appro- ‘ priation, Stanley Bright, of Reading, ‘ chairman of the State-wide Mothers’ | Assistance Campaign committee, said: : “The Governor’s budget for 1927-29 ‘ Tecommends an appropriation of $2,- 000,000 for the Mothers’ Assistance i Fund, an increase of $2 0,000 over the !last biennium. The | udget recom- | mendation says, “As this amount is matched by the counties, accepting i the provisions of the Acts of the As. | sembly, $4,000,000 will be available | for this purpose.” ; “During the last few months wide publicity has been given throughout the State to the fact that the Mothers’ | Assistance Fund is in urgent need of ja State appropriation of $4,000,000 for 11927-29. This appropriation would, : of course, be matehed by an equal sum {from the counties, making a total of $8,000,000 for the biennium, or $4,000,- , 000 2 year, ’ 0 “The proposed State approp tation (of $2,000,000, even ie approptia by | the counties, would not begin to clear {up the waiting list, whose very exis- tence is a violation of the good faith of the State. The appropriation would permit the giving of aid to only about one-fifth of the waiting list. In other words, about 480 of the 2400 waiting mothers would receive grants. More than 1900 mothers with over 6000 children would still wait. The appro- priation would still be too small to grant them the aid which the State ‘has pledged in the Mothers’ Assistance Fund Act of 1913. For at least two Uist children wold seek in vain the aid to which they are legally en- titled.” y sgally) en To give this in figures understand- able to the people of Centre county it might be added that the Mothers’ dren under sixteen years of age. On { the waiting list are 20 mothers with {60 children. Therefore the smaller { appropriation would mean that only 4 i mothers and 12 children additional | would receive grants, while 16 mothers | and 48 children would not be included {in the distribution of aid to which they { have looked forward for several years. Because of this condition, locally, the Mothers’ Assistance Fund commit- I tee of Centre county appeals to all those interested in the success of House bill 722 to write or telegraph | the Governor, Senator Scott and Rep- | resentative Holmes asking for their i favor for the bill. Mrs. John S. Walker, Mrs. W. F. Reynolds and Miss Mary H. Linn ap- peared before the Kiwanis club, at their regular luncheon on Tuesday, in support of the bill. rn lp emse—— How to Get into Military Training Camps, Sufficient funds have been appro- priated by Congress at its current ses- sion to provide food, clothing, trans- portation to and from camps, training, ete., of 4,300 young men from Penn- sylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Dis. trict of Columbia at citizens’ military training camps this coming summer. Announcement to this effect has been made by Major General Douglas Maec- Arthur, of Baltimore, Maryland. Since the original encampment in 1921, this annual period of one month’s physical training and eiti- zenship instruction has become in- creasingly popular. Applications to attend these encampments invariably exceed the number provided for and are gradually increasing development of new features. It has therefore become necessary to assign population quotas to the various coun- ties, and to follow the “first come, first served” rule in approval of ap- plications. A large number of appli- cations to attend this year’s encamp- ments have already been received. The entire quota for Centre county is twenty two. In past years, Camp Meade, Mary- land, has been one of the largest camps for this purpose but will be supplanted this year by other mili- tary stations in the Third Corps area, to be announced in the near future. Young men desiring to attend camp this vear should make early applica- tion to the local representative of the Military Training Camps association, or to The C. M. T. C. officer, Head- quarters Third Corps area, Baltimore, Maryland, from whom the necessary information and application blanks may be obtained. as ep il Cl ——Some people in Germany still think that others shared responsibility for starting and prosecuting the war. Possibly that is true, but the others were unimportant figures in the affair, —Subseribe for the Watchman. EE Hairy YELL BRHTIDOTTANL nivel Assistance fund of the sounty pn J giving aid to 18 mothers with 50 oF and appealed for the club’s influence | with the | SPAWLS FROM THE KEYSTONE. —H. J. Rubright, of Stowe, Bucks coun- ty, on Monday shot a twelve-pound ground-hog which he caught feeding on an ear of corn, which he had placed in a field for 1abbits and birds. —Snow-bound at Masontown last week, members.of the Waynesburg College fresh- men basketball squad spent a night sleep- ing in empty caskets at the undertaking establishment of H. A. Johnson, a trustee of the college. The morgue offered the on- Iy available sleeping quarters in the town. —Mrs. Mary D. Camwell, convicted of embezzlement in connection with misappro- priation of $5000 in school children’s de- posits at Midland Savings and Trust Com- pany at Midland, in Beaver county, on Mon- day was sentenced by the court to serve seven and one half years in the Allegheny County Work House and pay a fine of $500. —DBelieved to have suffered a stroke of apoplexy, Frederick Craft, 61, of Erie, Pa., was found on Tuesday sitting on a hot plate in his room at the home of Frank J. Fahey, with fire going in full blast. He had been burned so seriously before the fire in his clothing could be extinguished that he died in a hospital shortly after- ward. —Leaving his horse and wagon in front of a house, William H. Augsten, of Pitts- burgh, returned from delivering a sack of coal to find only the neck and head of the equine in view. The rest of the animal had sunk into soft dirt thrown into the street by a working crew. It took three hours and a block and tackle to rescue the horse. —J. Fred Weaver, prominent socially and a well known lumber dealer, of Clearfield, was found dead last Saturday afternoon in the Susquehanna river near that place. Weaver had been interested in real estate at Gulfport, Miss., and was reported to have lost heavily. Since his return from the south he had been in ill-health and despondent. —Miss Rosa Kubach, for thirty years employed as a domestic in the home of Mathias Seddinger, shipbuilder and real estate operator, of Philadelphia, has been made the sole heiress to the fortune left by the financier, who died January 23. While appraisement of the estate has not been made, it is believed by friends that it may total $200,000. —Returning of hundreds of checks and pieces of other mail to those who had ad- dresed it to the Acme Farms, started last week at the Bloomsburg post office. The farms figured in an alleged nation-wide swindle which was uncovered last De- cember; but the mail was held there until permission was received from the Post Office Department to return it. —Rosie Black, 25, of Altoona, afflicted with deafness and the loss of speech for 23 years, due to a malady in childhood, has been partially cured. She is able to pro- nounce her name and can hear a watch ticking. She is undergoing treatment ut DuBois, and it is believed she will recover. She’ was graduated from the Edgewood Park School for the Deaf in Pittsburgh. —Charles Miller, wealthy Franklin resi- dent and former head of the Pennsylvania national guard, in a suit filed on Tuesday in common pleas court against the News- paper. Printing company, publishers of the Gazette-Times, Pittsburgh, asked $30.000 damages for publication of am article in the paper in connection with a divorce action filed by Miller's wife. The item was published December 4, 1925. —Dr. William Mather Lewis, president of George Washington University, Wash- ington, D. C., has accepted the presidency of Lafayette College. His election to head Lafayette became publicly known on Tues- day when Judge E. J. Fox, president of the Lafayette board of trustees, received word of his acceptance. Dr. Lewis was elected last December at a private meeting of the board held in Philadelphia. —Dr. B. E. Bamble, of Manchester, York county, attended a public sale last Sat- urday and purchased an old muzzle-londing shotgun. His friends teased him a bit for buying such a relic, and the physician took the joshing good-natured. When he got Lome he tried to remove what he supposed was a collection of old paper from the barrel, but did not succeed, and called in a friend, who knew more about guns. They made a ramrod and set to work, when out cama a 85 bill. The “excavating” continued with the result that they extracted thirteen $10 bills. All the bills were dated twenty- three years ago, and were covered with sofr rust. —Clinton C. Seebold, fifteen-year-old boy, of Riverside, Northumberland county, was killed instantly when a shot gun was dis- charged into his breast at the home of his | barents at ten o'clock Sunday. John Mor- ris sixteen years of age, a companion of the dead youth, who was in the act of re- ceiving the gun from Seeboid’s hands when the fatal shot was fired, was not held at an inquest conducted later by Dr. Joseph K. Fisher, county coroner. Companions of Seebold and Morris testified at the inquest ‘that the tragedy was the aftermath of a hectic evening, during which Seebold “ran wild” with a gun during a demonstration of wild west methods and indicated that the shooting was an accident. —Cashiers of three banks in Scranton i have been subpoenaed to appear before the ' federal grand jury in Cleveland investi- ! gating an alleged been running syndicate | said to have shipped the beverage from ‘ Seranton, Edwardsville and Lock Haven | into Ohio. Deputy United States Marshal ; Gould, of Cleveland, went to Scranton last ‘Thursday and served summons on the : cashiers of the Dollar State bank, Bosak | State bank and the Anthracite Trust com- ; pany. The subpoenaes order the bank of ficials to produce records involving the financial transactions of William Loughran jand W. J. Vincent, of Scranton; Patrick | F. McGowan, or William A. Quinn, Harry Stahl and George I. ,Perrick. —A fractured coceyx, injury to the sac- i roiliaz point, two broken ribs, bruises and contusions from the back to the knee, and a blow on the head with attendant pain, and nervous shock entitle one to a damage | of $55,000. That amount is claimed by Miss | Fern A. Everett, employee of the Citizen's : National bank, of Washington, Pa., in a | suit filed against Mr. and Mrs. John S. { Brookman, owners of a property in North Main street. Miss Everett avers she fell on the pavement in front of their property and suffered the injuries described in her : statement. She claims that the owners are liable as the ice on which she fell was formed by water dripping from the roof of |a porch which projects out over the paves ment. bible a8 tha lea’ an wikian
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers