Daily tobacco leaf-chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1890-1895, 1891-07-23
TWO QUESTIONS.
Let the Governor Settle the Mob Cues
ton and the Legislature the
Lease Question.
To the Tobacco Leaf-Chronicle.

To the Tobacco Leaf Chronicle.
/ observe from yesterdays de-
spatches that the miners have APP
pointed a committee demanding that
the Governor call an extra session of
the Legislature to abolish the lease
system and that the Governor has
gone to confer with them about it.
The demand of the miners is this /;
that the fifteen hundred convicts of
Tennessee be taken at once from
their labor in the mines and put TO
such other employment as the State
authorities may determine. In this
othor employment, whatever it is,the
cOnvicts must of course compete with
honest labor. There are already con-
victs employed in making wagons,
chairs, harness, sadlery, etc., and
competing with honest men engaged
in the same occupations to the great
detriment of the latter. Now the
East Tennessee miners demand that
all convict competition against them
selves shall cease and as a conse-
quence that this competition shall be
transferred to other forms of honest
labor and the Governor has gone to
confer with them to see whether he
shall at once call the Legislature and
have the business arranged to the
satisfaction of the miners.
This convict question is grave
one and not one to be guessed off in
"A hurry at the demand of two thous-
and angry and lawless men. 1t is
the duty of the State to see first, that
crime is punished at as little expense
possible to society; second, that con
victs are decently treated and made
to work third, that the labor al
which they are put shall bring them
as little as possible in competition
with free labor. To abolish the lease
system at a stroke would be to de-
prive the State at once of a hundred
thousand dollars of revenue which
she is now getting from the lessees
and to throw the whole expense of
maintaining the prisoners on the
honest people of the State until some
method could be devised of making
the conYicts self-sustaining. II
would be an especially dangerous
and difficult thing to do now that
hepenitentiary has just been burned.
The lease system is an abOmina
ton and ought in decency to be dis
pensed with as soon as possible, but
this should not be done at the de
mand of an angry lot of miners who
have no ground of complaint except
that which must to greater or less ex-
tent exist wherever criminals are put
to any form of labor.
This whole business to a Tennes-
sean is humiliating in the extreme.
First the Governor with great flourish
of trumpets calls out the military
power of the State to suppress a law
less outbreak, aud after his troops,
who have marched into the dis If
fected region, have ingloriously sur
rendered and been shipped back to
him like lot of cattle, he and the AT
tOrney-G General begin nosing among
the books and hunting for law which
will justify them in sending any
more troops to the same dangerous
locality. This would be funny if i
wasn't reflection on the manhood
of the State.
Let the Governor settle the mob
question first and let the Legislature
settle the lease question as soon after
ward as it can be done with due re-
gard for the best interests of the en-
tire State. The first thing to be done
is to remedy the unparalleled disaster
of the gallant Colonel Sewer.
July "A, 1891. MILITIAMAN.