St. Paul daily globe., 1895-11-27
-FOUR ATTORNEYS GENERAL.

Between the ideal and the real at
torney general there is usually a very
wide gap. Ideally he is the watchdog,
guarding the interests of the people
and assaulting and driving off the in
truder. By another figure he. is the
engineer, who sits with his hand on
the throttle and sets in motion the
great machine of the law when pri-
vate greed invades public rights.
Really he is commonly content with
doing the work of his office which is
thrust on him, and not doing any
watching at all. He sees the laws,
enacted to protect society, set at
naught without any sense that it
lays any special duty on him. Often
as any he is the complaisant friend
of the aggressors, or remains docile
under apprehension of their power
to infiict injury upon himself If
his conscience prick him, he uuiets
ii with the thought that it is no
more his business than that of any
other citizen to act
While this is the monotonous level
of attorneys general, now and then,
here and there, there rises one above
the level, some officer with a liveIier
conscience and stiffer vertebrae. Not
as numerous as they should be are
these cases, nor, we regret, as uni
formly ideal as they might be; and
yet, so general is the disregard of
duty that. when one OF these officers
does exercise vigilance in behalf of
the state, it attracts and deserves at
tention. 1t is worth while to note
some of these.
For years the state treasurers of
Wisconsin had been depositing the
public funds in the banks and trans
felrins the interest paid on them to
their private account. Finally, in the
mutations Of politics, one O'Connor,
Democrat, by the way, became at
tOTney general. He began an investi-
cation into this appropriation of
public funds. 1t was beset with diff
culties. He beat them down. He
brought action against the derelfct
treasurers and their bondsmen. The
suits were stubbornly- contested. An
incident of one of them was the eff
fort Of an eX-United States senator
and a bOndsman to reach the court
by retaining the brother-in-law of
the judge. The ultimate outcome was
the recovery and payment into the
treasury of some $36O,OOO.
Down in Illinois a similar change
had put into the attorney generals
office one Maloney, also a Democrat.
That state was the locus of the great
whisky trust. A law of the state
forbade its existence, and had for
some years. Maloney brought suit
TO forfeit the charter, to annul the in
corporation of the trust. That suit
was fought through the courts,
through the district and up to the
supreme court and back again, but
Maloney held on stubbornly and the
outcome was the dissolution of the
trust. With a singular contradiction,
however, a federal court, into whose
custody the trust had been thrown,
authorized a sale of it's assets to
what was openly admitted to be an
other trust, a reorganization of the
old one, in the face of a federal
statute prohibiting the formation of
such industrial monopolies.
Then there was the attorney gen
eral of the state of New York, who
brought action there to dissolve the
sugar trust, that dips its spoon into
every sugar bowl in all this wide land
and takes tribute from it. He, too,
if memory serves US right, was a
Democrat. He carried the case
through the courts, opposed by the
counsel the trust was able to hire