Omaha daily bee., 1896-10-03
TOO MUCH POLITICS.
Two Men and One Woman Dead and
Others in ASyIumS.

Two Men nnd One Woman Dead and
Others in AsyIums.
Discussion of politics, and more es-
pecially of the silver question, says the Chi
cage T~imes-Herald, has driven several people
insane during the present presidential cam
paign, and is responsible for at least three
deaths. None of these have occurred in
Chicago, but several Chicagoans lost their
wits because of too much silver talk, and
out at Dunning there is a bank cashier who
owes his visit to too close study of the
financial question.
One man killed himself in Philadelphia.
George Norris was his name. Two weeks
ago a woman came running into Police Cap
tain Quirk's office and declared that her
husband was crazy. He insisted that the
goldbugs were after him and ran around the
house trying to evade them. She had tried
to demonstrate with him and he would pay
no attention to her. He merely continued
to shout:
Tho goldbugs! Look out for the gold
bugs! They are after mel" Like a man
who was suffering from delirium tremens
and imagined that he saw snakes.
Captain Quirk sent a couple of police
men with the woman to apprehend the
man and put him where he could do no one
any harm. Before their arrival, however,
he had killed himself with a large carving
knife, and he lay weltering in his own
blood on the floor. 1t was too late to do
anything, and he died before the police could
summon an ambulance.
The woman said that Morris had been
studying the financial issue for several
months and that he had talked about it all
the time. He was a jOurneyman tailor, but
had not worked for several weeks, having
devoted all of his time to the study of the
money question.
For weeks he had allowed nothing else
to occupy his thoughts. He had refused
to do any work, insisting that free silver
would soon he had and then II would mot he
necessary for any one to work. He would
try to argue silver with his wife and would
grow argry when she would refuse to lis
ten to him because she had to attend to
her household duties. Finally he had be-
come more and more violent and would talk
to various articles of furniture, imagining
that they were men. At last his mania
had assumed the form that she had re-
ported TO the police, He would run around
the house, declaring that the gOldbugs were
after him, and he often asserted that he
might as well Kill himself as fall into the
clutches of the g~oldbugs." 1t was probably
to escape such an imaginary fate that he
killed himself.
At Woodstown, N. j., on September II,
Caroline James. an aged woman, killed her
self by cutting her throat. Mrs. James,
who was so years OF age. had $4,000 saved,
which she had deposited in a Camden bank.
She began to study the silver question and
her neighbOrs told her that If free silver
won her savings would be cut in two. She
listened to their talk, and finally became
deranged, being naturally of weak mind.
She became convinced that Bryan would be
elected, and at last believing that she
would lose her money, decided that life was
not worth living without it. She cut her
throat and died in the hospital to which she
was removed.
Jacob Warren killed himself In Brooklyn
through fear 'of the consequences which
might follow Bryan's election. Warren had
been EMPLOYED I'm one of the big BROOKLYN |
bu. had been thrown out OF en-