The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1897-03-29
GOING BUREAUCRATIC

senator Thorpe is a man of unusual
clearness of vision. He also has the
power of condensing great facts into
| an ep1gram. He sketches a. situation in
words with the graphic skill of the
pencil of a Mast or a Keppler. He
threw into the arena of the senate a
great big truth, for the reading. re-
f1ecting and inward digesting of his
| colleagues, when he told them that if
the present rate Of production Of COM
missions was kept up, ''the danger was
that the state would go not Demo-
cratic or Popocratic, but bureaucratic"
The state government is being fast put
into commission. If anything is need
ed, create a commission, and if any
thing is not needed, make one anyway.
Attach salaries to most Of them for
the impecunious, and make others hon
orary for the merely eminent, with sal
! aries to come hereafter. when the emf
nents are stated and the hungry want a
place. One runs over the long list of
bureaus and commissions and boards
already installed and scans the meas
ures proposing more Of them, and Won
ders If the fathers had any just cause
Of complaint against George III. for
erecting a multitude Of new offices
and sending hither swarms of officers
to harass our people and eat out their
substance ~
Let us see what has been accom-
plished. We have a railway commits
sion, long on duties and short on funds,
whose expense account foots up $4,000
a year. AS an adjunct to them we
have the grain inspection bureau with
1873 occupants, whom somebody paid
last year in salaries $147,146 Then there
is the board of charities and corrections
who consumed the modest sum of &c.
900, and, ancillary to them, board Of
health that managed to get away with
$7,999.9O, leaving one to surmise how
that other 10 cents remained unspent
| On another side is the bureau Of vital
statistics, with an expense bill of but
$1,022, and a cattle diseases division
absorbing $2,227 Organized labor is
| just now quarreling with the head of
| its special bureau, which manages to
subsist on $11, $50 a year, while the
! bureau Of dairy and food costs
$15,79S. Then we have puolic
examiner and three alert aids,
who have thus far caught and
| bounced one Democratic county treas
urer for lending county funds to a Re-
publican county auditor, and found
several banks insolvent after they had
made assignments, for which valuable
service the guarded and protected pub
lie paid $1O,905.
We have lunacy commission to do
the lord knows what for its $780, and
a forestry commission, to be enlarged,
| at $1,000. Our modern nobility have
| their game preserves carefully looked
after by another commission that put
in an expense bill last year of $40, S70.44
while our old soldiers are mustered
under another board who sent in an
expense account of $16,347 The history
| of the state is perpetUated by a quasi
public association which received S.
! 321, and another half-Iegal, half-pri--
vate association that runs the state
fair wants some $2S, 900 out of the pub
| lie funds. Then we have boards of
! mana gers for prisons and reformator-
/ les, whose expense accounts are merged
/ in the general accounts. To this par
! tial list must be added those other func-
tionaries who, for reasons that are par
ty secrets, are not required to let be
known how much they cost the public
for whose good they exist, such as the
/ inspectors of Illuminating oils, an Of
! flee supposed to be worth some $4,000
year; the surveyors of logs who sue
! cessfully resisted an attempt to put
them on a salary of Sc, 900 year; boiler
/ inspectors, to prevent people from be-
ing blown up by f1endish engineers al
ways trying to burst their boilers and
/ kill some one. And there are others.
Will your epigram not bear amending,
senator? Has the state not already
| gone bureaucratic?
THE CONFLICT IS IRREPRESSIBLE.
The Milwaukee Sentinel offers "a
Word With Our Allies" the sound
money Democrats, of expostulation for
their assaults on the Dingley bill, which
is not at all to it's own liking. 1t agrees
with Senator Mcmillan, of Michigan,
who, before congress met. said that the
! tariff bill would be framed after CON