Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1893-1920, 1899-08-04
THE PAST AND THEPREsENT
Morning Papers Afacsips Picture of Pc
lice Regulations.

4
lice Regulations.
If there is one subject more than
another on which the Union is touchy,
it is that of public morals. THE ARGUS
of yesterday happened to venture the
hope that the so-called police force at
present making q pretense of duty
would show no partiality in the raids
which it was announced had
been entered upon. This mild obser-
yation, together with the extreme heat,
seems to have turned the Union up
side down. The consequence is a
splitting of fire, .frothing at the mouth,
and, taken altogether an exhibit in that
might impress a stranger in the city
with a sense of terror. But to
those who have been here at
this season of the year hear
tofore, the performance is not alarm
ing. The entire trouble in this par
ticular instance is that a comment of
any sort should have been made on
the agencies to which we owe the
moral condition of the city as it is
found today. 1t has never been the
practice of The ARGUS to darker in
the eyes of the world the hue by
which Rock Island is guaged, morally
or otherwise. The pastime of black
ening the city's good name and
blasting her character has be-
longed exclusively to the Union, and
The ARGUS is satisfied that it should
rest there. But it is the Inconsistency
of this method of systematic prevari-
cation and SANDER so Characteristic
of the morning sheet, that occasions
oa, vuiI1 10 wildly
called, the Union has always been
morality about election times when a
democratic mayor happened to be in
office. At other times it has been
perfectly content to permit things to
pursue the even tenor of their way,
regardless of circumstances or conse-
quences. During such periods, how
ever, as the Union has been under
the spell, political or otherwise,
and VIXEN the city has been made
the innocent victim of it's outbreaks,
the fact has always been deplored in
view of the effect of such misrepresen-
tation of the city. Yet this same pa
per whose influence heretofore has
been of the tendency to detract from
the best qualities of the city and to
attract class that might properly be
Stunned, has the audacity to compare
conditions that now are with those
that existed in the two years preced-
ing. Aided by the promptings of
genius in the Ananias line. it seeks
TO divert the public mind from those
things that are by deliberately falsify-
ing practices of the past, and it is a pc
culiar coincidence, though possibly not
an unnatural or surprising one that
it should carry it's to the extreme of
attempting to apply to past practices
what in theory and eXperit nee is the
method of its amiable informant. The
attributed to the former
are absolutely ground
less, and if for any reason there were
less prosecutions in the local courts
during the administration that pre-
coded the present than of late it was
because the subjects for such prosecu-
ton were kept out of town. If they
have since appeared here, tits another
circum stance for which the Union
should have much of the credit, or
discredit. rather.
But while the self-laudation of pres
ent police regulations is going on,
while boastiug of driving undesirable
individuals from the city, how is it
that the gentry driven out of neigh
boring cities remain? The ARGUS re-
peats that it trusts there will be no
partiality about the raiding business.