The citizen. (Honesdale, Pa.) 1908-1914, 1911-08-02
CONGRESSIONAL SCANDAL MILLS
BUSY,

BUSY.
Whatever other industries may
have been injuriously affected by the
talk of tariff tinkering which has
filled the air, the Congressional scan
dal mongering mills are working
overtime. Having secured control
of the House of Representatives the
Democrats have gone into the muck
raking business on wholesale
scale. 1t is a way they have. They
do it whenever they get chance,
and the recurrent disappointments
which they experience have no ef-
feet in restraining their eagerness
or dampening their hopes. The man
who thinks that every one else is a
rascal is apt to be a good deal of
rascal himself. He is inclined to
impute to others the delinquencies of
which he is conscious in himself.
That may not be why the Demo-
Gratis are always so keen on starting
Investigations at the rare intervals
when they attain to power, but they
always are and the fact that they
seldom succeed in finding what they
are looking for, and never succeed
according to the measure of their ex-
pectations, does not discourage them
from repeating the attempt.
They are hard at it now to an ex-
tent of which the public had only a
faint conception, and the indications
are that most of the clues they are
anxiously following will lead to the
accustomed mares nest. 1t is fact
that no fewer than twenty-four sep
arate and distinct Investigations are
now proceeding before special and
standing committees of the House,
and no one knows how many more
will be instituted before the session
ends. Unfortunately for the scandal
| mongers and smellers-out, the
amount of grist which has been de-
rived from all this grinding has been
| lamentably small. One of the most
disappointed of the muck rakers is
Representative Cox of Indiana, chair
man of the Committee on Expendi-
lures in the Treasury Department
He has been doing his very best to
expose the hypothetical misdoings
of those rascally Republicans, but
the paucity of his accomplishment is
driving him to despair. II don't
| believe there is anything much
wrong in the Treasury Department"
his special undertaking preserve,
he plaintively remarked the other
day, and then he sighed for some
more fertile field.
His experience is typical of the
rest, and if others were as frank as
he they would repeat the same OBJ
| servation. There has been no
scarcity but rather an over-abundance
of defamatory reports, for scandal
| fiourishes luxuriantly in an atmos-
phere of suspicion and credulity;
but all the crop the Investigators
have harvested has not been worth
the pains. They have discovered a
few irregularities here and there, as
in the ease of the payment made on
account of the Day portrait, which
no one attributes to anything else
than loose system of accounting,
but nothing of any real consequence
has been unearthed, nothing that
can be used to effect in the cam
paign which all this investigation
has in sight. AS for the effort that
has been made to discredit the per-
sonal integrity of the President, it is
SO dastardly and contemplate that
it is certain to hurt much more than
to help the personal and political am
bitions that inspired it.
1t may be questioned whether the
serViceableness of scandal as a politi-
cal asset is not very much overesti-
mated. The great majority of men
are honest themselves and are ready
to assume honesty in others, and
certainly the American people will
be prompt to resent any unsustained
| imputation on the honor of their
Chief Executive.