Greene County herald. (Leakesville, Miss.) 1898-current, 1914-01-16

found upon investigation that the stat
ute, Section 1880, which provides that
each farm sergeant "shall keep prop
er record, in bound volume, under
proper headings, of everything pro-
duced on the farm, dairy, in the shops,
mill, and of all live stock raised, pork
and beef slaughtered, in pounds and
head, and cost of production and APP
proximate value thereof, said books
shall be furnished sergeants by the
Board of Trustees
This law had been wholly ignored
by the Board of Trustees and no such
books had been furnished by them
and no such books had been kept by
the sergeants in charge of the differ
ent farms; in fact, there were very
few sergeants who kept any records
at all; many of them that produced
and had sold from their camps large
amounts of products, had no record
of it at all. Hence, it was impossible
to ascertain what the farm had pro-
duced or what became OF 1t. In fact,
the whole system of bookkeeping was
in such shape that it would have been
impossible to ascertain the number of
bales of cotton made on the property,
the number of cars or tons of seed,
except by resort to the records of the
carriers, such as the railroads who
had kept their own records in detail
for their own use. The system of
bookkeeping rendered it absolutely
impossible to tell what became of the
vast amount of supplies purchased by
the Board of Trustees. refer you to
the evidence now on file in the Gov
errors office subject to your inspec-
ton.
And it is fact that large amounts
of corn and other farm products had
been traded by the Board of Trustees
off the place and had been hauled
away by other people, and the most
rigid investigation has failed to dis
close what amount of corn was taken
from the property, this product having
been carried away by wagons and no
carriers record left of it, and lives
only in the memory of the convicts
and other people who saw them haul
ing it away without any idea as to the
quantity they got.
OF course, we all know as practical
business men that it is ridiculous to
say that $50 pounds of seed is more
than one-half of the seed coming from
the cotton, owing to the heavy weight
of the bales, but what became of the
other seed in the year 1911, and what
became of the seed in 1910, as there
were only S36 pounds per bale &C
counted for in the year 1910, it is inn
possible to tell. as the carriers rec
- - show what became Of it,
but you can appreciate that more than
$5O, 100000 of the States money has
gone in this direction.
In the next place, in accounting for
the loss to the State, | found that
some sergeants had carried away and
sold products and appropriated the
to their own use and permitted
other people to do likewise, and wher-
ever could get the positive informa-
ton as to this having been done,
brought the matter to the attention of
the law officers of the State and in
many cases they were arraigned in
the criminal courts.
| lind that a large majority Of the
cotton produced for the years 1908,
1909, 1910, 1911 and 1912 was sold to
one firm, viz, Boyce & ca. OF Mem
phis, Tenn; in fact, nearly the entire
crop OF the five years was sold to this
particular firm and nearly all of the
cotton purchased by them from the
State shipped abroad, and it has been
to obtain from this firm,
up to this writing, their return vouch-
ers or their accounts of sales to par
ties to whom they sold, which would
disclose the weight, grade and value
of the cotton, il accessible. The cot
ton that has been shipped by this
purchaser and sold in the United
States, we have obtained the figures
showing the grade, weight, staple and
price at which it was sold and this
discloses a very large discrepancy in
the weights, grades, staple and value.
For instance, on November 81, 1912,
! 900 bales of cotton were sold and
divided into two lots as though it
were different grades and staple and
was sold for 1888 and 14.40, and was
Immediately disposed of by the pur-
chaser as one grade at 15s4 cents per
pound This cotton brought to the
purchaser a profit of from $500 to
$21.0O per bale, there being a discrep-
ancy in weight from 5 to IS pounds
per bale. It is true that about one
fourth of this cotton lost in weight of
from one to six pounds, but the other
+hxnc fr4.v~%yac c1,cxu06 Very POnc11Gfvn-