The Alaska daily empire., 1922-06-19
DAMAGING PUBLICITY.

DAMAGING PUBLICITY. The other day The Empire commented upon SC of the inadvisable and damaging publicity that Ala licity not mentioned then that is equally harmful the kinds that were considered That is that wh purports to portray the low estate to which Ala is alleged to have fallen because of something Government has has not done. The Empires c viction that Alaska has been over-governed fl Washington and that the people of the Territory h not been given sufficient measure of self-gove ment is very strong. The Empire believes that American country develop along right lines less it has real self government and Alaska has had it. She has been creature of Washing Bureaus and Eastern faddists. However it is not to the Territory and the people who struggl in the North to over-state the situation. An instance in point is the following written Thomas Drayton of Seward and printed recently the Los Angeles Times:
 Among the intelligent people of Alaska there is division of opinion, shadow of doubt that a continuance of the present bureaucratic system of government will even tually result in the virtual depopulation of the Territory
 Already many sections of Alaska formerly occupied to greater less extent by white pioners have witnessed the exodus of the last white settler, and again parts of the primeval wilderness. The permanent inhab- tant the man attached to the soil, is vir- tually memory of other days. | ssFhose of who remain are, experiencing the brutal disillusionment that came to wiser men more readily In point of fact, the sole reason we remain in Alaska is because are too poor to get away
 Some of us expect to die in Alaska feel ourselves too old to start life again under a new and strange environment. Few men in Alaska under fifty could be found who would not eagerly seize opportunity to get out if given transportation and as- sured of fairly certain means of live- hood in the States A limited number of tradesmen in moderately comforta able cir cumstances, but these have gradually ab- sorbed the resources of the communities in which they operate.
 The rank and file of the people remain ing in Alaska are not more than two jumps ahead of the wolf
 To shift from generalities to concrete facts, it may be said that outside of the mercantile and professional classes not Alaskan in twenty can afford the luxury of sheets and pillow his bed; not one out of fifty two decent suits of clothes; not one out of hundred has the of bath tub; and not one out of a thousand but dreams of the hour when he can escape from Alaska to new home where hope and op- portunity not closed to him and his children
 
 literally bursting with natural wealth, where few years ago everybody prosperous, everybody happy and everybody considered himself permanently established factor in the founding of great and fourishng state.
 When the potential wealth of Alaska first began to be realized abroad faddsts and doctrinaires took instant notice. The Fed eral Bureaus in Washington equally alert and prompt in attaching their stamp to bewidered Alaska. The development of the Territory had already received an inn mense stimulus The urge of achievement was in every mans heart The future great ness of the country seemed assured
 In quick succession bureaucratic agency after another swooped down upon the defenseless land. New fanged administrative fads and experiments followed fast and fur iously upon the heels of each other Grad ually enterprise was strangled and the wheels of business came to stop Men of better Judgment at once abandoned the Territory.
 The more optimistic hung Things went from bad to worse until they have finally eliminated in the social and indus trial collapse of the country. Today no other region of the earth of such natural wealth and advantages is at so low ebb. To- morrow the country will be virtually de- serted. Bureaucracy and faddsm is the answer.
 * The triumph of bureaucracy great. but the catastrophe to Alaska was greater Wiser men read the purpose in its earlier stages and fled the country while there was yet time to something from the impend- ing wreck. Those of who remained gam bled with chance and lost
 Alaskans are by no means in any such depora light the Seward scribe would have people belle nd it does Alaska gloss injustice to misreprese lem in that way. Person for person Alaska is tods ithout question. one Of the prosperous of t 'litcal divisions of America. There is practical