The Daily Gazette

FINGER-BOARDS FOR 1884.

Some two years ago a Republican President and a Republican Secretary of the Treasury decided that Chester A. Arthur, then collector of New York, must be removed from office because he persistently prostituted the public service to favoritism and profligacy and resisted every effort of the administration to enforce economy and integrity in the New York Custom House. There was no attempt to conceal the grounds on which Collector Arthur was removed. The President and Secretary of the Treasury both stated in the most distinct terms, to the committee of the Senate and to Collector Arthur himself, that his removal was demanded by his flagrant debauchery of the public service, and a Republican Senate accepted the judgment of the President against the hardest protest of Senator Conkling, and confirmed Arthur's successor. That affront to the Grant leader of New York was resented at Chicago by Conkling peremptorily demanding the nomination of the dishonored Collector for the Vice Presidency, and he will take the President's chair of the Senate on the 4th of March next, and one life will stand between him and the Presidency of the United States.

Gen. Sharpe, a relative of Grant, and one of the Conkling school of Grant restorationists, was also one of the Federal Custom House officials of New York and was displaced by President Hayes for the same reason which dismissed Arthur. Sharpe was sent to the Legislature by the party and Conkling made him Speaker of the House to emphasize his contempt for reform within the party and make another unerring finger-board of the Republican reign of the future.

A. B. Cornell was another of the Grant-Conkling Custom House officials who fell beneath the civil service reform policy of President Hayes in the earlier and better days of the administration, and he was removed because, like Arthur, the testimony was conclusive that the New York Federal officials under Grant had degraded the whole public service at their command to political corruption and reckless profligacy. Conkling avenged that offense by making the rejected Cornell Governor of the Empire State, where he now labors for the Grant Restoration and stands on a conspicuous finger-board pointing to 1884.