Helena Weekly Herald

R. E. FISK,
THURSDAY, JANUARY 11, 1872.

EVADING THE ISSUE.

We have recently pushed home upon the Gazette the responsibility of encouraging the Legislature in prodigal expenditures of the public revenue, and warned it that we should hold it to strict account for its course in the future. It has assumed to make no denial of the charges upon which it is arraigned by the Herald, but strives to wriggle itself from the gaze of the people on the matter in point, by going back a series of years and rehashing the substance of its articles at that time upon questions of extravagant legislation which it then, as now, wantonly and untruthfully laid at the door of the Republicans of Montana.

The premises herein of the Gazette have been repeatedly shown by this journal to be untenable, but the proof, a hundred times produced, does not dampen in the least the ardor with which it persists in writing itself prevaricator before the people of the Territory. Just now, we find our neighbor entering into the old farce of trying to convince somebody that it was in times gone by, if it is not at the present time, an honest advocate of reform, and was favorable to economy, and all that. It does well to admit that it was the champion of the bogus Legislatures, so pronounced by decisions of the Courts and by the Congress of the United States. Its senior editor, now at Virginia, writing balderdash and buncombe to his paper, was one of the stripe of those distinguished legislative bodies. The Gazette, in its columns and in the person of its senior, helped to enact the partisan laws of the bogus, booby legislative bodies.

The Gazette does not err in saying that the editor of this paper helped to annul the bogus laws and render them abortive. He did specially telegraph the Herald, from Washington, on the 2d day of March, 1867, congratulating the people of Montana upon the abrogation by Congress of the special and partisan legislation of an irresponsible and illegal Assembly, and the glad tidings rejoiced the hearts of thousands of the good and true and law-abiding citizens of the Territory.

In 1866, the Democracy of Montana dominated with a high hand and rode rough-shod over the people. It won over to the party Smith, Governor, Meagher, Secretary, and Williston, Associate Justice. These renegade Republicans—the most likely of whom was Meagher—consorted with the Democracy, and did its behests. In the District Court of this District, Munson, Associate Justice, had decided the laws of the preceding legislative session (1866) null and void. The following (third) session, beginning Nov. 5, 1866, and ending Dec. 15, 1866, the Assembly sought to avenge itself upon Munson by putting Munson out of harm's way. A Judicial District was constituted out of Choteau, Vivion, (now Dawson,) and Big Horn counties, and the obnoxious Judge assigned to it. That was one little piece of the Assembly's work that the Gazette so virtuously boasts to have championed in advocacy of reform.

In reference to extra compensation: The same Assembly (bogus) of 1866 did not repeal extra compensation, if we rightly remember, other than that allowed the Judges. By the act approved Dec. 15, 1866, the extra compensation over and above the per diem then allowed by Congress to each member of the Legislature was placed at $320 per annum. Allowing forty days for the yearly sessions this extra pay from the Territorial Treasury was at the rate of $8 per day to each member. The same or substantially the same rate of extra pay was given to the officers and attaches of the Assembly, viz: First and assistant clerks of each house $320 each; sergeant-at-arms $250; door-keepers, $250; enrolling and engrossing clerks, $250; pages, $250; etc. etc. In consideration of their services to the party, both the Governor and Secretary's extra pay was not meddled with.

Now this was the sort of legislation the Gazette favored and the Herald opposed in 1866-7. We again show that, while it was backing Democracy and its peculations upon the Treasury, the Herald editor, with others, was successfully at work, at the National Capital, wiping out the acts of an illegal Legislature. We could proceed, if necessary, to further establish the consistency of the Herald in the past as now upon measures of public concern, and show in the same connection the spasmodic jumping-jack proclivities of the Gazette. We refrain from so doing at this writing, for lack both of time and space.

Closing, we wish to say to our neighbor: If you have any proof of the stultification of the Herald on the question of extra compensation, we ask you to produce them. If such articles, as you assert have appeared in this paper, exist, we want to see them, for we have no knowledge of their ever having appeared in our columns.