The Palatka News And Advertiser

SELF ADMINISTERED ABUSE.

John P. Wall, he of Putnam Hall, who is probably the greatest single exemplar of self-sacrificing devotion to the interests of the dear people that Putnam county has produced in this generation, is out with an offer to again immolate himself on the altar of his country at six dollars per day and—pickings.

In order to make his proposed new sacrifice appear all the more heroic and to excite sympathy for his cause, this devoted specimen of the whang-doodle in politics comes out in a letter to a local contemporary noted for the fearlessness with which it says nothing, and charges that he has heard that some one has stated that he received $500 for introducing the dispensary bill in the last legislature, the author of which statement he then proceeds to characterize as "a low-down slanderer, falsifier and liar."

It is more than likely that this report originated in Mr. Wall's own over-ripe imagination, and that all this flow of vituperation of which he has been guilty, if it bumps up agin' anything will bound back as an echo and lodge in his own whiskers. In other words, John needs abuse in his business just now, and if he can't get anyone to make the issue he can draw on his own vivid imagination for the necessary facts.

The question that is absorbing most thought just now, however, is, "If John didn't get $500 why didn't he?" It is no secret that the bill he introduced was prepared by the legislative lobby and that its sole purpose was to milk the liquor interests of the state. It is also no secret that the liquor dealers of the state raised a purse of $13,000 with which to placate the lobby. The bill was not an honest measure in its inception nor in its afterthought. It was sprung in the House as a blackmailing scheme and ended by turning up its toes in the senate. Now it is proposed to resurrect its rotten carcass, into which are centered the hopes of those designing politicians who would not hesitate to barter the good name of the state if so be their own insatiate greed for plunder will be enabled to wax fat on its dishonored name. If to make the state of Florida the dispenser of liquid damnation to its citizens doesn't mean all this, then in God's name what does it mean?

No, John Wall didn't get $500 for introducing that bill. He says he didn't and no one has yet intimated that he did; but from the days when he taught nigger school No 35 at Sister Springs church until the last dying gasp of his blackmailing dispensary bill, he has not been above taking pay for his work, and he hasn't always been so awfully particular about the work, as is proved by his teaching that nigger school.