Albuquerque Morning Journal

MR. BOATRIGHT SHOULD RESIGN

Mayor Boatright should resign. Whatever usefulness he might have had as chief executive has been ruined. There is no possible way by which he can earn his salary and he should not attempt to draw it. If he thought he had a right to name a chief of police, he should have named him and then taken the plain way of testing his rights in the courts. The effort to secure the office by violence might be expected in Torreon or Chihuahua, but it will not work, never can be permitted to work, in Albuquerque, a modern, civilized city where the courts are open to deal impartial justice, and do so.

Mayor Boatright is a well-intentioned man in the hands of bad advisers. He takes his policies from John W. Wilson, who gets his law from Charles Chadwick, a wool dealer who is grooming himself to succeed Jesse Romero as sheriff of Bernalillo county. Mr. Chadwick is trying to build up a personal machine in this city and Mr. Wilson is trying to build up a city attorney.

Mr. Boatright started out wrong. The city's councilmen are elected by the people, just as Mr. Boatright was elected. They have their duties to perform, prescribed by law, just as are the duties of the mayor defined by law. Soon after Mr. Boatright's election he went to [meet at a city police line-up and a tumult on his corner to make appointment, recorded by act of the council to confirm] - a right not even D.O. Sutherland or [Joe United States], the governor of any state in the union or by the mayor of any city in the middle. The effort of Mayor Boatright to dismiss [J. Lawin], city attorney, because the latter went to Santa Fe without authority from the mayor's [office] Tuesday in the [toy].

[He] may be well-advised [and] [lunal Memoatiht probably means write] but he listened to a wholly incompetent legal advice. He turned men on the council who otherwise would have been friends, against him. His assumption that he has a right to cast a deciding vote on the confirmation of his own appointee is wholly without precedent. The president of the United States has no such right, the governor of the state has no such right. It would be remarkable if the mayor of Albuquerque has such right. The claim that he took his vote under agreement at an adjourned meeting of the city council is wholly quibble.

The mayor now has [the] councilmen lined up solidly against him. He has not shown himself a man of working in the interest of the city in any particular but indicates that he is devoted to [building up] his charges to building up a political machine, not for the republican party, of which he is a member but in the interests of a man whose ambition is to become sheriff of this county.

The strong-arm methods attempted have given the city bad advertising. For several years we have been trying to show to the world that we settle the controversies through courts of law that we have passed beyond the raw methods of the border who disregard law. We have been showing to the world that we are not a turbulent element of old Mexico. We reiterate in all reluctance that Mr. Boatright should resign.

General O'Brien's army appears to have been lost sight of in the more important news of Mexico and the Colorado war.

In conducting his own business Mr. Boatright never listened to fool advice, therefore, he never acted like a fool.