Springfield Weekly Republican

Our Boston Letter.

From Our Special Correspondent.

BOSTON, Thursday, May 28.

There is less and less stir, each year, about the anniversaries, and, this year, we should hardly know they were taking place but for the newspaper reports, and even these are briefer than usual. The woman-suffrage convention and the prisoners' aid society were perhaps the most interesting of the early meetings, though neither were very fully attended. Mrs. Howe, having so lately got back from San Domingo, did not at first appear in the woman-suffrage meetings, nor did Wendell Phillips show himself, either in the labor-reform convention, nor at the prisoners' aid society, where he often speaks. Judge Russell, who is about setting forth for South America, spoke there, and so did Phillips Brooks. Dr. Howe was re-elected president, as Mrs. Howe was of the New England woman-suffrage association. The Unitarian association began its meetings, Tuesday, and kept them up, yesterday and to-day, with some animation, and the Congregationalists, Universalists and 'Free Baptists' have done the same for their denominations; but the old zeal of sectarian controversy has very much abated, and it is no longer so important by what name a Christian is called. This fact and the success of the anti-slavery reform have taken much of the zest out of anniversary week; the increasing size of the city, too, has something to do with it; for all gatherings are more absorbing in a small city, where the distractions are few, as they used to be in Boston. Now Boston is as large as New York was thirty-five years ago, and of course has too many occupations to be exclusively interested in any but the most absorbing events.

It was voted at the Unitarian association to sustain the action of the secretary, some months ago, in striking from the printed list of Unitarian ministers the name of William J. Potter of New Bedford, who had some scruples about calling himself a Christian any longer, and had so notified the secretary. The latter argued that if he was not a Christian he could not be a Unitarian, and therefore, rather needlessly, but naturally enough, dropped him from the list in the year book of the denomination. It shows how attenuated the spirit of persecution has become in these latter days, that this transaction was the subject of a heated debate on Tuesday, in which one ardent champion of Mr. Potter inquired if his brethren of the association wanted to light the fires of Smithfield over again. So from the burning of Ridley and Latimer we have come down in a little more than 300 years to the erasure of a name from an almanac. The interesting feature of the case is this,—that Mr. Potter is a man full of the spirit of Christ,—by birth a Quaker of Dartmouth, by training a scholar and a Unitarian, and by his later studies a 'radical' of one of the modern schools of advanced thought,—but in life and deeds a devoted, humble and earnest religious teacher. Precisely what his form of belief may be, I cannot say,—but he is a member of the Free religious association, and the Radical club, and one of the contributors to Mr. Abbot's Index. I remember it was said by way of jest among Mr. Potter's college friends when he came home from theological studies in Germany about 1857,—'If you know a parish where they do not believe in a personal God, that is the place for Potter to be settled in,'—and so I suppose his form of heresy may be some assumed difficulty of believing the accepted formulas about the divine existence. He has been almost ever since 1857 settled over a large and wealthy parish in New Bedford; from which he went into the army in 1861 as a volunteer and a private, but was soon detailed as chaplain in one of the Washington hospitals. He is one of those men whom it is unwise to censure for heresy, no matter what his intellectual opinions may be,—for the world will look at his good works, and say with the poet:—

'For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.'

Nevertheless I see no reason, and probably Mr. Potter does not, why his name should continue in the Unitarian almanac.

The Legislature is making some show of an early adjournment, but will not probably get away before the 15th or 20th of June. It is, on the whole, the slowest body in simple legislation that I have ever seen; others have wasted more time than this in committee hearings and other outside matters, but there has never been a Legislature that took so much time to pass a plain bill 'for the better preservation of alewives' fins on the shores of Herring pond in Podunk.' A great measure like this, which in former years would pass the House in four days and the Senate in three, will, this year, spend a week in the House, then lie a fortnight in committee, then be a week passing the Senate, and finally get to the governor for signature some time in the second month after being reported by the committee on education, or parishes, or commerce. Take the old law of pauper settlement as an instance. It was discussed in committee for three months, until April 29, then agreed upon and passed almost without opposition, yet only to-day has it become a law, if it has yet been signed by the governor, which I do not know. It is one of half a dozen good measures of more or less importance to the public which have passed in the five months already spent in the session, which has been singularly barren of general legislation of much interest. A few small jobs like the Lee and New Haven grant of $800,000 have been worked through, or will be, and the great $8,000,000 grant for increasing the Hoosac tunnel debt is quite likely to go through when Lee and New Haven has opened the way. Possibly Gov. Talbot may veto the Berkshire grab, now that Messrs. Adams, Codman and Phillips in the House have shown that a veto will be sustained there. The Senate will pass the grant, of course. There is but a languid interest in the whole railroad question,—not enough to warrant a busy man in reading through Dr. Loring's speech.

The Advertiser, which can be as sensational as any newspaper when it sees fit, seems to have greatly exaggerated the circumstances attending the death of Philip Dollard in the Bridgewater state work-house, last March; for there is little reason to suppose it was a homicide, much less manslaughter or murder. The coroner who took testimony at the work-house on Tuesday found the evidence against Leary, the alleged murderer, trivial, and directly contradicted by one or two eye-witnesses; while there is little or nothing to show that Dollard's death had anything to do with the incidents described in the Advertiser. He was an old and incurable hospital patient, with consumption and heart disease combined, and, though he died suddenly, that was natural enough, considering his frailty and the nature of his maladies. The nurse, Leary, declares that he fainted and fell from the bed, and was replaced there again without rudeness; this may or may not be true; but none of the circumstances seem to indicate brutality or murderous assault, such as the Advertiser would make out. There will be a coroner's inquest and the fullest investigation into the facts; and very likely these may lead, as I think experience should have led, years ago, to the substitution of skilled and responsible nurses for the rough ones who have generally done duty in pauper hospitals. This very man, Leary, however, is skillful enough, and perhaps as humane as the majority of nurses. He was a nurse at the Rainsford hospital before that was closed, six or seven years ago, and had a special skill in dressing sores, which is one of the common tasks of a pauper hospital. Although intemperate in former years, he is believed to have been free from this vice at Bridgewater, where he has been for four or five years at least.

There is need, however, for a great reformation in the matter of nursing in all such places, and one argument for the establishment of training-schools for nurses like those in New York, Boston and Philadelphia was the supply of nurses they would furnish, in due time, for work among the poor. The English training-schools at Liverpool and elsewhere provide nurses for pauper hospitals, and so ours ought to do. But it is very difficult to make the average alms-house-keeper or prison officers see that bad men and women need good nursing much as other people do; and oftentimes it is still more difficult to get a good set of nurses into a great public establishment, even when everybody admits they ought to be there. Take the only state alms-house in Massachusetts for an example,—that at Tewksbury, with from 100 to 150 persons in the hospital through the year. The nursing there was known, a year ago, to be insufficient and objectionable, and was complained of by the physician in charge for months before any change was made. Then one good nurse was appointed where six would have been few enough; and things went on so until in September the board of charities visited the hospital, complained of it and exposed the results of bad ventilation and insufficient nursing, as shown in an excessive death-rate. This provoked the alms-house authorities, who stood upon their dignity and did nothing to improve the nursing until after another visit of the board of charities in February, when they agreed to employ more nurses and have a better medical inspection of the inmates. Two months afterward they cried off this agreement by discouraging a good nurse, the faithful old physician of the hospital and the consulting physician, and putting comparatively inexperienced persons in their places; so that now, after a year of remonstrance and bickering, the friends of good nursing at Tewksbury cannot find out that things are any better than they were in the summer of 1873. All this is discouraging, but in time there will be an improvement, no doubt; and an investigation, troublesome as it often is, almost always leaves things better. It cannot be but that offenses should come in these great establishments; and publicity, even if exaggerated, is the best protection against them. Publicity will even purge the treasury department at Washington after a while, though Richardson holds on with all the tenacity of a fore-ordained office-holder. When Jackson said of the Washington civil servants in his day, 'Few die and none resign,' he must have had a class of Richardsons in his mind's eye. Secretary Richardson has a preference for two offices at a time, as we saw when he was still a probate judge in Middlesex; but now, being reduced to a single office, he holds on to that with double persistency. Of course he must go,—but when? Not until Congress has visited upon him the last indignity in the shape of a resolution of censure, I fear. A poor truth-telling wretch like Cluss can be turned out by Grant or Babcock at a moment's warning, but Richardson and his gang must be kept performing the air with their malfeasance in office for months, and then, perhaps, drop down into fat offices in Europe or in the court of claims. The people are watching all this business, and it is a mistake to suppose they do not know what it means. As fast as they get a chance at the polls they will signify what their opinion is of the incompetents like Richardson and corruptions like Butler. The latter, however, is hors du combat for the present, even if he does not go abroad for the rest of the year, which is quite possible. His attacks of pain and vertigo have frightened him greatly, and he will be fain for a while from actual duty as a political nuisance.