Honest Men Assailed for Doing an Honest Act

New York, 1895

The Standard assails the board of Supervisors for having paid Counselor Van Vechten about $7,000 for a year's work as the county's lawyer. The Supervisors, as honest officers, could do no less than pay a reasonable fee to a lawyer who had won damage suits aggregating $194,000, and having saved the county from being compelled to build a $150,000 bridge over Newtown creek at Maspeth avenue, and having attended to all the other legal business of the county for twelve months. Some lawyers would have charged the county $25,000 for their services in the damage suits alone, which grew out of the Blissville bridge disaster, and yet no higher priced lawyer could have been more successful than Mr. Van Vechten was. The Supervisors have not done an unreasonable thing at all.

The Standard's attack on the Supervisors is malicious. The Supervisors are assailed because they do not give the Standard patronage. The reason they do not take kindly to the Standard is that they caught the Standard in an attempt to cheat the county out of $255, which involved false swearing, and, like honest men, they defeated the steal. This dishonesty and false swearing taught the Supervisors not to trust the Standard, but to avoid it, just as every honest man mistrusts and avoids a notoriously dishonest person. Besides, the Supervisors have the common knowledge that the Standard has no facilities for doing public work, but is compelled to sublet work to city offices, where high prices are charged, and the Supervisors are not willing, nor would they be justified, in paying profits to New York printers and the Standard, too, for no better purpose than to keep alive a dishonest political newspaper. We have an honest board of Supervisors, thank goodness, and while we have there will be no robbery of the tax-payers to help political mendicants and pauperized newspapers.

We have at hand this very moment the evidence of the incapacity of the Standard to do public work. The Town Clerk of Jamaica is a Republican. He gave the Standard the work of printing the ballots for the town election. The Standard does not own a numbering machine, and has not the type or the presses to produce election tickets. After ten days' waiting the Standard was obliged to throw the job back on the Town Clerk with the humiliating confession that it could not do the work. Consequently, the Town Clerk was obliged, in order to have the election tickets printed at all, to send his order to THE FARMER, in whose office there are eighteen numbering machines, perforators, and presses of the very best kind. Here is the evidence of the Standard's default:

JAMAICA, L. I., March 23, 1895.

The LONG ISLAND FARMER will please furnish 15,000 official Democratic ballots, 15,000 official Republican ballots, 15,000 resolution ballots "For," 15,000 resolution ballots "Against," 15,000 Democratic excise ballots, 15,000 Republican excise ballots, 200 tally sheets, and 200 cards containing lists of candidates.

JOHN B. McCOOK, Town Clerk.

Now the public can see what a shabby concern the Standard is, and why the Supervisors are justified in ignoring it.

The Standard's malice toward Counselor Van Vechten grows out of the fact that he discovered and exposed the Standard's attempt to cheat the county. If Mr. Van Vechten had kept silent about the Standard's steal he would have the friendship of that dishonest paper, but he preferred to act the part of an honest attorney toward the Supervisors, and the Supervisors preferred to act honestly toward the tax-payers, and so the Supervisors and Mr. Van Vechten must submit to the billingsgate of this discredited newspaper.

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, NY, March 29, 1895, p. 4.