The $4-a-Day Officials Who Fought With Typewriters

We may have an occasional lull in Central American revolutions, the Filipinos may come in off the warpath, the Turks cease their butcheries of Christians, the Dove of Peace hover over the far East, but when all other newspaper space-fillers fail something is sure to be doing with the horticultural commissioner and his deputies. Just now a new and most violent outburst is focusing the attention of the public upon these worthy officials, who are engaged in working their typewriters overtime in the production of manuscript for the newspapers.

It is blow for blow, not with the sword but with the pen. When one in a column article written in manifold, a copy for each paper in the state, insinuates that the other is a mountebank and a black-guard, it is countered with the charges of horse-thief and cut-throat. All this is very interesting reading and edifying to the taxpayers who are being assessed for the $4 per day and expenses each one of these officials is drawing.

This week it is a three-cornered jaw-fest between the State Horticultural Commissioner Yon Holderbecke and Inspectors Brown and Cass of King County, a renewed outbreak of a long-standing feud.

If one-half the energy of these gentlemen devoted to preparing copy were directed to the legitimate despatch of their duties there would not be a 'pestiferous insect' left in the state.

The quickest way to put a stop to these disgraceful rows is for the governor to inform them that they will either have to shut up or he will clean out the whole outfit.