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Show THE CITIZEN 8 walks and the curbs have been in many years. If in twenty.or .thirty years the curbs have not cracked is there any chance that they will crack from any future expansion? Is the street department of the city, under the well known Mr. Burton, providing useless work so as to keep a contractor occupied? Some of the curbs have been broken recently, but the breaks have been caused by gravel wagons making short turns. WAR WASTE CAMOUFLAGE Among the alluring fictions which Chairman Cummings fabricated for party consumption was that the smelling committees, as he is merrily pleased to call them, discovered nothing in their investigations of war waste. The public memory has no grasp of details, but it keeps in mind general conditions. It soon forgets how many dollars and cents above the ten million mark a certain contractor made by the governwas a ment's cost-plu- s robbery, but it remembers that cost-plrobber system and that all of us still are paying for it. Chairman Cummings relies upon the peculiar weakness of the public memory when he makes his outrageous statement. He feels confident that not one in a million will recall exact facts and figures, but he neglects to take into account the strength of the public memory in one direction. That memory holds in an irrefragable grip certain large facts. In every great industrial community the cost-plu- s system was introduced. The more men a contractor employed the more he made. The longer the men worked at nothing the more he made. The public does not forget that. It does not forget that the more the public money was wasted the greater the profit of the contractor. The more materials, purchased at graft prices from his own or governmental favorites, the contractor could put into his building the greater the return to him of Uncle Sam's gold. From one end of the country to the other this kind of brigandage prevailed. Even the holdup man works for his money. He takes the trouble to purchase a revolver and a blackjack and to wait patiently citizen wends in ambush, sometimes for hours, until an absent-minde- d his way thitherward. Then he points the gun or cheerfully swings the blackjack. But in many factories and in the big cantonments workmen played billiards or pool or shot craps because they had no work to do and yet were needed for the purpose of padding the cost-plu- s payroll. Captain William J. Say, of the medical corps at Camp Sherman, testified as follows: New officers quarters were erected in the early spring and worked in the building from early morning until ten steam-fittelate in the evening, from spring until the following winter, killing time. They played cards and billiards occasionally, but generally when the medical corps officers were about they would be putting up or taking down the same pipe over and over again one or two men doing the work and the others looking on. Witnesses testified that sick soldiers were neglected in cold cantonments while steam-fittewere permitted to loaf, shooting craps or cooking hot dogs in the diet kitchens. They would get a couple of torches and generate heat enough to be comfortable when they should be working connecting up the steam line and the boys lay there suffering in the wards, said one witness. Parents all over the country received word that their sons had died of influenza or pneumonia and they were proud in their sorrow. They did not then know that the hand of death had fallen because contractors and workmen were in a conspiracy to rob the governus rs rs ment. statement that -- the canned goods would be used to increaser; rations of the soldiers and would be withheld from the market. Acting along lines suggested by you, wrote A. M. Davis tolii! 4 objector, canned peas, corn and squash and squash and st; beans will , be added-tthe ration list, which has always couta?: tomatoes. This will entirely dispose of your stock and elimi . : o "V-y- surplus. i . At that very time the war department was holding back giant and trying to sell them in Europe so as not to reduce prices indm United States, although the public was clamoring for governrth aid to suppress profiteering and to prevent prices from going higjad The testimony shows that the enormous quantity of foodstj amounted approximately to per cent of all the foodstuffnt the United States. The public has not forgotten that while our soldiers were brought home 39,000 automobiles were shipped to France and?c for 20 per cent of their value. Nor has it forgotten the appalj1 descriptions of waste at various ports in France. Miles of mobiles, automobile parts and tires, deep in the mud at Brest, ut left to the destruction of the elements. These are only a few revelations that recur as one ponders audacious statements of Chairman Cummings. That German coal seems to make everybody hot. It looks as if the United States would be well edited. They left Bryan high and dry. ' f rro i les sen What will McAdoo? stal If a wet president? is elected president does that make him a V.; .n m The Pole poked into the bears den and found him home. SPECIAL ELECTRIC RANGE DEMONSTRATION One of the most complete demonstrations of what electrical appliances particularly electric ranges can do for you will be The Cooking School which opens Monday, August 2, and closes Saturday, August 7, in the Auditorium. Miss Clift, a noted Eastern Domestic Science expert, will conduct actual cooking demonstrations on an electric range illustrating the simplest, most delicious and economical ways of preparing foods from 3 to 3:30 p. m. every day except Saturday. The classes will be preceded by a program from 1 :30 to 2 :00 p. m., and will be concluded Saturday by a big baking contest in which many valuable prizes will be distributed. You cannot afford to miss this unusual opportunity. 4- so riii mi , - sin t The public memory goes back to the spring of 1919 when the government allowed canned goods, hams and bacons to rot at Baltimore, Norfolk, Va., and other places rather than put the goods on the market as a counterblast to high prices. At one time a canner, hearing that the war department was about to place canned goods on the market, wrote a letter of protest and received in reply the welcome i |
