Indiana's Dearth

The distinguished senate of Indiana, 50 strong, sat last week as a court for the first time in 92 years. The immediate cause was a bitter quarrel between two middleaged men in the ill-favored town of Muncie, Ind. The reason, which the senate decided was good, sufficient and constitutional, was that one of the quarrelers, a circuit court judge named Clarence W. Dearth, appeared to have committed acts for which he deserved impeachment. That the other quarreler, Editor George R. Dale of the Muncie Post-Democrat (weekly) was a fugitive from Judge Dearth's justice, across the state line in Ohio, lent color to a case which, originating as a question of freedom of the press, had ramified, as the press had intended it should, into a question of curruption in high office. . For three years Editor Dale had attacked Judge Dearth as corrupt. His Honor, the Post-Democrat said, was conniving at the administration of city officials who countenanced organized vice in Muncie. Outwardly, His Honor was trying to make a record in juvenile cases; to make "goats" of a few bootleggers and criminals. His Honor was picking and packing juries, said the Post-Democrat, to suit His Honor's necessities. His Honor was friendly to the K. K. K.

Goaded to an extreme, Judge Dearth haled Editor Dale to his court for criminal libel. Editor Dale refused to go, left the management of his sheet in Mrs. Dale's hands and fled to Ohio. Judge

Dearth sentenced him for contempt of Judge Dearth's court. Editor Dale admitted his private but not his legal contempt. He escaped extradition from Ohio and appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court for freedom to return to Muncie.

His Muncie weekly continued to rub salt in His Honor's wounds. Typical salt was an inference by Editor Dale that the reason Judge Dearth's daughter ran away from home might be, not mental derangement, but moral. The girl was later found dead in a river. But Judge Dearth, irate and mortified, had meantime over-exerted his powers by arresting newsboys, confiscating their Post-Democrats and forbidding them to sell any more. The howl that Editor Dale was able to put up over this and other "Dearth scandals" persuaded the board of managers of the Indiana House of Representatives to prosecute Judge Dearth before the Senate. At the trial last week, testimony tended to show that Judge Dearth had in a variety of ways, "fixed" < his juries to give the verdicts which he, as Judge, desired. The trial moved along, strewn with puns about "dearth" a,nd "justice"; with Lieut. Governor F. Harold Van Orman of Indiana presiding; with grinning newsboys as witnesses, making the eminent senators laugh; with President Benjamin Harrison's son and grandson present, the one in the Senate, the other as one of the prosecutors from the House--and with the gadfly who brought it all to pass, Editor Dale of the Post-Democrat, telephoning fresh vitriol to his wife from his Ohio sanctuary.