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BRACKET! DEFENDS YOTE SENATOR FROM SARATOGA DISTRICT JUSTIFIES HIS ACTION ON GITTINS BILL. Makes Ringing Reply to Threat from Clergyman in His District That Ho Will Pass into Political Oblivion as Result of His Course. Saratoga, X. Y., July 2S. During the fight for the passage of the Gittins bill at Albany many legislators were besieged with letters that were inspired by the machine-made reformers. The hill that seeks to relieve the directors and owners of race courses from criminal liability for the nets of their patrons, of which they have no knowledge and control, was branded as the opening of the gates for gambling, crime and disorder. One of these letters, which was characteristic, was written hy Bev. 1. C. Abbott of Clifton Park, X. Y., to Senator Edgar T. Brackett. This letter ;iml the threat it carried is here given with the lengthy explanation by Senator Brackett of his vote lor the bill: ".My Dear Sir I have your letter addressed to uie, dated Clifton Park, July 20 inst., in these words: " Senator Brackett: Dear Sir Did you go it Wind when you went in for the Gittins bill V " If that bill passes you will also pass into political oblivion. Once your admirer. " D. C. Abbott. To this Senator Brackett made reply as follows: "I am glad for an expression of your views, as I tun always glad to learn the sentiments of any constituent, or of any good person on any pending ques- lion. But I :uu glad more than for any other reason hecause it enables me to tell you, and through you, the public, my exact view of the Gittins bill and the exact reasons actuating me in voting for it, as it was linally amended. "i might truthfully say to you that I very much doubt whether the bill at all changed the law in its practical operation. I do not bclievu in this I differ from those interested in racing and their counsel, that, under the present law, a director of in race track can be held liable for gambling hy an-tither person on the track unless he knows of it, n- unless it is so continued and notorious that his 1 knowledge will be legally presumed. In this I am in entire agreement with my good friend Canon Chase, who led the opposition to the bill. I think such director would be held equally liable and to equal degree had the Gittins hill become law. "But 1 do not mean to rest my action on any such, or mi any question of legal construction. I believe, in deciding any matter involving morals, that it is the right thing to see how far you can keep away from the wrong, not how close you can come to it and still justify yourself, and in this belief I pass any narrow question of construction and come squarely to the issue. "It was announced hy the president of the Saratoga Association, with great ltositiveness. and I supposed, and supiKise, truthfully, that unless the amended Gittins bill became a law there would he no racing at Saratoga this year. So far as my H-rsonal comfort or pleasure was, or is. concerned, that announcement meant nothing to me. "I neither care for. nor attend, horse races, nor do I bet on them. It is my confident helief that Saratoga would have been vastly better off had no race track ever hcen established or maintained here. But. the race track is here and large interests have grown up around it, and the question cannot he treated as an original proposition. Thousands of lx-rsons, unlike you and me, delight in races and are attracted to Saratoga by them, and have been since 1SC1. "A generation has grown up in our village with the Ingrained belief that Saratogas principal support is racing and the- visitors drawn hy the races. In this belief, and in reliance upon the continuance of racing at the Saratoga track, men have made their business contracts; they have built houses with rooms to rent and to take lwarders, and barns to let, and. wore than all, many, if not the majority of them, have mortgaged their places In reliance upon the income obtained from such rents and boarders, to pay their Interest, and ultimately their principal. "They are not gamblers, nor the supporters of gamblers. Perhaps they ought not to have thus made contracts, but they did and are not criminals for having done so. As their means of support, they, unfortunately, rely for their living upon the patronage of those who attend the races. "I may truthfully say, and can bring the evidence of my neighbors, many of whom do not agree with nie. that, for years, I have denied the commercial value of the races to the village, and have, in season and out, urged that the community turn its attention and its hope in other directions and seeks its living and its prosperity from other sources. I do not care to say how much of my professional earnings I have risked in demonstrating this helief, but I am sure that it is enough to thoroughly attest my faith in what I say earnings some of which I would gladly have given for the work of the Methodist Church, save that this seemed a practical necessity and as valuable as any other missionary work. "But the community cannot change is habits in a year any more than can any individual in a moment. There are many times when your congregation must have the milk of the Word before yoii can give them strong meat, and many of these people whom I have mentioned, themselves innocent of wrong, who have simply grown into conditions as they found them, these eople faced distress, many of them ruin, if the races were suddenly withdrawn before they had opportunity to adjust themseles to new conditions. These arc not a few in number, but hundreds. "Knowing this, I sought and ohtained from the race track owners their most solemn promise that if, hy tills amended Gittins hill, they could be relieved from a menace that seemed to them real, although to mo not at all so, they would hy every known means hunt out and suppress any gambling attempted on the track, and having done this, after not a little of something akin to travail of mind, for the reasons I have stated I decided to, and did, vote for the hill. "Would not you, Dominie Abbott, have done the fame? I believe you would. I believe that the Hu-. inanities of the situation would have so possessed you that you could not have done otherwise. If you could, you have drawn from the Methodist discipline and doctrine a rule different from my faith and practice. "Do not, in any of this, think that I am pleading for wrongdoing that good may come of it. You cannot lxdieve stronger than I that righteousness exalteth a community as it docs a nation, and that sin Is a reproach to any people. You cannot believe, stronger than I, nor try harder to practice, although you may bettor succeed, thnt there Is hut one course that cah satisfy a mans own conscience ami that is to do right. I am, by this, only seeking to show you that in deciding a question that was hard to he sure I Was deriding right. 1 weighed the situation with an anxious wish to do exactly right. "A careful retrospect of the entire situation has not changed my opinion as to what was right. If, in so doing, I have forfeited your good opinion, as your letter indicates, and the good opinion of other men like you, in the church and in the pulpit, respect for whom and for whose work I am sure I inhaled with my earliest breath and took in with my Methodist mothers milk, with a big sorrow in my heart that it is so, 1 still must bear it and continue to try to do right, and must count it one of the penalties, albeit a bitter one. that I was and am compelled to pay for my neighliors and fellow townsmen. I am sure that none with whom I am acquanited will have any notion that I was trying to favor race track orother gambling. "One thing more: Believe me, that the political retirement which you suggest as due me, does not disturb me a moment, nor did it, or shall it, enter into the question at all in. deciding this, or any, question coming before me. No man approaching fifty-eight years of age .should be much worried about retirement, political or otherwise, and no man who has put in fourteen years of hard service in the New York Senate can much care to stay there longer. Whenever it is deemed that my work is not, on the whole, satisfactory to my district and advantageous to the state, it will not take much of argument to persuade me to go into the political retirement, mention of which I infer you think is distressing to me. "While there Is in your letter just a little of a tone which 1 do not like, forgive it, in view of what I know is your great earnestness with respect to the question involved."
