The Fifty-Ninth Congress

NOVEMBER, 1906

BY SAMUEL W. McCALL

IT is easy to overestimate the historical importance of our contemporary politics, although it is far from being the worst fault that we should treat them too seriously. Questions that are discussed with a vast deal — I will not say of passion, for there is little genuine passion in our current politics — but with a vast deal of noise, are somehow quickly displaced by other questions no more important nor more closely related to the real life of the nation, and permanently disappear. We have witnessed in the last decade the sudden rise of statesmen, almost purely the creatures of executive favor, who have in a moment blazed from the horizon to the zenith, whose greatness has been established by executive proclamations and solemnly ratified by university degrees conferred with academic eloquence, and we are already asking ourselves what they really said or did that history will trouble itself to recall. Its verdicts we may be sure will not be greatly influenced by the extravagance of contemporary censure or contemporary praise. Whether or not a President really said not long ago, as reported, “In Mr. — I have a great Secretary of State, in Mr. — a great Attorney-General ” — and so on throughout nearly the whole Cabinet list — and then, “in Mr. — I have the greatest war minister that has appeared on either side of the ocean in our time,” there are plenty of contemporary utterances to prove amply that now, not in the troubled times that try men’s souls, but in the fat era of a gross material prosperity, the real golden age of statesmen has at last dawned.

All this leads to caution in expressing emphatic opinions concerning contemporary politics, although the extreme of censure is more often met with than that of praise in dealing with Congress, except when it suits the whim of the moment to treat that department of the government as the mere organ of the executive. It is somewhat the fashion to rank the present Congress, in the importance of its work, with the congresses immediately following the Civil War. I think this opinion may safely be treated as an exaggerated one; and that it has done nothing that can equal in constitutional importance the first act for the government of Porto Rico, or, in point of industrial importance, the Wilson or the Dingley Tariff Act, or that can approach in the logical response to a critical condition of the country the repeal of the silver-purchasing clause of the Sherman Act. And if one ventured farther back he would find other legislation of equal importance this side of the period of Reconstruction.

But the record of the first session of the Fifty-ninth Congress is very notable both for what was done and what was not done, although the balance is strongly in favor of actual achievement. It failed to pass the bill granting free trade to the Philippine Islands, and the tariff escaped that judicious revision which it has so often been proclaimed to be the peculiar prerogative of its friends to bestow; but it passed the bills for untaxed industrial alcohol, for meat inspection, for pure food,for the admission of the territories, and for a form of government railroad rate-making. It also displayed a remarkable capacity for spending money, and granted a total of appropriations of almost fantastic proportions.

The membership of the two houses in point of character and ability will compare not unfavorably with the best congresses that have ever been sent to Washington. Although they lacked the very few overshadowing figures associated with the congresses of past times, they contained men of rare talent, while their average membership was of a character scarcely to encourage those who delight in disparaging their own time in comparison with the past, or with the future their imaginations paint.

It would not be difficult to name a score of senators who in debate or in some other important feature of the work of a senator will be likely to be remembered at least by the next generation. “There does not seem to be a quorum in the divine presence,” Mr. Reed once sarcastically observed, as he entered the Senate Chamber when a senator was delivering an elaborate and carefully prepared speech to a small number of sleepy colleagues. But Mr. Reed, who signalized his speakership by his daring way of counting a quorum, and who always went to the heart of the subject himself, rarely making a speech in the House over fifteen minutes long, did not regard with favor the average set speech. The set speech of a senator is usually one of portentous length. Senatorial dignity seems to demand the quality of length as a tribute to the importance of the rule for unlimited debate. Many long speeches were spoken in the Senate during the late session, some of them unnecessarily long doubtless, and devoted to the elaboration of points that were not always of the first magnitude, but on the whole the debates in that body, especially that upon the railroad rate bill, displayed a very high order of ability. Some of the strongest men in the Senate had previously been members of the House, where they had passed unrecognized by the public at anything like their real value. Men who had served in the House with Mr. Bailey, for instance, knew that he was a man of rare talent; but the newspapers, which generally employed themselves in ridiculing him at that period of his career, made the discovery after he became a member of the Senate that he was a debater of commanding ability.

The House did not lack in able men. It chose as Speaker the most picturesque character in current American politics, a very efficient presiding officer, but seen at his best in debate upon the floor of the House. The floor leaders of the majority were Payne, the chairman of Ways and Means, and Dalzell and Grosvenor of the Committee on Rules; and when to these are added Hepburn, Hitt, Williams, Littlefield, Burton, Clark, Cochran, Russell, and others whom space forbids to name and whom not to name seems invidious, there is presented a variety of talent that would add strength to any legislative chamber in the world. Ninety men, the number of the membership of the Senate, might be chosen from the House, and in aggregate of ability they would equal the present Senate.

The bill for free trade with the Philippine Islands passed the House, but failed in the Senate. It was supported by the Democrats generally and by a majority of the Republicans, but it encountered the opposition of a formidable contingent of Republican members who came chiefly from the agricultural states, and feared that the unrestricted competition of Philippine sugars would have an adverse effect upon our beet sugar industry. As an economic measure simply, little could be said in its favor save from the standpoint of absolute free trade, for no people in the world differ from us more widely in their social system, standard of wages and of living, and in industrial conditions generally. From considerations of commerce and industry alone, there is scarcely a country in the world with which we should not more quickly have free trade than with the Philippine Islands. And as to their importance to us as customers, the grandiloquent prophecies so freely indulged in, in 1898 and 1899, about the markets for our products that we were about to conquer, become for the first time impressive, when we read them today in the light of that magnificent total of $6,000,000 of exports, which we have at last been able to attain after eight years of benevolent assimilation, to say nothing of reconcentration and war. But from the standpoint of justice the measure was irresistible. Having forcibly taken from them and arrogated to ourselves the power of deciding what taxes those people should pay, having levied in all their ports our own high duties against other nations, and especially against those nations with which they would naturally trade, it would not merely be unjust, it would be inhuman, for us to deny them the benefits of the system of which we had imposed upon them all the burdens. They should have nothing less than free trade with this country until we shall again remember our own history and reëstablish the principles upon which our government was founded. When that time shall come, the people of those islands will decide for themselves what taxes they shall pay.

The most important measure of the session from an industrial standpoint was the “denatured” alcohol bill, so called, as if the prime object of nature in making alcohol was to provide a beverage. The bill removed the entire tax from alcohol which had been rendered undrinkable, so that this important agent in the arts might be used with comparative freedom. The tax remains as it was before upon alcohol which might be used for drink. Free alcohol in the arts was a feature of the tariff act of 1894, but Mr. Carlisle, then Secretary of the Treasury, found difficulty in preparing regulations which would clearly separate alcohol used in the arts from that used as a beverage, and prevent frauds upon the treasury; and the provision, although the law of the land, was never put in force. But some foreign countries have successfully employed the device of mingling with the alcohol substances that would render it poisonous or revolting to the human stomach, and have thus baffled the ingenuity of those who would sell it for drink. The legislation of the last session was based upon the experience of those countries, and it cannot fail to have a most important effect. Free alcohol in the arts lies almost at the basis of industrial Germany, which employs it to the extent of 75,000,000 gallons a year. Our own tax of $2.18 on each gallon was practically prohibitive, and in those important manufactures which depended upon its use we were at the mercy of our rivals. The possibilities of the employment of alcohol in producing light, heat, and power are also enormous, as gallon for gallon it has a far greater potency than the best grade of refined petroleum, and need not much, if at all, exceed it in price. The only opposition to the bill came from the wood alcohol interests, but as the use of that article even in the arts is attended with danger to life and health, no reason appeared for taxing for its benefit a more efficient and safer rival product, and the bill passed by a nearly unanimous vote.

The pure food bill was designed to prevent the transportation across state lines of adulterated, deleterious, and misbranded foods, and the chief instrumentality created to accomplish this purpose was a system of federal inspection supported by penalties of varying degrees of severity. The bill was based upon an enlarged, and possibly an unjustifiable, construction of the commerce clause of the Constitution, just as the taxing power has been amplified and often employed, not to provide revenue, but for purposes essentially foreign to it, and to regulate, suppress, and promote business and industry. The passage of the bill was largely due to Mr. Hepburn, chairman of the Committee on Inter-State and Foreign Commerce, under whose leadership it had, in a modified form, passed the House of Representatives in a previous congress. The most valuable portion of the legislation is that aimed at the traffic in patent medicines, containing deadly poisons covered by false and attractive labels, —a form of industry which all the resources of federal and state law might well be employed to suppress.

Of the same general character as the pure food law was the meat inspection amendment to the Agricultural Appropriation Bill. The methods of preparing animal food even in the best regulated home kitchens would not always seem appetizing, if reported with a too close attention to detail, lit up by a sufficient play of fancy. But the colossal slaughter houses of Chicago, however well conducted, would inevitably afford a field for the higher imagination, which, if properly exercised, would turn the stomach of an Esquimaux. But it is sufficient to say with regard to this amendment that it was not at all necessary to nauseate a nation, and strike down for the time an important foreign trade, in order to obtain an enactment which the great packers themselves may well have been eager to secure. For, in addition to the benefit of the certificate of purity, placed upon their product at the expense of the Government, the law will tend to drive out of the interstate and foreign trade some of those establishments which are too small to occupy an inspector, and will thus still further centralize the industry.

The legislation to which I have just been referring illustrates very well the striking principle dominating the work of the entire session. Congress was apparently animated by a profound faith in the infallibility of federal supervision. That the federal inspector was made of the same stuff as the state inspector, that some of the most sweeping financial swindles of the age, some of the most appalling disasters upon the ocean, occurred under a system of direct federal supervision, were facts that either were lost sight of entirely or were not regarded of the first consequence. And it is probably correct to say that Congress was responsive to the popular opinion of the moment. It is a most attractive way of dealing with an evil, not for one to fight it himself and face the disgusting details, nor for the community which is immediately affected to combat it, but to call upon the great central deity at Washington. What more powerful fulmination can there be against crime than a federal statute ? Against this magnificent device the old-fashioned notion of keeping power near the people has little weight. The inhabitant of a city sees the water works which have been stolen, he knows the aldermen who helped to carry them away, and within fair limits he can reach a just conclusion upon the questions of guilt or innocence, and whether the law has been justly enforced. But the distance of the Washington stage is suited to sleight-of-hand and the red fire of the tableaux, and it matters not that the guilty may be dramatically absolved and the innocent attacked, and that mere suspicion or laudation may more easily take the place of proof, if only the central performer on the stage is willing to work the machinery of justice for political ends. The unknown and the distant have an obvious advantage over the near and the commonplace, for they strongly appeal to the imagination.

Excessive federal supervision of course disregards the boundaries that have been established between the national and state governments, and by centralizing authority more and more at a greater distance from the mass of the people it causes power when exercised to strike with a heavier incidence, just as a falling body acquires momentum and strikes the harder the farther it has fallen. But still worse, it tends to establish a relation between the government and the individual which ought never to exist, and which leads him to rely upon the government to do those things which he should do for himself. The debate upon the appropriation for the geological survey well illustrates this tendency. When once an executive bureau has been established it is the well-settled rule for it, not merely to “grow up with the country,” but to expand with far greater rapidity than the country’s growth. In reaching out for an enlarged jurisdiction it not infrequently duplicates the work already performed by some other bureau. If a special appropriation is granted it for a temporary work, the temporary appropriation is apt to grow into a fixed or an increasing annual charge upon the Treasury, The splendid proportions to which the appropriations for the geological survey have grown showed that that excellent bureau was no exception to this rule. A few years ago a special work of testing such substances as fuels and building materials was put in the charge of this bureau. This special work was established in connection with the St. Louis Exposition, which, of course, has passed into history. But it was proposed on an appropriation bill at the last session to continue this work, which was not the testing of materials and fuels upon the public domain, but of materials and fuels belonging to private individuals. It proposed to have the government do something at its own expense which the individual had in times past done for himself and done very successfully. But from the debate one would perceive the greatly superior way in which a private work could be performed by men holding an office under the government, — and at its cost; he would wonder that we had on the whole made some progress upon individual initiative, and that the telephone, the telegraph, and the other marvels of invention had not first been brought to light by men in the classified service or wearing a federal uniform; and listening to the debate, he would have marveled still more when he recalled some government institution, — the naval observatory for instance, with its wonderful equipment of telescopes and other instruments, its large and talented staff paid by the government to explore the heavens, and its magnificent appropriation, — and remembered that — omitting one rare man — its discoveries would not compare in importance with those of some half-starved college professor in charge of a meagre and poorly equipped observatory upon some New England hillside. A noteworthy feature of the incident was that the appropriation was favored by conspicuous members of the party claiming as its own the timehonored creed that the government which governs best governs least.

I have referred to the efficiency of the present Congress in the expenditure of public money. The total appropriations of the session amounted to $880,000,000, and if the appropriations for the Panama Canal and on account of the public debt are deducted there will still remain nearly $800,000,000, as the cost of running all the departments of government for a single year, including the post office. It may perhaps be urged that appropriations amounting in all to $35 ,000,000, to cover deficiences in previous years, should also be deducted; but deficiency has become a regular feature of our budget, and, if we may judge from the precedents, Congress at a future time will be called upon to provide for the deficiencies of the current fiscal year. This total of $800,000,000 of annual expenditure is about $300,000,000 greater than the corresponding expenditures for the first fiscal year of the McKinley administration. This astounding increase of about sixty per cent in the period of nine years demands some scrutiny and explanation.

An analysis of the appropriations will show that much the larger part of the entire increase is due to our vastly greater expenditures for military purposes. That our appropriations for these purposes might be somewhat lessened with safety is doubtless true, but the greater part of the increase is the necessary consequence of the policy of empire and glory upon which we entered at the conclusion of the Spanish War. That policy affected the United States no more profoundly in the principles of its government than in its military problem. In 1898 a great ocean separated our territory from every nation that might make itself formidable to us in war. If prior to that year Japan, for instance, had desired to attack us she would have been compelled to bring her war ships, with their limited steaming radius, and her armies, across the Pacific, and to fight us upon the American side of that sea — a task she could not hope successfully to perform. And the hopelessness of the undertaking would have made it practically certain that she would never attempt it. But to-day, if she determined to attack us, all she would need to do would be to seize some little island of ours lying at her own doors, and we should be compelled to cross the Pacific to give her battle; for as a practical question, I think no one doubts that the United States in the present temper of its people would defend the least of its possessions from forcible capture. In other words, our “world power ” statesmen at a stroke of the pen converted this superb ocean rampart into a rampart for a possible foe, which it would be necessary for us to cross for the purposes of defending our own territory. Since then we have rendered ourselves so vulnerable to attack, it would scarcely be the part of wisdom to rely entirely upon the pacific intentions of other nations and permit an abject military weakness to appeal too strongly to their warlike ambition.

A further scrutiny of the appropriations will also bring to light the fact that there has been a very considerable increase in the cost of running the machinery of civil government, made necessarily large by the steady encroachment of the national government. The plea that our national expenditure on the basis of population is less than that of some of the other great powers contains an obvious fallacy. It does not take into the account the federated character of our system. Our state and municipal governments support the weight of public education, of constructing and maintaining roads, furnishing protection against fire, providing the courts which decide the great mass of controversies, and maintaining the internal peace and order. The people of Massachusetts, for instance, tax themselves each year about $25 per capita in order to carry out these great purposes of government which are partly or wholly performed by the more centralized governments of foreign nations. When all our governmental expenditures are taken into account there is not more than one great foreign power, if, indeed, there is a single one, that can vie with us in amount of taxation.

Undoubtedly the most important enactment of the session, judged by the effort expended to secure its passage, and by that feature of the legislation from which it took its name, was the Railroad Rate Bill. No subject in our recent politics has been talked about more vaguely nor been less understood than the precise form of the railroad question involved in the bill. It would not be an exaggeration to say that public opinion, the argument upon the subject in the first presidential message, and the body of the debate, were directed to a point which was absolutely unrelated to the controverted principle of the bill. Every feature of the legislation which might tend to prevent or punish discrimination by railroads could have been passed without debate and by unanimous consent; but when government rate-making was put forth as a cure for discrimination there was presented an economic non-sequitur, so palpable as not to stand the test of a moment’s serious thought.

To understand the situation more clearly, and to discover how far, if at all, the rate-making provision of the bill responded to any evil related to it and to any well-developed public opinion, it will be necessary to revert to the session before the last, when the subject first engaged the attention of Congress. In his annual message in December, 1904, the President dealt at length with the evils of discrimination and the giving of rebates by railroads, and concluded by proposing as a remedy that authority be conferred upon the interstate commission, when a given rate was complained of, to establish a new rate which should have effect immediately and stand until set aside by the courts. There was undoubtedly a strong public sentiment at that time against railroad discrimination, but such sentiment as existed in favor of giving the commission authority to fix rates was confined to the commission itself or to isolated utterances of a few individuals. Certainly, if one looks for the manifestation of a public opinion in favor of government rate-making prior to the last presidential election, in the important newspapers, the platforms of the great parties, or the utterances of their candidates, he will look in vain.

It was pointed out very early in the debate that followed the introduction of a rate bill in the preceding congress, that there was no logical relation between the fixing of rates by the government and the giving of rebates or secret rates by the railroads. If a governmental agency should set aside a rate established by a railroad and substitute another for it, the railroad could as easily give a secret rebate from the new rate as from the one that had been set aside. The making of rates by the commission would do no more to prevent rebates, as was said by Mr. Ackworth, a leading British authority, than would the reënactment of Magna Charta. Senator Dolliver, the leading Republican supporter, in the Senate, of government rate-making, formally admitted during the debate at the last session that it would not prove a remedy for rebates.

But the recommendation had been made by a Republican president, and it at once became party policy; it was enthusiastically supported by the Democratic party, with the modern principles of which it was precisely in line; every known instance of railroad favoritism, the grafting of insurance officials, the magnitude of swollen fortunes, almost every financial and economic evil of the times very naturally served the purposes of argument in favor of a measure the inception of which had violated every logical rule, and government ratemaking finally passed with only seven dissenting votes in the House and three in the Senate.

The debate upon the bill will rank among the notable congressional debates of the generation. In the House, where the rules and the practice make it easy to limit discussion, it was much more brief than in the Senate, and for that reason perhaps the speeches were devoted much less to detail and dealt more broadly and comprehensively with the important features and the vital policy of the bill. If the volume of the debate in the House is reduced one half by rejecting the glowing anti-corporation sentiments which might perhaps be expected in a body whose members were about to come before the people for reelection, there will remain a thorough and informing discussion of the bill.

It was inevitable that so rare an opportunity should have been embraced to exhibit a lavish generosity that would cost the giver nothing. There was shown a tendency to overlook entirely the distinction between public property and capital invested in a public service, as if the capital invested in rendering a public service, with the result of making the present development of the country possible, was any less entitled to the protection of the law than those other forms of capital, sacred and inviolable to lawmakers, which were devoted to the making of beer or woolen goods or to any other selfish kind of industry. Some senators and representatives were generously willing to concede that the fabulous values created by the enterprise of the railroad builder should be further augmented at the cost of the wretches whose investments underlay the country’s prosperity, but who had incautiously put their money where it could not get away. At least, the railroad scoundrels should consider themselves fortunate if they were permitted a return of three per cent by an indignant people whose values had increased tenfold by the building of railroads.

Much was said in the debate about “Graft,” which was declared, we may well believe with truth, to be the crime of the few and to be foreign to the great mass of business and to the general conduct of our people. But if anything would effectively prove its general prevalence and that it infected the whole body politic, it would be to have a public response to the appeals which in effect were made to have the farmer, the manufacturer and the merchant join hands under the lead of the politicians and treat the vast mass of capital invested in railroads as mere loot because it was guilty of performing a public service.

Most of the speeches in the Senate ignored the broad economic and constitutional grounds of debate, and there was an imposing display of technical but rather irrelevant learning. This scrutiny of detail resulted from the rules of the Sen, ate, which secure the unlimited right of amendment and debate. But with the exception of the court-review amendment and that prohibiting common carriers from engaging in other forms of business, the contributions of the Senate to the bill were not of the first importance. Great legal skill was shown in debating whether the bill would be constitutional if it did not contain an express and broad provision for a court review, as if the courts would not protect all constitutional rights without the express direction of Congress. Whether the bill attempted to delegate legislative power was a much more robust constitutional point. This point received little attention in the Senate outside of the masterly speech of Senator Foraker, which in its luminous treatment of the broad legal and constitutional questions involved was the incomparable speech of the senatorial debate. Admitting for the purpose of argument that the making of railroad rates was within the power of Congress to regulate commerce between the states, Congress itself would have to exercise the power and could not delegate it to any other body. But it was asserted by the friends of the bill that in giving the commission authority to fix only such rates as were just and reasonable, Congress established the rule of rates, and that nothing was left for the commission but to perform a merely ministerial act without the exercise of any legislative discretion. This would seem equivalent to asserting that Congress itself does not exercise legislative discretion unless in such acts as are unjust and unreasonable. If Congress can confer the power to fix just and reasonable railroad rates upon a commission, then it can in the same way confer any of its other great powers, and commissions may be created to establish reasonable tariff rates or to declare just wars, or to make just and reasonable regulations upon any federal subject. The principle of the bill would thus seem to involve nothing less than congressional abdication.

The opponents of the bill contended that the law should require all rates to be just and reasonable, and that under such a provision the individual could always secure redress in the courts for any extortion by the railroad. Judging by the readiness of juries to award round verdicts against railroads for damages to persons and property, it cannot be doubted that the railroads would maintain a system of unjust or preferential rates at the peril of bankruptcy if the individual should proceed in the courts, which are the forum where rights are made practical, and a government by law is secured. If the commission were endowed with greater power to initiate proceedings where upon investigation it believed a rate to be unjust, the practical remedy against excessive charges would be more effective than in the Hepburn bill. The power of testing every rate exercised by judges scattered over the whole country would in no degree tend to centralization, but the fixing of rates by a central commission at Washington, whose members were appointed by the President, and were subject to removal by him at any time, would mean centralization of the worst character. For what greater power could an ambitious president, seeking reëlection, ask than the power, by his coercive authority over the commission, to fix every freight rate between the two oceans, and to discriminate in favor of a community whose vote he was attempting to secure as against a community which was hopelessly antagonistic.

Fifteen years ago Chief Justice Cooley, then the chairman of the commission, declared that the task of fixing freight rates for the whole country would be a superhuman one for the commission to perform. To-day the task would be twice as great, owing to the expansion of our railroad system. Instead, then, of the flexible American system of adjusting rates to the demands of business and the competition of railroads and localities, any material interference by the commission in the making of rates would be likely to give us the unyielding and wooden schedules characteristic of bureau rate-making abroad; and instead of the low long-distance rate which has enabled the most remote parts of our country to trade with one another and has been responsible for the settlement of the interior portions of the Union, we should need to prepare ourselves, if foreign experience is of any weight, to witness a rate based upon distance which would be fatal to the long-distance traffic. An important practical safeguard against the chief evils of commission rate-making so far as the railroads are concerned will be found in the fact that their task, as Chief Justice Cooley said, is superhuman, and therefore impossible of performance, and in the sweeping provision for a court review.

So far as the prevention of discrimination is involved it is noteworthy that there is nothing in the bill which approaches in its definite and sweeping terms the Elkins Law, which had been upon the statute books nearly two years before the rate-making programme was proposed, and which had never been seriously enforced. There was nothing of mystery about this statute. It required no profound legal knowledge, but only the ability to read, to discover in its provisions the most comprehensive remedy for rebates, both against the railroad which gave and the shipper who received them. The effective proceedings against discrimination instituted under the Elkins Act during the last six months, which have almost uniformly been upheld by the courts, make it certain that if that act had been enforced prior to the President’s first recommendation for commission rate-making, the recommendation, if made at all, would have been based upon some other ground than the prevention of rebates and discrimination. And as there was at that time no general complaint that railroad charges were excessive, the recommendation would probably never have been made at all.

The work of the Congress is, of course, not yet complete, although it is not probable that important legislation of a general character will be secured at the short session. The Immigration bill, which has passed both houses in different forms and is now in conference, may be enacted. The situation in Cuba may demand legislative action, which it is to be hoped will not destroy the independence of the little republic, in line with those flamboyant speeches which were made for Philippine annexation, and are now being repeated. But almost the whole time of the ten weeks’ session will be required for the passage of the great annual supply bills.

I have referred to those features of the record of the session which seemed to me of the chief importance. It remains for me to suggest an obvious question of a general character, and not related to any particular measure. Did the course of legislation show that enlarged participation of the executive in the work of Congress, the tendency towards which had been witnessed in recent years ? To this question I imagine only a single answer will be given. The influence of the executive upon legislation is to-day by no means confined to those common constitutional methods of expression, the veto and the message recommending legislation, but it is chiefly shown by an influence exerted upon the individual members, upon the legislative machinery of the two houses, and even by special messages upon amendments proposed to particular bills, which in effect amount to written speeches upon the mere details and phraseology of measures, and are read in that House in which the debate is proceeding. There are concentrated in the person of the President the great authority of the party leadership and the far greater practical authority which results from the vast powers of his office, of which by no means the least important, and certainly the most corrupting, is the control of the patronage. Unless there is a scrupulous and restrained exercise of these enormous powers; the presidential office becomes a formidable engine for throwing the whole mechanism of the Constitution out of gear. The practical absorption of the great prerogatives of Congress has gone as far as it can be permitted to go with safety to our system of government.

After all the laudations upon mere rapidity of motion without regard to direction, and the supreme importance of “doing things,” with discrimination as to the character of the “things” a secondary matter, something still remains to be said in favor of parliamentary institutions, which in Great Britain and in this country have furnished the world with the best models of free government. One representative will be slow, over-cautious, and never disposed to action; another will be all impulse, and in reaching his conclusions will scorn to indulge in the process of thought; but in a great body of representatives the influence of extremes will be largely nullified and a comparatively safe average will be struck. But where you have a government of one man, it is apt to be a government by fits and starts, depending rather upon individual traits than upon the law. If your ruler is ultra-conservative, your government may never move at all. If he is erratic and emotional, ready to settle over night the problems that have vexed the ages, you will have a government of instability, and the great ship will be sailed, not by the charts and the settled currents of opinion, but like a cat-rigged boat, trimmed to catch every whiff of wind that may at the moment be blowing. At a time when Parliamentary institutions are becoming more powerful in Europe, and our people are looking with extreme sympathy upon the attempt in Russia to establish a duma, it is significant that we should be regarding with silence and apparent unconcern a movement in the direction of the practical obliteration of the Congress of the United States, and that we should apparently be turning our faces away from those nations with which we are most closely allied in civilization and ranging ourselves by the side of those South American countries where congresses and even courts employ themselves in registering executive decrees. And although it must be confessed that executive government is likely to afford a loftier stage for the exhibition of those arts with which the rapidly increasing breed of political acrobats and swordswallowers may thrill the galleries of the country, the American people are not yet ready consciously to adopt such a system however entertaining it might be. The clear and general understanding of the danger will provide a certain remedy.