Why Ambassadors ?

M

R. BACON was our Ambassador to France. The other day, he handed his ambassadorship back to Mr. Taft. No cause for the Bacon stepping down and out was given. The true reason, when it does transpire, may be found to be a Roosevelt reason.

Mr. Bacon, under Mr. Roosevelt, was First. Assistant Secretary of State. When Mr. Root, at the behest of Money, laid down his Secretaryship of State to succeed Mr. Platt in the Senate, Mr. Bacon went up a step and took Mr. Root's place. This was but a scanty handful of weeks before Mr. Taft's inauguration.

It was the Roosevelt wish, as it was the Bacon ambition, that Mr. Bacon should continue as Secretary of State, and sit on the cabinet right hand of the Taft administration. Mr. Taft preferred Mr. Knox, however, and ousted Mr. Bacon, gilding his cabinet dismissal with that appointment to France. This cabinet dismissal of Mr. Bacon is one of the counts in the indictment that Mr. Roosevelt-in the courts of his own resentments - has drawn against Mr. Taft. In thus ousting Mr. Bacon, Mr. Roosevelt charges Mr. Taft with the political crime of ingratitude.

In France, and for that diplomatic matter, England and all Europe, it is being recalled with round-eyed

FROM

wonder that Mr. Bacon was our fourth ambassador to France during the past seven years. The Paris dispatch, which related the diplomatic going of Mr. Bacon, set forth the French astonishment. Said the dispatch:

This rapid shifting of ambassadors at Paris has not produced a good effect in French political circles. It has been pointed out more than once that an ambassador hardly has time to acquaint himself with his new duties or familiarize himself with the statesmen and the political conditions of France before he leaves, for one reason or another.

The French wonder at the easy readiness wherewith Americans shift their ambassadors, swings

largely upon

a point of

every hour, and the machinery of state would never slip a cog. Americans are aware of these ambassadorial futilities, and refuse to set a value upon officers who have no value at all.

In an elder day, when your ambassador or your minister to a foreign court was half hostage, half spy, such glittering splinters of government may have had their turn and served it. Even then, however, the sagacious Cromwell, a statesman unsurpassed, was moved to remark: "A battleship is your best ambassador." In our own time, a time of steam and electricity, such public trinkets belong only with the rag-tag and bobtail of a tinsel past. They serve no end, having none to serve. Who alive ever heard of any worth while work by an ambassador? Are not these posts, by the practice of forty years, held sacred to the occupation of rich weaklings, who purchase them of the parties with campaign contributions? These vapid children of money buy ambassadorships, just as a rich peacock would buy a tail were he to find himself hatched without one. Having bought them, they strut with them, peacock-wise. And, since it affords these slight, vainglorious ones an opportunity to be great without being dangerous, perhaps

Root as the Taft "Jonah "

Τ

IT is not understood that Senator Root is shedding tears over the hot differences developed between Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Taft. The sly, secret, inimical Mr. Root-that American Richelieu-was a member, as was Mr. Taft, of Mr. Roosevelt's cabinet. Mr. Root had two purposes in entering the cabinet. He was there to withstand Mr. Roosevelt in any effort to curb the criminal corporations. And he was there to secure for himself a presidency at the close of the Roosevelt term.

Mr. Root cannot be said to have succeeded in either of these enterprises. In all freedom and frankness, he most miserably failed as to both. Restraining Mr. Roosevelt was a task beyond the Rootian strength. It was as though a ten-year-old boy had been set. the task of restraining a husky three-yearold bull. Mr. Root held fast to the rope; he did all he could. Mr. Roosevelt never heeded the restraining pressure. He took Mr. Root with him whenever he charged; and though Mr. Root dug deep into the sod his faithful heels, and did his corporation best to hold back, it resulted only in his being foolishly skated all over the pampas.

Mr. Roosevelt paid no attention to Mr. Root's efforts to control him. If he at all noticed the rope of corporate influence and corporate interest with which Mr. Root was striving to check and stay him, he regarded it as no more than just the bond that united them.

Mr. Root's hopes of a White House were sent to the scrap heap the moment Mr. Roosevelt, picking a successor, pitched upon Mr. Taft. And yet observe the sarcasm of the situation, behold the irony of events! Mr. Root has not alone avenged himself upon Mr. Roosevelt, whom down deep in his cold heart he will not soon forgive for preferring-presidentially-Mr. Taft to himself, but he has done more, through Mr. Taft, in aid and comfort of the criminal corporations than he would have dared attempt, in his own person, had he himself been made President. Mr. Roosevelt bequeathed to Mr. Taft both his policies and his enemies. He was to foster the former, fight the latter. Before Mr. Roosevelt was out of the White House, the wily Mr. Root had begun teaching the docile Mr. Taft to make friends with those enemies, while permitting the "policies" to go wildly adrift.

With a last word, it was neither Mr. Aldrich, nor Mr. Payne, nor Mr. Morgan, nor any and all of the forty-odd influences of politics and criminal

money that cluster

about a White House, that led Mr. Taft to the tents of the ungodly. These had their weight with Mr. Taft

-no doubt. None the less, the dark honor of that Taft desertion belongs for the greater part to Mr. Root who, discovering Mr. Taft in the icy hour of a Harrison, has had during twenty masterful years the Taftian ear. The proverb-mongers tell us, "He laughs best who laughs last." If that be true, then Mr. Root, who has destroyed his rival, Mr. Taft, who has disappointed Mr. Roosevelt, and placed that turbu

lent lion-hunter in feud with the administration that he, Mr. Roosevelt, created, and who, as incident, has served his trust masters to the last limit of a robber tariff, owns authority for the bland smiles that broaden and wreath his pike-like face.

Too Much of a Good Thing

TRUSTS-tariff-protection-they all

run into one-are to be the issue. The people insist, the politicians submit. And since such is the political case, it would be as wisely well were you to equip yourself with a quiverful of barbed facts and figures.

As to tariff, men break into three groups. Some are for free trade; some are for tariff for revenue; some are for protection. Just now, the protectionists are on top, as they have been for forty years, and so, with the Payne-Aldrich measure, we have protection. Sailing as close to the wind of discussion

as our rig will permit, let us say for the argumentative moment that Protection may be a good thing. Admitting, however, that Protection is a good thing, there still remains the truism, indorsed by the gray experience of the ages, that one may have too much of a good thing.

Have we had an overdose of Protection? Whom has it helped? Whom has it hurt? What have been its broad effects? American mankind is complaining of the higher cost of living. Has Protection had anything to do with notching up that cost?

Consider these figures, taken from Uncle Sam's books. There may be in them a protection thought or two. During the years from 1900 to 1910, roundly 9,000,ooo aliens came into this country. With 91,972,266 of population, nearly one in ten is from Europe and landed here within the decade.

During the last six years-these are Bureau of Immigration figures-5,900,000 people came here from Europe. Of these 4,720,000 went into New England, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.

Their work?

They were licked up by the mines, by the manufactories. Not one went to the farms. They became food consumers, not food producers; wage reducers, not wage ad

vancers.

Under a protection that pays a Carnegie $25,000,000 a year and a Carnegie workingman $500 a year, manufacturing has expanded after this manner. In 1880, the manufacturing center was in western Pennsylvania; in 1890, it was in eastern Ohio; in 1900, in was in western Ohio; to-day, it is in central Indiana.

What of the farms? As manufacturing advanced, cities grew and farms were blotted

out. Take New England: During a recent New England decade, 25,300 factories came into being, and 15,344 farms went out of being. It was as though every other factory chimney, pointing skyward, pierced the heart of a farm. ·

The farms retreat before the factories. They have done it in New England, in New Jersey; they are doing it in Ohio, in Illinois, in Indiana. The natural is giving away before the artificial, the city is routing the farm. That sounds as though our civilization were making sternway. For while the city-the market-place-is born of the farm, the farm finds its source in nature.

What becomes of the American farmer, driven factory-wise from his fields? In 1910, 103,844 of him crossed over to Canada. American immigration to Canada will grow while Protection grows-Protection, which kills the farm to make room for the factory, which drives Americans out of America in favor of an immigration from Naples and Odessa!

Have we been overdosed with Protection?

This $240,000 came to Mr. Carnegie as "commissions" from the astute Tom Scott-who never believed, as does Mr. Carnegie, in muzzling the ox which treadeth out the corn-for selling an armful of dubious railroad bonds to an unlucky coterie of credulous Scotch and English. That was fewer than forty-five years ago. Now Mr. Carnegie's income is $25,000,000 a year.

And all the time there exists no religious, no social, no political, no com-mercial reason why Mr. Carnegie should be better paid or better housed or better fed or better clothed than is Bob Jones or Bill Smith. That Carnegie income of $25,000,000 is a flower of Protection. There are hundreds of such

"You remember Mr. Carnegie's recent regrets before the Stanley Committee over his want of shrewdness in getting only $430,000,000 for his Steel Trust holdings?"

Who would farm it for ten per cent., when his money will bring forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty per cent., in a "protected" factory? They complain of a disappearance of our merchant marine, and talk of subsidies. Who would put to seain competition with the world-for ten per cent., when his money will bring forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty per cent., in a "protected" factory? Some recent congressional Cicero, with a genius for mixed metaphor, called the chimney of the factory "the foremast of national progress!" Granted. Granted. It is none the less bad seamanship that strengthens the foremast, but sinks the vessel. Protection's Prize Flower