Page images
PDF
EPUB
[ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

habit to think in terms of Pike County, as it were.

In February, 1912, soon after the Clark Presidential boom began to assume serious proportions, the Speaker said to me: "I am against all trusts. There can't be any good restraint of trade. I don't agree with the Supreme Court on that point. I believe the Sherman law if honestly and courageously enforced would break up all the trusts, but if there is any question on that point I would favor amending it. In my opinion it does not need any amendment.

"As chairman of the jurisprudence committee of the Missouri legislature I reported one of the first anti-trust bills. No one has ever found a flaw in it and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines have been collected under it. We may get a million.

"I have devoted more time to the tariff than to any other political question. I debated it as a boy in school. When I first came here in 1893 I thought I knew all about it. Now I feel like Sir Isaac Newton in the presence of the mysteries of the universe-like a boy picking up shells on the seashore. The question ramifies into so many other things that it embodies all human activities and if one is studious he can learn something new about it all the time. As the Government is conducted at present we have to raise a billion dollars a year. Whether that rate of expenditure will ever be reduced I do not try to say. I have been wrestling with that question.

"We have only two great sources of revenue the tariff and the internal revenue tax. There used to be a great revenue from the land office but it is about gone now. We have to raise from $325,000,000 to $350,000,000 a year from the tariff. Perhaps if the income tax amendment, which I favor, is adopted we can reduce the tariff considerably. My idea of tariff reform is to levy the highest taxes on luxuries that they will bear and not invite smuggling in large quantities, and the lowest tariff or none at all on necessaries. The whole thing needs overhauling from top to bottom and readjusting to cut out the monstrosities and ex

[graphic]

tortions in the Payne Bill and raise the maximum revenue while at the same time taking the minimum of money from the pockets of the people. It is estimated that under the Payne bill every time one dollar goes into the Treasury four or five dollars go into the pockets of the tariff barons. I would make some exceptions to levying the highest tariff on luxuries. Some things are so valuable in small bulk that if the tariff is very high the Government would be defrauded by smugglers. Diamonds are a fine illustration of this. I would have two rates on diamonds, one, the higher on the finished product and a low tax on uncut stones, so as to encourage the development of the diamond cutting industry in America.

"I can take the Payne bill and rearrange the rates so as to get $500,000,000 instead of $325,000,000 revenue and at the same time cheapen the finished products to the people. This can be done in clothing, furniture, machinery, and many food products. A splendid example is in the case of blankets nine feet long, worth not more than forty cents per pound, on which the present rate is 33 cents a pound and 50 per cent. ad valorem. This amounts to a tax of 182 per cent. on an article of prime necessity. Do you know how many of these blankets were imported into the United States in the last fiscal year? A total value of $40.20 on which the tariff amounted to $60.53. From the tariff on one kind of sheepskin glovesthe sort the women call kid gloves - the Government got a total revenue from importations in one year of $2.40."

defined his notion of tariff reform a little more closely by saying that he was in favor of duties that would produce the largest revenue and give a fair degree of protection. "What about the so-called Progressive issues, Mr. Speaker?" I inquired.

"Well, take the initiative and referendum. We have it out in Missouri. I voted for it. It is a state issue.

"I introduced the Australian ballot bill in the legislature against the opposition of the politicians. I was really the author of the parole bill. I was the cause more than any one man living or dead of the primary law being adopted in Missouri.

[graphic]

The discussion of the tariff was interrupted at this point by a newspaper man who wanted the Speaker to contribute to a "symposium" on Thomas Jefferson. The Speaker obliged with several interesting facts about Mr. Jefferson, such as that he was the only red-headed President, that he was the first to import Merino sheep, that he started the Agricultural Department, and that when Minister to France he succeeded in obtaining some of the precious seeds of the Italian rice, which he sent to America, where they became the progenitors of all the great THE FARMER HAT rice plantations of the South. Then he

Copyright by Harris & Ewing

TWO OF MR. CLARK'S TRADEMARKS

AND THE BARN-DOOR FLAP" TROUSERS POCKET

[blocks in formation]

The first Congressional primary ever held in the state was the one at which I was nominated; and afterward primaries were adopted by law.

"I believe in Senatorial primaries we have them in Missouri. I think Senators ought to be elected by the people. I favor any reform in the ballot law that really makes for a free ballot and a fair count and brings elections close to the body of the people. I endorse the principle of the corrupt practices act. It has done a great deal of good in Missouri."

"You wish to be classed as a Progressive, then?" I asked.

"Yes, I class myself as a Progressive. It's in the air-everything is Progressive these days."

"Do you anticipate a realignment of the people into new political parties, Progressive and Conservative?"

"Yes, I think we are coming to that." "About the recall?"

"I should rather not state my position on that just yet."

Just then a bell rang in the Speaker's

room.

it, they're in trouble in there and I've got to go and fix it up," he re

1

marked, with unconscious profanity, as he strode over toward the House.

A human, likeable old gentleman, this member from Missouri-pleasant to talk with or to listen to, popular, magnetic, devoted to his books and his home and his family. His comfortable old white house at Bowling Green is as crowded with books as a public library. An interesting personality, that of Champ Clark - and if he has any conception of the vital, burning questions the American people are asking, any grasp on the issues and problems on which the voters of the nation are sharply divided as never before since the dark days before the Civil War, any comprehension of the great readjustments that are going on across party lines as the Progressives and Conservatives are reclassifying themselves, one finds no evidence of it in his conversation or recorded speeches except as some minor symptom of the great unrest has been felt in Pike County. He does not burn with indignation at the encroachments of the special interests on the people's rights, as Woodrow Wilson does; he does not stand firm against all new departures from the traditions of the past, as Judson Harmon does. He is a compromise candidate.

[graphic]
[graphic][merged small]
[graphic][merged small]
[ocr errors]

THE TINY "DETECTIVE'S EAR THAT BROKE DOWN THE MCNAMARA DEFENSE

O

AND THAT HAS CONVICTED OTHER CRIMINALS

BY

FRENCH STROTHER

NE day in May, 1911, during the session of the Ohio state legislature, two men stood in a room in the Hotel Chittenden, at Columbus. One of these men held a roll of bills in his hand; and he said that he wanted to get senate bill No. 256 out of, committee. The other man was Rodney J. Diegle, sergeantat-arms of the Ohio state senate. He said that he could get four votes for that purpose, at $200 apiece, provided he himself got $100 for the job. The first man counted out $100. Diegle started to take it. Then he walked to the door of the closet and opened it and looked carefully within. Then he got down on his hands and knees and looked under the sofa. Then he walked back and took the money. And in June - two months later

Diegle was sentenced to three years

in the penitentiary. He had made the fatal mistake of being six weeks behind the times: he had looked for a man under the sofa - he should have looked for a dictograph. For a dictograph hung under the sofa, and a stenographer sat in the next room with a receiver at his ear and scribbled down the words that sent Diegle "across." And the Supreme Court of Ohio, in February of this year, sustained the admissibility of the evidence obtained. by the dictograph.

The dictograph broke down the McNamara defense in the Los Angeles Times dynamiting case; from November, 1911, to February 15, 1912, the dictograph got the evidence in the headquarters of the International Iron-workers' Union that led to the arrest of President Ryan and of forty-four other union leaders throughout the United States; in October, 1911, the

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][merged small]

dictograph procured the conviction of Mayor Thomas E. Knotts, of Gary, Ind., on a charge of receiving a bribe of $5,000. What is this mysterious dictograph? It is a tiny sound magnifier and transmitter. Sounds are gathered by it and are multiplied many times in intensity, by the peculiar construction of the vibrating disc that receives the shock of the sound-waves. These vibrations are transmitted over wires to a receiving ear-piece on the same principle as by ordinary telephone. The novelty of the The novelty of the dictograph is in the extreme sensitiveness of its sound gathering and sound transmitting device a device the technical construction of which its inventor declines to explain.

The transmitter of the dictograph is enclosed in a round, flat, black, vulcanized rubber case, three inches in diameter and three quarters of an inch thick. The other parts of the apparatus are an earpiece two inches in diameter, and a dry battery cell about two inches wide, three inches long, and three quarters of an inch thick. The entire apparatus can be held in one hand, and altogether weighs a little less than one pound.

The dictograph is efficient. In the laboratory at Jamaica, Long Island, in which it was perfected, I stood by the side of Mr. K. M. Turner, the man who invented it. At his direction I took up an ear-piece from a work bench while he turned a switch. Then Mr. Turner, speaking merely into the air as if he were talking to another man in the same room, said, in an ordinary conversational tone:

"Mr. Haff, there is a gentleman on the line here in the laboratory who wishes to have you demonstrate the detective dictograph. Will you please talk to him and show him how it can be heard through various materials?"

At once I heard a perfectly distinct voice answer:

"Certainly, Mr. Turner. I am now talking in an open room, with no obstruction between me and the transmitter, though I am standing about four feet from it.

Now I shall turn a switch and talk to you through another transmitter that is enclosed tightly in a wooden box." Here the voice began to sound more remote but exactly as distinct as before, as it continued: "I shall now switch to still another transmitter that is imbedded in a solid block of cement," and now the voice seemed very far away, but still perfectly audible and distinct. I asked the voice several questions and received its answers. Then Mr. Turner led me out of the building in which the laboratory is, across a yard to another building, and there introduced me to Mr. Haff, who at once continued the conversation that we had just broken off and showed me the wooden box and the concrete block containing the several transmitters.

The detective dictograph is an outgrowth of the commercial dictograph,

« PreviousContinue »