people spoke with no uncertain voice. Instantly and from every corner of the country, arose an all but universal protest. The popular indignation was confined to no party and no section of the country; for the moment all Americans were Democrats and spoke with one voice in protest against an obvious outrage upon popular government.

But the people spoke in vain. Influences which were powerful enough to force the President of the United States into so odious a position, and which could compel representatives in Congress shamelessly to abandon their avowed principles, proved to be more powerful than the expressed will of the people. The voice of the President was eventually added to the voice of those interests which demanded that the Constitution be overthrown and a tariff levied upon the Porto Rican trade. With his back to a justly incensed people, Mr. McKinley became the willing advocate of the trust demands. As such he employed all the power of his great office to cajole or coerce congressmen into sharing his own interests. "I voted for the Porto Rican tariff bill," wrote an Indiana congressman to his Republican constituents, "at the earnest solicitation of President McKinley and the leaders of the Republican party." Such was the experience of scores of honest representatives of the people; whose honesty, however, was no match to the imperious demands of a compact and ruthless money power.

Such a spectacle was never seen before in a free republic. But for the hope of a restoration to the people of the sovereignty thus openly wrested from their hands, it might be said that popular liberty in the United States then and there received its death blow.

The imperialistic purpose of the administration in pushing through the Porto Rican tariff bill was made only the more manifest in a "rider" added to that measure by the express official request of the President himself. In a special message to Congress on March 2, the President advocated the novel theory that a great political wrong can be righted by the substitution of charity for justice. He accordingly recommended that the two million dollars, up to that time collected on products coming from Porto Rico to the ports of the United States under the Dingley law, be created into a fund for the temporary relief of the islanders. A bill to this effect was rushed through and the Porto Ricans were further outraged by being made the recipients of charity from the hands which had shamelessly deprived them of their lawful rights.

But here again the chief sufferers from these unconstitutional acts

were not the faraway islanders upon whom they were perpetrated, but the people of the United States. Any act of injustice is reflected with greater force upon the person or the people by whom it is committed. As in the case of the Philippine islands, it was here evident that the purpose of the President as inspired by his new "guide, philosopher and friend," the money power, was really to release Congress from Constitutional limitations and to create in his own person a power higher than the Constitution, higher than any law. It would appear that this purpose was even present in the President's mind when he dictated that significant clause in the treaty at Paris which provides:

"That the civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by Congress."

Previous to this remarkable pronouncement, the status of treaty law had been supposed to rest upon Article 6, clause 2 of the Constitution of the United States, which declares that all treaties made under the authority of the United States shall be, together with the Constitution and the laws enacted in pursuance of it, the supreme law of the land.

But upon that clause in the Paris treaty a complacent committee of the United States Senate, working wholly, as it would appear, to carry out the purpose and instructions of the same interests that inspired the President, based the novel contention that the natives of Porto Rico had no civil or political rights which any American Congress may not override at will; that these unfortunates are wholly beyond the protection of the Constitution.

The newspaper organs of the President took up the fight in behalf of their (and his) chiefs, and presently the land resounded with noisy denials of all the maxims of government which had hitherto been accepted as fundamentally true. The people read with fresh astonishment impudent denials that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. "The Constitution does not follow the flag," these noisy advocates declared. It is within the power of Congress to levy taxes upon the Porto Ricans, although the Porto Ricans have no representation in the Congress. Such doctrine was brazenly avowed by the official successors of the men who had taken up arms against King George's army because they were taxed in a British Parliament in which they were denied representation.

It is not partisan zeal which speaks in these terms of this shameful

episode in our history. The Democracy appeals from the orgy of lawlessness lately perpetrated at Washington to these words of Chief Justice Marshall, uttered in the case of Loughborough v. Blake (15 Wheaton, 319), referring to the very question involved in the Porto Rican tariff bill:

"The power to lay and collect tax duties, imposts and excises may be exercised and must be exercised throughout the United States. Does this term designate the whole or any particular portion of the American empire? Certainly this question can admit of but one answer. It is the name given to our great republic. It is composed of States and Territories; the District of Columbia, or the territory west of the Missouri is not less within the United States than Maryland or Pennsylvania, and it is not less necessary on the principles of our Constitution that uniformity in the imposition of imposts, duties and excises shall be observed in the one than in the other."

Only this last step in the course of imperialism was needed to awaken the American people to a sense of the danger with which their rights are confronted. The Democratic party from the beginning has pointed out that this war has been waged in pursuance of the policy of imperialism. Its political opponents had not hitherto fully recognized the truth of this contention. They had seen martial law prevailing under the American flag in the Philippines, but have regarded that condition as a temporary and necessary step to the establishment of a civil government in those islands. Many patriotic Americans have honestly believed that neither the Filipinos nor the Porto Ricans could be trusted immediately with a full measure of self-government, but few if any, have doubted until now that that blessing was soon to be accorded to these islanders under the terms of our agreement with them and in accordance with the spirit of the American Constitution.

Such dreams have been dispelled rudely by the Porto Rico tariff bill. The imperialistic character of that measure is not to be mistaken. It distinctly denies that the Constitutional guarantee of equal rights as to taxation. It makes the Congress superior to the Constitution and the President superior to the Congress. As to who and what interests are superior to the President, it leaves a wide field for inference. In a word, it definitely commits the Republican party by specific legislation to the policy of imperialism which the Democrats have charged against it from the beginning.

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The revolt which has followed within the ranks of the Republican party, bodes no good for the permanence of that organization in the supreme power, but it promises nothing but good for the people, smarting under a sense of rights invaded and liberties outraged, for it means the speedy restoration to the Democracy of the power delegated to false servants.

The real purpose of the money power in creating this new empire with the President at its head and fastening an increased standing army upon the people to enforce its rule, has been manifested with startling emphasis in the recent struggle between organized labor and the plutocracy in the Coeur d'Alenes. The sequel to that unhappy conflict is still in progress, though the fact may be scarcely known, or if known almost forgotten, by the majority of the people. It has been a part of the policy of capitalism which precipitated the conflict to keep the voters in ignorance of the real facts. From April, 1899, when the first outbreak occurred, until the present day, an inspired press has belittled the affair, concealing or perverting all occurrences that could throw light upon the lawlessness of the capitalistic anarchists who own the mines, but dwelling with unconcealed delight upon the outbreaks of exasperated labor. Of the Press Associations the largest has been practically silent concerning an affair which in some important respects is the most vital that has occurred in America since the Civil War. Only one large newspaper sent a correspondent to the scene. There has seemed to be an almost universal conspiracy to suppress the truth. What is here written is the result of a personal visit by the writer to the district and a careful investigation of the facts, conducted with some difficulty in the face of obstacles imposed by the mine owners, but with no other desire than to learn the truth.

There is no disposition on the part of the Democracy to excuse the crime with which the Coeur d'Alene incident began. This was committed on April 29, 1899, when a body of 150 union miners at Burke, Idaho, seized a freight train and, joined by other miners at Mace, Gem and other points, proceeded to Wardner and blew up with dynamite the concentrator belonging to the consolidated Bunker Hill and Sullivan mine. The shooting of James Cheyne, which occurred during this riotous performance, is no more to be excused than the murder of any man. It was a disgraceful crime, committed in the name of organized labor, and dearly has organized labor paid for it,

Neither is this crime to be extenuated on account of the warrantable exasperation of the union miners at the time when it was committed. The Bunker Hill and Sullivan mine was at this time the only one in the district not employing union labor. It was a Standard Oil property, and its scale of wages was considerably less than that prevailing in the other mines. Pursuant to an agreement with its employes, these wages were finally raised to the union scale, but the mine owners made this increase the occasion for a fresh and unwarrantable attack upon the unions, and this conduct upon their part was the beginning of a quarrel which culminated eventually in the disgraceful scenes of April 29.

But neither the murder of Cheyne nor any other offense against the criminal law, can compare for atrocity, much less for the menace implied against public order and the supremacy of the law, with the manifold offenses since committed by the civil authorities of Idaho, abetted by the administration at Washington, backed up by the army of the United States and inspired throughout by the arrogant monopolists owning the mine. The Democracy has no apology for crime in any form, whether manslaughter or murder, or the overthrow of personal liberty and constitutional order by men in high positions and of great wealth. If one offense be more serious than the other, it is the latter, whose consequences are not to be measured by their immediate and personal influence, but extend throughout our whole system of government with effects which are felt for all time by all the people.

The story of the riot of militarism serving the ends of plutocracy, which ensued upon the events described, may be briefly told here, to many readers perhaps for the first time. On April 30 following the explosion, the rioters, having then dispersed, and the district being quiet, telegrams began to pour into Washington, asking, demanding of the President and the secretary of war and other officials that a military force be dispatched to the Coeur d'Alenes. The first of these messages came from D. O. Mills, an officer of the Standard Oil Company, resident in New York city. Others were sent by William S. Crocker, a San Francisco banker, and by various Chicago capitalists and mine owners. One was a personal appeal by wire to the President's secretary, asking him on the score of personal friendship to use his influence to have the army sent at once. None of these gentlemen was on the scene of the disorder he so eloquently described, or could possibly have had personal knowledge of the state of affairs which in his judgment called for instant interference by the mili

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