VOLUME III. AUGUST, 1902. NUMBER 2. ment of EVENTS OF THE MONTH. BY CHARLES H. DENNIS. When the first session of the Adjourn Fifty-Seventh Congress came to Congress. an end July 1 its members very generally congratulated themselves on the vast amount of work which it had performed. The bare statistics of that work are sufficiently formidable. In the house of representatives 15,572 bills and joint resolutions were introduced, and in the senate 6,450. A total of 1,503 bills were sent to the president, of which 596 originated in the house and 547 in the senate. One thousand of the senate measures were passed by that body; the house passed 1.386 of its own bills. It is disquieting to think that so much lawmaking is deemed necessary by the men who go to Washing ton to attend to the legislative affairs of the nation. Indeed, there is comfort in the belief that the congressmen have done many things that were not necessary; for surely they have left many important things undone. Money was appropriated lavishly. Including the expenditure involved in the construction of the isthmian canal, it may be said that this was a billion-dollar session, the total of its appropriations establishing a new record. The great canal, however, is such an exceptional work in all respects that fairness seems to require the elimination of the sums to be spent for it from the list of expenses authorized before judgment is passed upon the congressmen. Mr. Cannon, chairman of the house committee of appropriations, by leaving out the isthmian canal appropriation and the large sums required to carry out contracts on public buildings and river and harbor work already under construction, estimates that the recent session authorized the expenditure of $750,063,837. Taking into consideration the extreme solicitude of Mr. Cannon during the closing weeks of congress to keep down expenses, it is fair to conclude that the figures quoted are quite as low as an able partisan conscientiously can make them. Not only in appropriations for river and harbor improvements and for the erection of a surprising array of public buildings, but in very many other sorts of expenditures, including further pension legislation, was shown the liberal spirit in which congress disposes of the public funds. Doubtless the people themselves are responsible for this policy of magnificent spending. The average citizen, careful as he is with his own possessions, takes a sort of pride in seeing the public money scattered with a free hand. Misfor That is one of the evils of the tune of treasury surplus. When the Too Much government has more money Wealth. than it needs a spendthrift congress and a complacent public are useful ir getting rid of the embarrassing overplus. They obviate the necessity of reducing the revenue by cutting down taxation. If such usefulness is to be applauded the present is a particularly favorable time to indulge in gratulations over the large activities of Mr. Cannon's hard working committee. At the close of the fiscal year, on June 30, the available cash balance in the national treasury was $208,630.022. The excess of re(Copyright 1902, by the CURRENT ENCYCLOPEDIA COMPANY.) 1604 JOSEPH G. CANNON. ceipts over expenditures for the preceding tection from certain industries that are controlled by oppressive trusts which fix arbitrarily prices to consumers of their products is one of the grievous mistakes of the recent session. President Roosevelt, who earnestly advocates curbing the power of trusts that have a harmful effect on the affairs of the people, has given no intimation in his speeches or public messages that he sympathizes with the view that tariff protection should be withdrawn from corporate offend ers. In view of President McKinley's his- ble that his successor in the presidential of- portant reform. Congress and the president, while guarding sedulously against the forming of an issue for the democrats out of charges of official misconduct in the Philippines, seem to have made a political blunder in failing to guard against the great issue forming nearer home. No Re- Congress made other mistakes at its recent session. Chief of them was the lamentable breakdown in the plan to give relief to Cuba by tariff reductions on its tobacco and sugar. When congress adjourned the senate had taken no action of any sort on the reciprocity bill, the attitude of the eighteen republican senators who opposed tariff reductions of any sort for the young republic being regarded as a sufficient excuse to let the matter go over. It was announced in Washington at the time of the adjournment that the president would call no special session to consider the reciprocity bill but would wait until next winter to secure for Cuba trade concessions by legislation or treaty. This is a very tame ending of the heroics in which the friends of reciprocity indulged at the height of their enthusiasm. Without regard to the actions of the so called republican insurgents, the senate's course gave a painful display of ineptitude on the part of those members who ostensibly were in sympathy with the president's efforts to aid Cuba. That the real needs of the beet sugar industry had anything particular to do with the outcome seems doubtful. It may be questioned whether the eastern sugar trust did not make telling use of its own unpopularity to prevent action by the senate, going to some pains to impress upon the public that it greatly desired low rates on Cuban raw sugar. The disquieting discovery, due to the action of the house in amending the reciprocity bill, that its differential on refined sugar was likely to be taken from it when the tariff was lowered on the Cuban raw product seems to have made the cane sugar trust eager to defeat the measure which up to that time it had favored. Reports of a business alliance between the beet cane sugar refiners were given the color of truth by the disgraceful fiasco at Washington. Kneaded into the complicated mass of intrigue was the effort of certain senators to injure the influence of President Roosevelt by subjecting him to the ignominy sugar and of a conspicuous failure. The defeat of legislation which he had so much at heart and which he advocated in a special message to congress as late as June 13 was expected by the president's republican enemies in the senate to break his spirit and lower his prestige. Attitude of the President. But the president is likely to have his revenge. With characteristic buoyancy and persistence he has continued to plead the cause of Cuba and to demand that justice be done to its business interests. The methods of this young chief executive afford a curious study and are watched by friends and opponents with increasing interest. His stubbornness is of a different sort from that of President Cleveland; whether it is to prove more or less effective than the latter remains to be seen. If the democratic president had failed to Bludgeon the senators of his party into carrying out his wishes in a case of this sort very likely he would have called a special session and driven through a reciprocity bill with ponderous blows. But President Roosevelt is not that kind of a fighter. Besides, he has come into power by a cruel chance and not by the deliberate act of his party; therefore he does not possess the baton of party leadership under conditions that warrant extreme measures in carrying out his policies. Such resiliency as he has shown under defeat, however, must be disquieting to those who have tried to shatter him. Republican state conventions, held in the midst of the hubbub at Washington, very generally have approved the plan to give relief to Cuba and in conspicuous instances have declared for the reelection of the president in 1904, thus materially strengthening his hold on party affairs. True, the republican convention in Michigan, a center of the beet sugar industry and the home of Senator Burrows, one portant industries," but this is an exceptional view of the situation. Minnesota republicans seem to have been rather put to it when they prepared their platform, the senators and some of the congressmen of that state having opposed the reciprocity bill. So they declared in favor of "reciprocity with Cuba urged by President Roosevelt by a plan which shall insure the profitable interchange of commodities, insure to the advantage of both nations, help the Cuban people needing assistance, but the chief benefits of which shall not enrich trusts, monopolies or foreign speculators, or which shall not interrupt our home production." This is truly a heroic attempt to make everybody happy. The president himself has lost no time in proclaiming his future policy toward Cuba. In his Fourth of July address at Pittsburg, after giving reasons why Cuba "must in the larger sense be a part of the political system in international affairs of which this repub PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT'S HOME AT OYSTER BAY, NEW YORK. Where the President and his family are spending the summer. of the principal "insurgents," congratulated the president and congress on having fulfilled "to the letter" the nation's pledges to Cuba and commended the state's representatives in Washington for their "zealous and able work in behalf of Michigan's im lic stands as the head," he continued: "She has assented to that view and in return this nation is bound to give her special economic privileges not given to other nations. gret that a measure of reciprocity with Cuba is not already embodied in statute or in treaty, but it will be just as sure as fate." Doubtless the president will win in the end, but the delay is a bitter injustice to Cuba and a humiliation to the president which the public ought to public ought to resent. Incidentally, it should be remembered that the democratic senators probably would have voted for the house bill if they had been given an opportunity to do so. |