WRITERS AND SUBJECTS IN THE MAY FORUM.

MICHAEL D. HARTER (The Blight of Our Commerce), born at Canton, O., in 1846, is a resident of Mansfield, O., and a Democratic member of Congress. Mr. Harter has had long experience as a private banker and manufacturer. He is a vigorous opponent of the free coinage of silver, and it was largely to his efforts that the defeat of the Bland bill was due.

SENATOR WILLIAM FREEMAN VILAS (The Threat of the Present Coinage Law) was born in Chelsea, Vt., July 9, 1840, whence his parents removed to Wisconsin while he was a child. He was graduated at the State University of Wisconsin in 1858, and at the Albany Law School in 1860. He was a member of the Legislature in 1884, and chairman of the Democratic National Convention in the same year. During President Cleveland's administration, he was successively Postmaster-General and Secretary of the Interior. By the last Legislature he was elected United States senator.

JAMES C. HEMPHILL (The Loss of Southern Statesmanship) was born in South Carolina, and graduated from Erskine College in 1870. He entered journalism as the editor of the "Abbeville Medium," in 1871, then one of the leading weeklies in South Carolina. In 1880 he joined the local staff of the Charleston "News and Courier," of which he became in 1889 the editor and manager.

S. C. T. DODD (Ten Years of the Standard Oil Trust), born in Franklin, Pa., in 1836, was graduated at Jefferson College, Pa., and practised law in his native city until 1881, when he moved to New York City and took charge of the legal business of the various corporations which were afterwards united in the Standard Oil Trust. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania in 1873, and took a leading part in framing the provisions relating to corporations. He has written various articles in favor of freedom of association.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT (The True Purpose of the Higher Education), born in Norwich, Conn., in 1828, after graduating from Yale, in 1849, studied theology for three years and then taught there until 1855, when he studied for two years at Bonn and Berlin. In 1858 he became professor of sacred literature and New Testament Greek in Yale Theological Seminary. In 1886 he was made president of Yale.

ULYSSES D. EDDY (My Business Partner, the Government), born in 1843, is president of the Coombs, Crosby and Eddy Co., of New York, which has an export trade with all the foreign countries with which we deal. He has travelled considerably, and his large practical experience has made him an authority on commercial affairs.

E. L. GODKIN (Idleness and Immorality), born in Ireland in 1831, was graduated at Queen's College, Belfast, in 1851. He came to the United States in 1856, studied law in New York, and was admitted to the bar in 1859, but practised only a short period. He established and edited "The Nation" in 1865, and when in 1881 this publication was made the weekly edition of "The Evening Post," he assumed an editorial and proprietary interest in both papers.

D. R. WILKIE (Advantages of the Canadian Bank System) was born in Quebec in 1846 and educated at the Quebec High-School and at Marvin College. He entered the service of the Quebec Bank in 1862, and assumed the cashiership of the Imperial Bank of Canada at its organization in 1875 and still holds that position. He has been vice-president of the Toronto Board of Trade and was chairman of the bankers' section of that board in 1889-90, when the "Bank Act" was being prepared.

BISHOP HENRY C. POTTER (The Significance of the American Cathedral), born in Schenectady, N. Y., in 1835, was educated at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of Virginia. He was successively rector of churches at Greensburg, Pa., and Troy, N. Y., assistant rector at Trinity Church, Boston, and rector of Grace Church, New York. In 1883 he became assistant to his uncle, the late Bishop Horatio Potter, whom he succeeded as Bishop of New York.

EDWARD ATKINSON (Incalculable Room for Immigrants), was born in Brookline, Mass., in 1827. He is president of the Boston Manufacturers' Mutual Fire Insurance Company, which wrought a revolution in the construction and security of manufacturing buildings, and he is the inventor of the "Aladdin Oven." His numerous works include: "The Collection of Revenue," The Railroads of the United States," The Railway and the Farmer," and "The Distribution of Profits."

EDWARD P. NORTH (Ocean Traffic by the Erie Canal) was born in Hartford, Conn., in 1835. In 1852 he joined an engineering party in Illinois and during 1854-56 studied engineering under Prof. William M. Gillespie at Union College. Since then he has been employed chiefly on works of public utility. He was elected a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1867. CARROLL D. WRIGHT (Does the Factory Increase Immorality?), born in Dunbarton, N. H., in 1840, was educated in New Hampshire and Vermont, and was admitted to the bar in 1865. He moved to Massachusetts, where he served in the State senate in 1871-72. He was chief of the State Bureau of Statistics of Labor in 1873-88, appointed supervisor of the United States Census in Massachusetts in 1880, and in 1885 first commissioner of the Bureau of Labor in the Interior Department in Washington, and he has held many other public offices. He is an authority as a statistician and economist.

ANTON SEIDL (The Development of Music in America), born in Pesth in 1850, received his musical education at the Leipzig Conservatorium. In 1872 he was employed at Bayreuth by Wagner to make the first copy of the score of the Niebelungen tetralogy, and he also assisted at the festival there in 1876. In 1879 Wagner's recommendation secured for him the post of conductor of the Leipzig Opera House, which he held until 1882, when he travelled extensively. In 1883 he became conductor at the Bremen Opera-House, and in 1885 conductor of the Metropolitan Opera-House, where he remained until the past season. He is at present the conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York.

LUCY MAYNARD SALMON (The Woman's Exchange-Charity or Business?), born in Fulton, N. Y., was graduated at the University of Michigan in 1876, and was a graduate student in history there in 1882-83. She has been since 1887 associate professor and professor of history at Vassar College. She is the author of a "History of the Appointing Power of the President," and is a contributor to historical and educational periodicals.

"Communism is a hateful thing and a menace to peace and organized government. But the communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions, is not less dangerous than the communism of oppressed poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the citadel of rule.

"He mocks the people who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich, and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. Any intermediary between the people and their government, or the least delegation of the care and protection the Government owes to the humblest citizen of the land, makes he boast of free institutions a glittering delusion and the pretended oon of American citizenship a shameless imposition."

AMONG his many words of wisdom to his countrymen, none are more wise or appropriate for consideration at the present hour than the extract from the message of President Cleveland of December 3, 1888, which precedes this article. Reading it by the light of events that have followed since the words were written, how impressively true are they, and fully attested by the history of the Fifty-first Congress and the action of the present Executive. In the election of 1888 the people of the United States were indeed caught napping, but were speedily aroused from their somnolent indifference by the unhesitating and insolent action of the representatives of triumphant plutocracy and of the "communism of combined wealth and capital," who flocked to the seat of the National Government to arrange for a division of the spoils of conquest and to rivet more securely the fetters of their control.

In the national treasury, on March 5, 1889, was found a great sur

Copyright, 1891, by the Forum Publishing Company.

plus, the result of combined integrity in collection and custody, economic administration, and a superabundant revenue derived from excessive taxation, from the latter of which relief by the repeal or amendment of tax laws had been rendered impossible by the presence of an adverse Republican majority in the Senate. So vast and rapid was the accumulation in the four years of Democratic administration that congestion of the Treasury and consequent depletion of the money market became a cause of grave solicitude. All this, however, was soon relieved by the presence of a Congress, Republican in both branches and with an Executive in complete and ready accord, which in two years exhibited a willingness and an unprecedented capacity to scatter the substance of the people, gathered by ruthless taxation in its most unjust and unequal forins. History will remember it as the "Billion-Dollar Congress," and will remember that the money was thus lavished and spent broadcast to prove that existing taxes were not only necessary, but should be increased and not diminished, and that prodigality and lavish outlay could be relied upon to re-distribute into favorite hands any supply, however great, that industry, enterprise, and invention, with backs bending under their legal burden, could painfully pour into the public treasury. Such wild and wanton expenditures entail evils so patent and dangerous as alone to cause the withdrawal of public power from the hands of a party capable of such

abuse.

But the action of the Executive and the Fifty-first Congress had unveiled to the American people other dangers compared with which extravagant disbursements were but temporary and almost trivial. The policy avowed in presidential recommendations, in congressional measures carefully formulated and enacted into law by a solid party vote, by the congressional debates and extra congressional deliverances of the Republican leaders, demonstrated the existence of an organized plan for the permanent association of the Government with the private and personal interests of favored classes of its citizens in the exercise of the sovereign power of taxation with no limitation but their own discretion, and is now presented as the platform and basis for the perpetuation of their political power throughout the national Union. Mr. Cleveland's words have been thoroughly justified in his description of a "communism of combined wealth and capital, the outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfishness, which insidiously undermines the justice and integrity of free institutions."

The McKinley tariff bill was, in the language of the gentleman

whose name it bears, "assuredly protective." Instead of relief from unnecessary burdens or reformation of unjust methods, it was an intensification of these public wrongs; it was a scheme of taxation drafted and arranged under the immediate supervision of the agents of associated interests who themselves apportioned their respective levies and assessments upon the substance of their fellow-countrymen. Congress, in fact, renouncing its duty of popular representation, became the mere registrar of these selfish decrees. Each member of this combination attended merely to its own separate object, and, that having been attained, gave but little heed to what might accompany it. In such a system of legislation it is plain that disinterested statesmanship has but little part, and that the organization of political parties and their control will necessarily be left to expert bargainers whose character and faculties fit them for such tasks, and necessarily render them incapable of appreciating or preserving the essential equities of a carefully arranged constitutional system.

The unconscious and incontrovertible proof of what has thus insidiously become the actual law-making power of the people of the United States is amply supplied by the published reports of the various associated interests under whose direction and dictation and to whose entire satisfaction the schedules of the McKinley tariff were arranged. This statement finds abundant corroboration in the reports of the "National Wool Growers' Association" with its State branches, and the "National Association of Wool Manufacturers" and its kindred "Association of Wholesale Clothiers." The metal schedule was declared "completely protective" by the "American Iron and Steel Association," the "American Tin-Plate Makers," and the manufacturers of fire-arms and cutlery. The makers of American sugar now receive a bounty in cash, and the Treasury receives no taxes upon that article of commerce.

The creation of new industries is justified and avowed as a public policy, although it plainly consists in supporting one set of unskilled, inexperienced workmen at the cost of all other taxpayers of the country, with the supply of a dearer and inferior article as a consequence, and the occupations thus created at public cost are avowedly to enable the favored individuals to continue in business for their own personal profit. It is obvious that every tax thus levied in response to the demand for a protection of an existing industry or the creation of a new industry is an excluding tax upon some foreign commodity, and that every commodity in the degree that it is so excluded destroys or contracts to that extent the market for American exports,