news of this atrocity reached the outside world slowly: when it came, the Jews of western Europe, and especially those of the United States, cried out in horror, held meetings, drew up protests, and framed petitions, asking the Czar to punish the criminals. Leading American Jews besought Roosevelt to plead their cause before the Czar. As it was well known that the Czar would refuse to receive such petitions, and would regard himself as insulted by whatever nation should lay them before him by official diplomatic means, the world wondered what Roosevelt would do. He took one of his short cuts, and chose a way which everybody saw was most obvious and most simple, as soon as he had chosen it. He sent the petitions to our Ambassador at Petrograd, accompanying them with a letter which recited the atrocities and grievances. In this letter, which was handed to the Russian Secretary of State, our Government asked whether His Majesty the Czar would condescend to receive the petitions. Of course the reply was no, but the letter was published in all countries, so that the Czar also knew of the petitions, and of the horrors which called them out. In this fashion the former Ranchman and Rough Rider outwitted, by what I may call his straightforward guile, the crafty diplomats of the Romanoffs.

IN

CHAPTER XV

ROOSEVELT AND CONGRESS

Na previous chapter I glanced at three or four of the principal measures in internal policy which Roosevelt took up and fought through, until he finally saw them passed by Congress. No other President, as has been often remarked, kept Congress so busy; and, we may add, none of his predecessors (unless it were Lincoln with the legislation required by the Civil War) put so many new laws on the national statute book. Mr. Charles G. Washburn enumerates these acts credited to Roosevelt's seven and a half years' administration: "The Elkins Anti-Rebate Law applying to railroads; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor and the Bureau of Corporations; the law authorizing the building of the Panama Canal; the Hepburn Bill amending and vitalizing the Interstate Commerce Act; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection laws; the law creating the Bureau of Immigration; the Employers' Liability and Safety Appliance Laws, that limited the working hours of employees; the law making the Government liable for injuries to its employees; the law forbidding child labor in the District of Columbia; the reforma

tion of the Consular Service; prohibition of campaign contributions from corporations; the Emergency Currency Law, which also provided for the creation of the Monetary Commission.

Although the list is by no means complete, it shows that Roosevelt's receptive and sleepless mind fastened on the full circle of questions which interested American life, so far as that is controlled or directed by national legislation. Some of the laws passed were simply readjustments — new statutes on old matters. Other laws were new, embodying the first attempt to define the attitude which the courts should hold towards new questions which had grown suddenly into great importance. The decade which had favored the springing-up and amazing expansion of the Big Interests, had to be followed by the decade which framed legislation for regulating and curbing these interests. Quite naturally, the monopolists affected did not like to be harnessed or controlled, and, to put it mildly, they resented the interference of the formidable young President whom they could neither frighten, inveigle, nor cajole.

And yet it is as evident to all Americans now, as it was to some Americans at the time, that that legislation had to be passed; because if the monopolists had been allowed to go on unrestrained, they would

1 C. G. Washburn, 128, 129.

either have perverted this Republic into an open Plutocracy, in which individual liberty and equality before the law would have disappeared, or they would have hurried on the Social Revolution, the Armageddon of Labor and Capital, the merciless conflict of class with class, which many persons already vaguely dreaded, or thought they saw looming like an ominous cloud on the horizon. It seems astounding that any one should have questioned the necessity of setting up regulations. And will not posterity wonder, when it learns that only in the first decade of the twentieth century did we provide laws against the cruel and killing labor of little children, and against impure foods and drugs?

Year after year, the railroads furnished unending causes for legislative control. There were the old laws which the railroad men tried to evade and which the President, as was his duty, insisted on enforcing; and still more insistent and spectacular were the new problems. Just as three or four hundred years ago the most active and vigorous Frenchmen and Englishmen tried to get possession of large tracts of land, or even of provinces, and became counts and dukes, so the Americans of our generation, who aspired to lead the pushing financier class, worked day and night to own a railroad. Naturally one railroad did not satisfy a man who was bitten by this ambition;

he reached out for several, or even for a transcontinental system. The war for railroad ownership or monopoly was waged intensely, and in 1901 it nearly plunged the country into a disastrous financial panic. Edward H. Harriman, who had only recently been regarded as a great power in the struggle for railroad supremacy, clashed with James J. Hill, of Minnesota, and J. P. Morgan, a New York banker, over the Northern Pacific Railroad. Their battle was nominally a draw, because Wall Street rushed in and, to avert a nation-wide calamity, demanded a truce. But Harriman remained, until his death in 1909, the railroad czar of the United States, and when he died, he was master of twenty-five thousand miles of road, chief influencer of fifty thousand more miles, besides steamboat companies, banks, and other financial institutions. He controlled more money than any other American. I summarize these statistics, in order to show the reader what sort of a Colossus the President of the United States had to do battle with when he undertook to secure new laws adequate to the control of the enormously expanded railway problems. And he did succeed, in large measure, in bringing the giant corporations to recognize the authority of the Nation. The decision of the Supreme Court in the Northern Securities case, by which the merger of two or more competing roads was declared illegal, put a