VOL. XIX.

No. 4.

Peace and a

The passage of the great appropria Quiet Life for tion bills and the acceptance of a Uncle Sam. compromise in lieu of the pending army reorganization bill obviated the necessity of a special session of Congress. Unless something very unusual should occur, the law-making chambers at Washington will be closed until next December. Affairs at home will go on as usual, with a very excellent outlook for a continuance of agricultural and commercial prosperity. President McKinley remarked to a visitor the other day that the United States was never before in its history on terms of such cordiality with all nations as to-day. It is an extremely unpleasant situation in the Philippines; but there is nothing in it to prevent the American

A SPLENDID RECORD.

Surely the Fifty-fifth Congress will never be charged with having gone to sleep.-From the Tribune (Minneapolis).

A HistoryMaking Congress.

However one may regret the failure of this favorite measure or that in the closing days of the session at Washington, it is fair to say that the Fifty-fifth Congress made a very notable and, in the main, a very creditable record. It was this Congress that history will hold responsible for the precipitation of the war with Spain; and that war will stand in the permanent record as redounding to the honor of America. It was an extra session of this Congress, convened within a fortnight after President McKinley took the oath of office, that enacted the Dingley tariff bill. Later it became necessary to enact a war revenue measure in view of extraor dinary expenditures. The enlargement of the regular army and the creation of a volunteer force, the annexation of territory, and many other matters of moment devolved upon the Fifty-fifth Congress. As compared with the parliamentary bodies of other leading nations, the character of our last Congress must stand very high indeed. The House of Representatives has been strongly dominated by the will of its Speaker, Mr. Reed. At some times his masterful methods are grievous to bear; but in the long run they seem to work for efficiency and good results. Mr. Reed could not hold the position of enormous power that has been assigned to him if it were not generally believed that he exercises power with fairness and with good conscience. It is not at all likely that there will be any appreciable opposition to Mr. Reed's choice as Speaker of the Fifty-sixth Con

gress. It would be strange indeed if there were never any differences of opinion among the leading spirits of a great party, and it may be true that policies favored by the President and Cabinet have not always been those that appealed most strongly to the Speaker and his leading chairmen in the House. The late Mr. Dingley, of the Ways and Means Committee, was supposed to be in close accord with Mr. Reed; and Mr. Dingley's successor, Mr. Payne, of New York, is presumably in cordial agreement with the Speaker, who fills the chairmanships. Mr. Cannon, of

Illinois, the active and courageous chairman of the Appropriations Committee, is also accounted. as an exponent of the programmes that are arranged under Mr. Reed's leadership. But it would be a great mistake to magnify rumored differences between Mr. Reed and his friends and the White House policy. The public has not been treated to any unpleasant exhibition of disagreement, and the Republican party as a whole has shown a surprising ability to avoid serious differences and to work harmoniously since the election of President McKinley.

Parties and Prospects for 1900.

The opinion as expressed privately by Republican leaders is that there will be no systematic opposition next year to the President's renomination. The only element of serious dissatisfaction in the popular judg ment has grown out of the army scandals. The lightening by the President of General Eagan's sentence was disapproved with a unanimity that might well have made the President doubt the wisdom of his clemency. The remarkable unwillingness of the President's commissioners to find anything whatever the matter with the army supplies has also been unfavorable, rather than favorable, to Mr. McKinley. Instead of convincing the public, the report has had the oppo

HOW MR. REED FINDS IT HIS DUTY AT TIMES TO "HOLD UP" UNCLE SAM.-From the Herald (New York).

HON. SERENO E. PAYNE, OF NEW YORK. (Who succeeded Mr. Dingley as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.)

site effect; and it has very possibly aroused suspicions of an entirely groundless nature as to the determination of the Government to keep the truth in the background. The evidence that the army investigating board has been finding as to the shockingly bad quality of much of the beef that was furnished to the soldiers will have made a powerful impression that no explanations can efface. The Democrats will be almost certain to find a good deal of campaign material for next year in this testimony about the way Uncle Sam's army was treated under a Republican administration. The two most conspicuous men in the Democratic party during the past month have been Mr. Croker in the East and Mr. Bryan in the West. Mr. Bryan has been opposed to what is called imperialism," and Mr. Croker has come out in a carefully prepared statement glorifying imperialism to the skies and demanding it in unlimited quantities. Mr. Bryan refuses to yield a hair's breadth of the Chicago platform on the money question, and Mr. Croker is supposed to be in general agreement with the New York bankers on all such questions as money and banking. Mr. Croker had arranged for a Jefferson's birthday dinner on a mammoth scale, and the question of Mr. Bryan's attendance involved all the phases of Democratic doctrine and policy. In the West Mr. Bryan is considered not only the

Status of

as

The Nicaragua Canal bili as a separate Inter-Oceanic measure was evidently doomed Ship Transit. Congress neared the day of adjourn ment. Although it had passed the Senate, it was evidently in a hopeless case at the other end of the Capitol building. Speaker Reed and the programme makers had ordained that the bill should not pass the House. The Senate attached it as a rider" to the river and harbor bill; but the House refused to accept the amendment, and this refusal was maintained when the matter went into conference. Finally, on the very morning of adjournment, it was agreed to give up the bill and to substitute for it a clause

appropriating $1,000,000 for a new investigation of the whole subject of trans-isthmian waterways. The measure as passed does not confine the inquiry to the Nicaragua route, but specifically authorizes an examination into the status of the Panama project, while giving the President full discretion in considering other routes. Large authority is also conferred upon the President to negotiate with the Central American countries for cessions or franchises which would give the United States control of the land upon which to construct the waterway by the direct agency of our Government. While the desirability of a canal is urgent, it has for years been the contention of this magazine that the canal ought preferably to be built, owned, and operated directly and exclusively by the Government of the United States, and that it ought not to be constructed until our Government had purchased or otherwise obtained full territorial and jurisdictional rights over a zone or strip of ground which would enable us to say that we were cutting the canal upon our own soil, as a part of the navigable waters of the United States or as an extension of our shoreline. The canal ought to be as truly under the control of our Government as the proposed ship canal across Florida. If the reward of some delay should be the construction of the canal upon this thoroughly satisfactory basis, the delay would have been amply justified. As to the inclusion of the Panama route for purposes of investigation, the American people ought not to be hoodwinked. The projector of the Panama Canal, M. de Lesseps, was wont to say that if a canal were to be constructed with locks, the Nicaragua route was undoubtedly preferable. The original argument for the Panama route was the advantage to be derived from a passage at tide level. But the impossibility of such a canal was long ago admitted. All prudent public men at Washington, after the hideous Panama revelations in France, will wish to keep their skirts clear.

The Panama Revival.

It was a curious, if not a suspicious, movement which suddenly made so pretentious an appearance in the United States a few months ago in favor of the resuscitation of the once hopelessly discredited Panama project. The effective opposition to the Nicaragua Canal has always come from the transcontinental railroads. Such opposition has, naturally, found indirect methods better than direct ones. Thus the plausible advocates of the Panama Canal have now been put forward, apparently with the one object of raising doubt and preventing action. The country was on the point of proceeding vigor

ously and promptly to dig the Nicaragua Canal. The great voyage of the Oregon around Cape Horn had provided an object-lesson. Nobody

was hearing a word about the defunct Panama enterprise, except as its reminiscences continued to play an ugly part in the scandals of French politics. Suddenly and without warning there began to appear pro-Panama articles in a considerable number of American papers. It was not particularly difficult to trace this simultaneous outburst of interest in Panama to its sources. It had just one definite and immediate purpose, and that was to head off the Nicaragua Canal bill. It did not succeed in influencing the Senate very strongly, but it seems to have had some measure of success in the other house. The Nicaragua bill was killed, and in the substitute clause providing for the reinvestigation of the subject-which the United States has been regularly investigating for about half a century-it was expressly provided that the President should examine the Panama route and project as well as the Nicara guan.

This Panama revival has the aspect of a piece of skillful and ingenious lobbying strategy, with less reference to the actual construction of a canal across the Panama Isthmus than to the maneuvering which is intended to interfere with the thoroughly practicable project of the Nicaragua Canal.

The pretense of the gentlemen who The Canal, the Navy, and dominated the action of the House the Finances. of Representatives in defeating the Nicaragua Canal bill was that they stood as the great champions of economy, and that the United States, on account of the war, was just now

spending too much money to build a canal. This argument will not bear close analysis. The United States would hardly be expected to build the Nicaragua Canal out of current revenues, but by the sale of bonds, which it would probably market at 2 per cent. The annual interest charge on $100,000,000 of bonds would be $2,500,000. There is some reason to believe that the tolls that could be collected from the use of the canal for commercial purposes would pay operating expenses and the interest on the bonds. Further than that, however, it must be remembered that we are now spending in round figures $50,000,000 a year for the maintenance and growth of our navy. The Nicaragua Canal, even if it were boycotted by commerce and used exclusively as a convenience for the United States navy, would be a measure of actual monetary economy. With such a canal built, the Gulf of Mexico would obviously be our great naval rendezvous, and the ability to send vessels quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa through a canal would add so much to the efficiency of our navy that we could accomplish given results with a much smaller relative number of vessels. When one considers that commercial uses would support the canal and that the existence of the passage would save us several million dollars a year in our naval bills, it is plain enough that the plea of economy as the reason for killing the Nicaragua Canal bill is not entitled to serious respect. The argument that the bill itself was objectionable in some of its features and that the Government needs more time to perfect preliminary plans is, of course, an argument of a different sort; and