ATLANT

MONTHLY

It is easy to overestimate the historical importance of our contemporary politics, although it is far from being the worst fault that we should treat them too seriously. Questions that are discussed with a vast deal—I will not say of passion, for there is little genuine passion in our current politics but with a vast deal of noise, are somehow quickly displaced by other questions no more important nor more closely related to the real life of the nation, and permanently disappear. We have witnessed in the last decade the sudden rise of statesmen, almost purely the creatures of executive favor, who have in a moment blazed from the horizon to the zenith, whose greatness has been established by executive proclamations and solemnly ratified by university degrees conferred with academic eloquence, and we are already asking ourselves what they really said or did that history will trouble itself to recall. Its verdicts we may be sure will not be greatly influenced by the extravagance of contemporary censure or contemporary praise. Whether or not a President really said not long ago, as reported, "In Mr. I have a great Secretary of State, in Mr. a great Attorney-General”—and so on throughout nearly the whole Cabinet list and then, "in Mr. I have the greatest war minister that has appeared on either side of the ocean in our time," there are plenty of contemporary utterances to prove amply that now, not in the troubled times that try men's souls, but in the fat era of a gross material prosperity, the real golden age of statesmen has at last dawned.

VOL. 98 NO. 5

All this leads to caution in expressing emphatic opinions concerning contemporary politics, although the extreme of censure is more often met with than that of praise in dealing with Congress, except when it suits the whim of the moment to treat that department of the government as the mere organ of the executive. It is somewhat the fashion to rank the present Congress, in the importance of its work, with the congresses immediately following the Civil War. I think this opinion may safely be treated as an exaggerated one; and that it has done nothing that can equal in constitutional importance the first act for the government of Porto Rico, or, in point of industrial importance, the Wilson or the Dingley Tariff Act, or that can approach in the logical response to a critical condition of the country the repeal of the silver-purchasing clause of the Sherman Act. And if one ventured farther back he would find other legislation of equal importance this side of the period of Reconstruction.

But the record of the first session of the Fifty-ninth Congress is very notable both for what was done and what was not done, although the balance is strongly in favor of actual achievement. It failed to pass the bill granting free trade to the Philippine Islands, and the tariff escaped that judicious revision which it has so often been proclaimed to be the peculiar prerogative of its friends to bestow; but it passed the bills for untaxed industrial alcohol, for meat inspection, for pure food, for the admission of the territories, and for a form of government railroad rate-making. It also displayed a remark

able capacity for spending money, and granted a total of appropriations of almost fantastic proportions.

The membership of the two houses in point of character and ability will compare not unfavorably with the best congresses that have ever been sent to Washington. Although they lacked the very few overshadowing figures associated with the congresses of past times, they contained men of rare talent, while their average membership was of a character scarcely to encourage those who delight in disparaging their own time in comparison with the past, or with the future their imaginations paint.

It would not be difficult to name a score of senators who in debate or in some other important feature of the work of a senator will be likely to be remembered at least by the next generation. "There does not seem to be a quorum in the divine presence," Mr. Reed once sarcastically observed, as he entered the Senate Chamber when a senator was delivering an elaborate and carefully prepared speech to a small number of sleepy colleagues. But Mr. Reed, who signalized his speakership by his daring way of counting a quorum, and who always went to the heart of the subject himself, rarely making a speech in the House over fifteen minutes long, did not regard with favor the average set speech. The set speech of a senator is usually one of portentous length. Senatorial dignity seems to demand the quality of length as a tribute to the importance of the rule for unlimited debate. Many long speeches were spoken in the Senate during the late session, some of them unnecessarily long doubtless, and devoted to the elaboration of points that were not always of the first magnitude, but on the whole the debates in that body, especially that upon the railroad rate bill, displayed a very high order of ability. Some of the strongest men in the Senate had previously been members of the House, where they had passed unrecognized by the public at anything like their real

value. Men who had served in the House with Mr. Bailey, for instance, knew that he was a man of rare talent; but the newspapers, which generally employed themselves in ridiculing him at that period of his career, made the discovery after he became a member of the Senate that he was a debater of commanding ability.

The House did not lack in able men. It chose as Speaker the most picturesque character in current American politics, a very efficient presiding officer, but seen at his best in debate upon the floor of the House. The floor leaders of the majority were Payne, the chairman of Ways and Means, and Dalzell and Grosvenor of the Committee on Rules; and when to these are added Hepburn, Hitt, Williams, Littlefield, Burton, Clark, Cochran, Russell, and others whom space forbids to name and whom not to name seems invidious, there is presented a variety of talent that would add strength to any legislative chamber in the world. Ninety men, the number of the membership of the Senate, might be chosen from the House, and in aggregate of ability they would equal the present Senate.

The bill for free trade with the Philippine Islands passed the House, but failed in the Senate. It was supported by the Democrats generally and by a majority of the Republicans, but it encountered the opposition of a formidable contingent of Republican members who came chiefly from the agricultural states, and feared that the unrestricted competition of Philippine sugars would have an adverse effect upon our beet sugar industry. As an economic measure simply, little could be said in its favor save from the standpoint of absolute free trade, for no people in the world differ from us more widely in their social system, standard of wages and of living, and in industrial conditions generally. From considerations of commerce and industry alone, there is scarcely a country in the world with which we should not more quickly have free trade than with the Philippine Islands. And