VOLUME XXXI

NUMBER 2

T

HE condition of our National Treasury's expenditures is at last crystallizing the question, Shall we change the government of the United States? Shall we abolish the pork barrel and substitute a budget and make the President responsible for the budget? The public is beginning to realize that not only national defense but almost every other national activity is dependent for efficiency upon a change in our system of governmental expenditures.

The Wilson Administration has already successfully handled certain great problems that have acutely vexed the statesmen of this country since the Civil War. It has placed the currency and banking system on a sound and scientific basis for the first time since the Civil War. The Administration has introduced an income tax that will remain indefinitely a part of our fiscal system. It has created a trade commission, which, it is hoped, will do much to solve the trust question. At the forthcoming session Congress will give the Nation more protection on land and sea than it has ever enjoyed in peace times. After these achievements the Wilson Administration can logically undertake a reform that concerns even more fundamentally the national welfare-the creation, out of the present disorganized and incoherent

administrative activities, of something in the nature of centralized, responsible government.

The first step in this reform is the adoption of a budget system of expenditures. A committee of Congress, headed by Mr. Swagar Sherley, of Kentucky, has been working for several months preparing a tentative plan. President Wilson is coöperating with this committee. The system adopted for presentation to Congress, therefore, will represent the best ideas of both the legislative and executive departments.

Elsewhere in this magazine Mr. Burton J. Hendrick traces the origin and growth of the organized wastefulness which so much needs reform. Not only Congressmen, but department heads and bureaus, are tainted by the pork barrel. The Nation was greatly shocked by the extravagance and almost criminal carelessness of the last Congress in appropriating about $60,000,000 for river and harbor improvements. But we ignored the fact that recommendations for such improvements, as they came from the War Department, called for appropriations of not far from $100,000,000. It is time for a change in our government, and the change must come or else the government will break down under our increasing necessity of being an efficient nation.