warning that he would make it quite clear to the public what a vote against the amendment meant, in purpose and inspiration. Therefore, the clause must be withdrawn. With the aid of fellow humorists in the lower house of Congress, Senator Aldrich worked out a parliamentary scheme-a sort of secondary jokerwhereby the offensive valuation measure was joked and jockeyed to a silent death. First, he withdrew the bond feature of the bill. The LaFollette amendment, of course, disappeared with it. The Senate passed the bill, all disembodied as it was. In this form it was useless to the Aldrich scheme; but that didn't matter. It was only a bill of straw, set up to be knocked down, anyway. The House of Representatives promptly knocked it down. They rejected it, as had been strategically arranged, and passed the Vreeland Currency Bill as a substitute. In its turn, the Senate rejected this with enthusiasm and dispatch. That threw the whole thing into conference. The conferees, representing Senate and House, duly met and gravely decided that they could not agree. All the newspapers announced the abandonment of the measure. They were fooled. Meantime, the Hon. Nelson Aldrich was enjoying some laughter in his sleeve. In the last hours of the session there appeared, with jack-in-the-box abruptness, an Emergency Currency Bill. It was not the original Aldrich bill. It was a changeling, a ludicrous travesty of high finance. It went immeasurably farther than the original measure had gone, in providing that emergency currency might be issued upon "any security upon which a national bank loans money.' That is, not only railroad bonds, but railroad stock would be made available. Almost any kind of certificated junk could be made the basis for "pulling the leg" of Uncle Sam. To such a proposition, of course, Senator LaFollette's plan of valuation would be a doubly essential corollary. The most hardened railroad Senator would hardly have dared to oppose it. Thanks to the Aldrich jugglery, there was no necessity of opposing. For, the new bill was brought in as a conference report. A conference report cannot be amended. Also it has the right of way. This extraordinary measure was jammed through in the last hours of the session, despite Senator LaFollette's attempt to talk it to death in a nineteen-hour speech; and it is to-day the law of the land. Consequently, the national Treasury is now in the position of being held ready to guarantee paper which may be worth little or nothing; the smaller banks of the country are encour aged to lay in a supply of this "truck” which Wall Street had been holding ready to sell, as a basis for currency in case of panic; and you, whose banked funds may be used for this ingenious species of governmentally-backed wildcatting, aren't allowed even to know the real value of the securities for which your money is going. The joke's on you! Senator Lodge's Expensive Friends At the present writing, President Taft has succeeded, by a violent stretch of executive power, in keeping Congressman Rainey off the Ballinger Investigating Committee. The reason is largely personal and dates back to the time, two years ago, when Mr. Taft, then Secretary of War, approved that able exponent of jocosity, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts, in his side-splitting skit entitled "Ships of State." The ships are the "Shawmut" and the "Tremont." The State is the United States of America. The background is the Panama Canal. Chorus of Delighted Special Favorites, Disgusted Engineers and Embottled Congressmen. In the winter of 1907-08, the "Shawmut” and the "Tremont" were lying up at Seattle. There was no profitable trade for them. As an investment, they were disastrous. Nothing was accruing to them but barnacles. The owners, the Boston Steamship Co., were at their wits' end. Almost, that is, but not quite. Some remnant of inspiration suggested a last re source. Why not sell them to the government? Happily, the Boston Steamship Co. had an ally at court, in Senator Lodge. They were friends and supporters of Mr. Lodge. How could he do less than befriend and support them (and their families) in return? The Sundry Civil Bill was up. Senator Lodge slipped in a little joker, in the form of an amendment. "To enable the Secretary of War [Wm. H. Taft] to purchase for the Panama Railroad Company two steamships of American register, each to be of not less than 9,000 gross registered tonnage, and at a cost not to exceed $1,550,000." The pith of the jest is in the specifications "American register" and "not less than 9,000 gross registered tonnage." In all the seas of all the world there were but two such ships available. These two were the property of Mr. Lodge's friends and supporters, the Boston Steamship Company's "Shawmut" and "Tremont," then gathering barnacles from the waters of Seattle Harbor. One million one hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars was the price paid. And at that, the government had to pay fifty six thousand dollars to get the two ships around to New York. Rather an expensive joke, thus far. Congressman Rainey exposed the whole matter, in a speech full of jagged edges and acid. President Roosevelt and Secretary Taft were furiously indignant. The former, in particular, fulminated anathemas, but didn't answer Mr. Rainey. Senator Lodge's friends hastened to explain, officially and unofficially, that ships were badly needed at Panama; in fact that those very ships and none others had to be had for the work there. Now, let us see what the canal authorities themselves thought about it. The man giving testimony before the Congressional Committee is Col. Goethals, Chairman and Chief Engineer of the Canal Commission. Q-Can those ships be used at present? Q-How many feet of water have you? Q-How much will it cost to do the dredging? now. We will have to construct a pier as well as dredge the channel. A little matter of channel-dredging and pierbuilding as additional cost for obliging Senator Lodge's friends. Q-What speed are these ships? A-Eleven knots, I understand. Q-What speed were the other four vessels [ships of suitable size already engaged on the work]? A-Twelve to fourteen knots. Q-From your statement I should judge that these ships were unsuited to the immediate purposes and needs of the work at Panama? A-They are not as adaptable and useful to our purposes as smaller ships would be. Note here, that if Senator Lodge's amendment had specified a smaller tonnage which would have been better suited to the work in hand-there would have been a considerable list to pick from instead of just the "Shawmut" and "Tremont." But, of course, an amendment permitting competition would not have been as "adaptable and useful" to Senator Lodge's ship-selling friends. Q-In other words, you have charged to canal construction, the purchase price of these ships without any benefit to the canal? A-That is right; yes, sir. And, finally, this: Q-Was the purchase of these ships recommended by the Commission? A-No. So, the undivided credit for this antic masterpiece must go to Senator Lodge. Alone and unaided he beguiled the government into buying two ships which it didn't want; which were dead upon their owners' hands; which were slower than the ships already in use; which couldn't enter the harbor for which they were intended, and couldn't have found a place to dock, if they had been able to enter; the employment of which would have involved the expense and delay of lighterage, which, in short, were a pair of marine white elephants costing Uncle Sam thus far some $1,200,000 of additional cash dumped into a bottomless hole. In the classic phrase, "It is to laugh." Special privilege is always, with the mirthloving American, a subject for glee. But perhaps this time you'll laugh a bit wryly. A million dollars is a stiff fee for finding out that the joke's on you. Cap and Bells on the Bench One thinks of the U. S. Supreme Court as a solemn body, little given to the lighter phases of life. Grave injustice is done by this view. The nation's most venerable tribunal has its "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" like lesser folk. One of the quippiest (not to say wiliest) of its contributions to the gayety of nations was its light-hearted sand-bagging of the Commodities clause of the Interstate Commerce Law. Legislative enactments are dull reading, I know. But this one is worth going through just for the bright ray of wit wherewith the Court illuminated it—and, incidentally, burned it up. "From and after May first, nineteen hundred and eight, it shall be unlawful for any railroad company to transport from any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, to any other State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, or to any foreign country, any article or commodity, other than timber and the manufactured products thereof, manufactured, mined, or produced by it, or under its authority, or which it may own in whole, or in part, or in which it may have any interest direct or indirect except such articles or commodities as may be necessary and intended for its use in the conduct of its business as a common carrier." Such is the law. In main intent it was aimed at the coal-mining railroads. Independent mine owners had complained for years that the coal-owning railroads forwarded their own coal expeditiously, and left the product of outsiders' mines heaped up along the tracks to an extent that obliterated the scenery. If the independents objected, they were soothed with the formula, "No cars available." Meantime, they could sit upon their own accumulating masses of "black diamonds" and watch the railroad company's cars, filled with the railroad company's tonnage, roll profitably past en route to the waiting market. Small wonder that they rose up and demanded a law to stop the parade. That there was a crying need for such legislation is sufficiently attested by the letter of Chairman Knapp of the Interstate Commerce Commission to the President, in which he says: "By the gross and extensive abuses and wrongs properties producing freight carried and sold by them in competition with their patrons, we are convinced that this provision is based upon sound principles, and is a wise policy which should be persistently adhered to." found to have resulted from the interest of carriers in It In the Commodities clause, the victims of railroad discrimination thought to have found redress. The language of the clause seemed to them both definite and determinate. may even look so to you. Examine it again. A railroad must not carry coal (that is, an "article mined") "which it may own in whole or in part, or in which it may have any interest, direct or indirect." Doesn't that appear to be a pretty thoroughgoing and exhaustive prohibition? Its framers, who had forced its passage against a powerful railroad opposition, so considered it until the Supreme Court of the United States brought to bear upon it the twinkling eye of the judicial intellect. Under that mirthful regard, the carefully constructed law dissolved and became as if it had never been. For, then and there, with only one dissenting voice, the learned and jovial judges achieved one of those fine distinctions of legal sense which fill the lay mind with wonder, awe, and the desire for a large and knotted club. Certainly, said the Supreme Court, a railroad must not carry and sell coal mined by itself. On that point, the law is clear. But pause a moment. Let us not (observed these gowned merrymakers) be too hard upon the struggling railroads. True, the law says that there must be no interest, on the part of the railroads, direct or indirect, in the commodities transported. But, just for fun (chuckles the Supreme Court) let's insert an "interpretation." Let's decide-although, of course, there isn't the slightest indication of any such meaning in the law as it comes before us-that the measure applies only to a legal or equitable interest. Therefore, although a railroad company must not own coal mines and transport their product perish the illegal thought!—it may form a stock company to own and operate the coal mine, and still carry the coal. That is, owning all the stock in the company which owns the mine does not constitute ownership of the coal! (Persons giving way to loud and unseemly mirth in the court room, will be removed by the gentlemanly attendants.) Two words constitute the joker here: "legal" and "equitable," injected by main judicial force into the law, and obligingly pointing out to all and sundry, just how the intent and purpose of the restrictive clause may be safely evaded, and discrimination be successfully carried on against the independents, by the coal-mining railroads. Here is the text, deciding that the prohibition against such carrying of commodities is effective only when the carrier at the time of transportation has an interest, direct or indirect, in a legal or equitable sense [the italics are extra-judicial] in the article or commodity, not including, therefore, articles or commodities manufactured, mined, produced, or owned, etc., by a bona fide corporation in which the railroad company is a stockholder." This teaches us, according to the highest principles of the law, that if you buy a peck of pecans and eat them all, you still own the shells, which are outside of you, but you have no "interest, direct or indirect, in a legal or equitable sense" in the meats, which are inside of you; and if you get a stomach-ache from super-repletion, it's no fault of those genial jesters, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. One dissenting voice was raised; that of Justice Harlan. He pointed out that the joker devised by his associates would "... enable the transporting railroad company, by one device or another, to defeat altogether the purpose, which Congress had in view, which was to transportation, and thereby to prevent the transdivorce, in a real, substantial sense, production and porting company from doing injustice to other owners of coal.” That, of course, is exactly what has happened. The railroads hold the mines as they did before. They control the supply which you must purchase. They own the cars, without which the product of independent mines cannot reach you. They retard independent shipments and so maintain the control of prices which you must pay. The interfering law is on the scrap-heap. The joke's on you! Standard Oil Tries its Hand Illuminating, as an example of a Joker's Progress, is the Standard Oil attempt upon the new tariff. It exhibits the various steps clearly, with Uncle Joe Cannon in cap and bells, as Master of the Revels. The old import tax on petroleum had been a countervailing, or retaliatory duty. It provided that importations of petroleum from countries im posing a tax upon American oil should be subjected to an equal tax. Fair though this may appear at first sight, it was in itself a joker and actually operated to shut out practically all foreign oil from the country, thereby maintaining Mr. Rockefeller's monopoly intact. It was the intent of the Ways and Means Committee, in the tariff readjustment, to report out a clause putting oil on the free list. Arch-protectionist though he is, Chairman Sereno E. Payne favored free oil, as a measure of fairness. So did the committee, in a ratio of about six to one, as was evidenced by the final vote. But, in the last forty-eight hours of the deliberations, Speaker Cannon injected himself into the proceedings. Through bulldozing and cajolery, he won over enough reluctant members of the committee to change the intended report to the old, monopoly-nurturing retaliatory duty. This in the face of Chairman Payne's warning to his associates that the change would be rejected on the floor of Congress, through pressure of anti-Standard Oil sentiment, and his blunt avowal that he himself would not fight for a measure which he considered indefensible. So, the old joker was made part of the committee report. But this was only half of Uncle Joe's funny little game. One of his men, Congressman Vreeland of New York, offered an amendment, establishing a duty of 25 per cent. on petroleum and its products, and the Speaker got a rule through opening a way for a vote on this amendment, and shutting out all other amendments. This was the secondary joker. It meant that Congress must either accept the 25 per cent. amendment, or fall back upon the old retaliatory duty. There was no third way. In either case, Standard Oil would win its point. But for once Uncle Joe had misconceived the temper of the usually tractable House. Congressman Norris, of Nebraska, offered an amendment to the amendment, substituting a nominal duty of 1 per cent. for the 25 per cent. Congressman Olmsted, a Cannon supporter, presiding over the House in Committee of the Whole, ruled the motion out of order. That left only one hope of beating the joker; to overrule the decision of the chair, a decision which was technically correct. Appeal was taken, and the House sustained the appeal by a vote of 168 to 136. By so narrow a margin was the Standard Oil Co. prevented from having the laugh on the whole country again. As this vote proved that the sentiment of the House was for free oil (a 1 per cent. duty being merely nominal) Congressman Payne asked unanimous consent to an amendment putting it on the free list. One setback, however, doesn't discourage an inveterate humorist as keen for his little joke as is Speaker Cannon. He took the floor himself, and in a sort of operabouffé prose poem, interspersed with sparkling references to misrepresentation and demagogism, passionately pleaded the cause of the Standard Oil Co. Not openly, however, for, of course, he pretended to be fighting the battles of the independent oil operators. That was part of the jest. Everybody understood it. When the echoes had ceased to reverberate with Cannonical eloquence, the House quietly adopted Mr. Payne's suggestion. Speaker Cannon's one last appearance in the comedy was in the final vote on the free oil amendment. He was one of the 47 nays. There were 322 yeas. Of the Ways and Means Committee, which had weakly lent itself to the joker, against its chairman's protest, only three out of nineteen stuck by it to the end, and voted against free oil. Governor Hughes Spoils a Laugh How came the joker in the now famous Income Tax Constitutional amendment? Many governors of many states would like to know this. The amendment reads as follows: "Article XVI. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration." The joker is the clause, "from whatever source derived." State and city bonds have hitherto been held to be exempt, by implication, from taxation. This clause destroys that exemption. It puts it within the power of the Federal Government to tax any state out of existence, perhaps the most radical and dangerous invasion of states' rights ever proposed. To Governor Hughes belongs the credit of discovering this joker. Although a believer in the principle of the Federal Income Tax, New York's executive recommended, in a special message, the defeat of the amendment by the legislature. Lacking a defense against his allegations, the amendment will doubtless fail of the necessary ratification. How was it, then, that a trained lawyer like President Taft overlooked so fatal a defect in the document? A warm friend and supporter of the President declares that when the amendment was shown to Mr. Taft for his unofficial approval, the words "from whatever source derived" were not embodied in it, and that some person, presumably Senator Aldrich, inserted them afterward, with the deliberate purpose of bringing the measure to ultimate defeat. This implies that the President failed to notice the insertion, when he signed the bill. In lieu of any explanation, it is, at least, an interesting theory. If it be true, Senator Aldrich has once more tricked the nation's chief executive as he did in the tariff bill, and the joke's on Mr. Taft as well as on you. Toilers in the Shadow To the uninitiated a vote of 70 to 1 in the U.S. Senate would seem fairly overwhelming. It would appear that a measure commanding such a majority must have been almost unanimously approved. Yet Senator LaFollette's "Hours of Labor" bill, which finally became a law by the vote cited above, was the subject of a long, strategic contest on the floor of the Senate and was twice narrowly saved from defeat. Why the almost unanimous final advocacy of it, then? Because there is a certain type of Senator who will not come out openly against a bill which has a strong backing of public sentiment. This is the type of legislator who deals in jokers. His sense of humor is equalled only by his alacrity in "getting aboard the band wagon," and appearing, with a pious smirk, upon the public welfare side of the question when all underhanded and secret means to defeat it have failed. In the case of Senator LaFollette's bill, the injected joker happily was detected and thrown out. The bill provided, roughly speaking, that no railroad employee, engaged in the operation of traffic, should work more than sixteen consecutive hours (with certain exceptions) or should resume duty after a trip of ten hours or more, without having had eight hours for rest. Organizations of railroad employees endorsed it. Obviously it was to the interest and safety of the traveling public. It seemed reasonable that workmen upon whose efficiency and watchfulness hundreds of lives might depend should not be required to work more than sixteen hours on end. That is, it would seem reasonable to the normal sort of mind. Not, however, to the humorist type of legislator. He would naturally be opposed to it, as tending to interfere with the refined knockabout sketch put on as a sort of continuous performance by our railroads, whereby some fifty-odd thousand people are killed and maimed annually. When the bill came up for discussion the Old Guard of the Senate rallied against it. Hale, Kean, Foraker, Hopkins, Heyburn, Carter, Warren, Gallinger—they all beheld in the measure, an outrageous and anarchistic attack upon vested rights. Foraker declared the bill to be unnecessary. Gallinger denounced it as mischievous and pernicious. Carter tore his hair and lamentably prophesied that it would paralyze the traffic of the country. Brandegee pleaded that it might be toned down to a less stringent severity. When its proposer rose to defend it, he was harassed by motions to recommit, parliamentary obstructions, and claims of no quorum. Then came the jokers. Senator Foraker brought forward one, specifying that the employee should be punished for working over hours, which ingenious device was punctured by prompt protests from the railroad organizations, pointing out that such a provision could readily be perverted to defeat the purpose of the law by an unprincipled train dispatcher, seeking to cover up his own mistakes. Then a general exception of "casualty" was offered, whereupon a suspicious spirited defender of the bill looked up the word and found that it meant "That which occurs by chance," and that if the law were to be inoperative in case of casualty, employees might be kept working twenty-four hours on a stretch because the conductor stubbed his toe or a seat in the caboose broke down. Indeed, the bill itself, after the committee had trimmed it down to suit its own ideas, was so weak a measure that Senator LaFollette had to patch it up with amendments, on the floor, until it resembled a quilt. And it was on these amendments that the first real "show-down" came. They passed by only four votes. To the front then came Senator Gallinger, perhaps the leading railroad humorist of the Senate. He had an amendment which he had been sedulously withholding for a favorable opportunity. It specified that hours of labor of railroad employees should be limited"except when by unavoidable accident, or act of God, or resulting from a cause not known to the carrier or its agent in charge of such employee at the time he left the terminal, he is prevented from leaving his terminal." How much would be left of a law amended to this effect, after a court in sportive mood (as was the U. S. Supreme Court in the "Commodities clause" case) had finished "interpreting" it? And, how often would "the carrier or its agent in charge" be so careless as to know provably the cause of delay? The amendment was deliberately and skillfully designed by an avowed enemy of the bill, to render it inoperative. The railroad Senators rushed to its support. It was defeated by the narrow margin of 35 votes |