ourselves the disciplining process. Mr. Roosevelt has made it pretty evident that, whenever he is again confronted by such a dilemma, he will grasp the second horn. He will interpose as a receiver, and administer certain revenues of the delinquent debtor, for the benefit of creditors. Our Government is already doing that in the Dominican custom-house at La Plata, and it must presently take similar measures against Venezuela, or once more allow European creditor-Powers to apply force. For reasons best known to President Castro, the customs revenues of the ports of La Guayra and Puerto Cabello-about a third of which were set aside by treaty for the payment of foreign creditors are falling very much short of the figures exhibited before the agreement was made. Meanwhile, far from appreciating the friendly position taken by our Government during the blockade of Venezuelan harbors by allied European Powers, President Castro has been showing himself more stiff-necked than ever in his attitude toward an American asphalt company and other American claimants of justice at the hands of Venezuela. It is an act of insolence and folly of which this South American adventurer is guilty. If he had common knowledge and common sense, he would foresee that, should we make up our minds to bring fellows of his kidney to book, they would find our little finger heavier than Europe's loins. There are not a few long-headed Americans who, in view of our national determination to construct and maintain an interoceanic waterway across the Isthmus of Panama, already assert that we cannot afford to tolerate the continuance of anarchy on the southern shore of the Caribbean, and that, in self-defence and in the interest of the civilized world, we may be driven to assume a protectorate over the riparian tract stretching from the Isthmus to the Orinoco.

Why are European manufacturers profoundly interested in the twin bills introduced the other day in the House of Representatives, and understood to embody the President's views, the bills providing that the Interstate Commerce Commission, when a given railway rate is complained of, may substitute another rate, which may be confirmed or set aside on appeal to a Court of Transportation which is to be called into existence. They are interested in two ways. In the first place, if the twin bills to which we refer should become laws, products of European manufacture could never again procure a lower rate of transportation

from the American seaport at which they might be landed to the interior place of consumption-say, Minneapolis or Kansas City-than could be obtained by domestic competing products shipped from some inland point to the same consumers. In the second place, American products of iron and steel, manufactured, let us say, at Pittsburg, could never again secure a lower rate for transportation to New York, when intended for exportation to European markets, than they could if meant to be distributed and consumed in the United States. So much for the significance which the President's railway policy ought to have in the eyes of foreigners. We need not point out that the Russian producers of crude and refined petroleum will prick up their ears when they learn that the Standard Oil Company may no longer be able to get rebates from the American railways transporting its commodities to Atlantic and Pacific ports for transmission abroad.

It would be almost superfluous to point out the eagerness with which foreign purveyors of some raw materials and certain manufactured products are watching the reception of the President's intimation that some of the duties imposed by the Dingley tariff ought to be reduced, so as to adjust them to existing industrial and commercial conditions. Nothing could exceed the suavity with which the proposal has been persistently urged, or the velvety smoothness of the glove enveloping the proposer's iron hand. It has become tolerably clear during the month of January that the Republican leaders in Congress have succumbed to the dulcet but firm pressure exerted by the President, and that, although no extra session of the Fifty-ninth Congress will be called for the purpose in the coming spring, the task of tariff revision will be seriously undertaken by committees during the summer, and the changes agreed upon will be submitted at an extra session to be held in the early autumn. We say "committees," because, although the Ways and Means Committee of the present House of Representatives expires with the Fifty-eighth Congress, all the members of it have been reelected, and may reasonably expect to reoccupy their former places, so that, properly enough, they can confer unofficially with the corresponding Senate committee.

Well-wishers and ill-wishers of our country are alike concerned to note the position taken by our Federal Government with reference to the solution of the negro problem in our Southern States, a problem the gravity of which is already tremendous, and easily

might be aggravated by ill-timed and injudicious interference. Such interference was threatened in the platform framed last year at Chicago by the Republican National Convention. plank in that platform advised that measures should be taken toward an early enforcement of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution, which provides that a State's representation in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College shall be reduced in proportion to the number of adult male citizens who in that State may be excluded from the franchise. Although no distinct allusion to the subject was made by Mr. Roosevelt, either in his letter of acceptance or in his speech of acceptance, it seems to have been taken for granted by not a few Republicans that his silence implied approval. In pursuance of this assumption, Mr. Crumpacker of Indiana introduced in the House of Representatives, and Mr. Platt of New York laid before the Senate, resolutions recommending that alleged restrictions of the franchise in certain States should be investigated, and that, if these were found to exist, the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment should be enforced by legislation. No other incident has occasioned such widespread uneasiness, not to say alarm, throughout the South since a Force Bill was mooted under the Harrison Administration. It may be remembered that, at that time and previously, the late James G. Blaine expressed the opinion that the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment had modified seriously the effect and potency of the second section of the Fourteenth. That section had simply asserted that, whenever a State should see fit to exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, the Nation, on its part, would exclude the negro from the basis of apportionment. Mr. Blaine held that, when, by a subsequent change in the Constitution, the Nation declared peremptorily that a State should not exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, it neutralized and surrendered the contingent right, before possessed, of excluding him from the basis of apportionment. It seems to follow that, as things are now, Mr. Blaine would have said that there is no ground for a Force Bill, the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment having lost its vitality, and the Fifteenth Amendment not being applicable, inasmuch as in none of the Southern States is the negro excluded from the franchise qua negro, but as a citizen falling short of specified educational or property qualifications.

We do not know whether President Roosevelt has been much impressed by Mr. Blaine's argument, which makes the application of a Force Bill a matter, not of ethics, but of law. We imagine that he was much more influenced by the moral objections to an enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment, which were set forth effectively by a Southern thinker, Mr. E. G. Murphy, in the last number of this REVIEW. Mr. Murphy undertook to prove and, in the judgment of many dispassionate readers, he succeeded in proving-that an enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment would work irreparable injury to the welfare and progress of the Southern States. He expressed the conviction that his fellow countrymen at the South would never consent to forfeit the representation in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College to which their population entitles them, and that, sooner than submit to such a loss of poitical weight, they would level all the dykes which of late they have patiently erected to shield the intelligence, thrift and progressiveness of their section from being swamped by floods of negro ignorance and white illiteracy. Mr. Murphy did not hesitate to affirm that, in the past, the South had suffered as much, if not more, from the hide-bound prejudice and stubborn backwardness of illiterate whites as from the instability and corruptibility of uneducated and worthless negroes. In conclusion, he made a powerful appeal to warm-hearted and far-sighted men in all parts of the Republic, not to paralyze the efforts of the South to free herself from both sources of misfortune. Let the South go on with her attempt, he said, to make the franchise a certificate of merit, and thus gradually to purge herself of negro ignorance and white illiteracy. Whether it was, we repeat, Mr. Blaine's technical argument or Mr. Murphy's appeal to conscience that exercised the more influence on Mr. Roosevelt's mind, we are not competent to say; but certain it is that, in an interview with Judge Jones of Alabama, one of his appointees to the Federal Judiciary, he made an unequivocal announcement that he was opposed to the enforcement of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. We know of nothing that has happened during the last fifteen years that is of better augury for the advancement of the South and for the welfare of the whole Republic.