Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 193, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1911 — Conscience In Law- MAKING [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Conscience In LawMAKING

By EDWARD B. CLARK

tfRINQ the last seven or eight years in the senm B ate and in the house of yj fj f representatives there B Ar-Q have been introduced many measures. Many of I lAfj them have had their AjJm origin directly with the people who have made VV jy their influence felt more VyrvJ markedly within the dec/Kj ade than perhaps ever - V before in the history of the country. As a result of this members of both houses have been at times forced to show plainly whether their sympathies were with the masses or with the great can trolling interests. It has been hard tor them to counterfeit a loyalty to the people's Interests. Some of them have attempted it and have been found out, and are now in private life The conditions have been such as to make congressional actions within the last few years of special interest, certainly to the onlooker in Washington. After the Beveridge beef-inspection amendment had been tacked —it was hoped securely—upon the agricultural department appropriation bill the senate awaited house action on the amendment with manifest anxiety. Now there were some members of the senate who it was supposed from the very inception of the matter had held that the measure was altogether too drastic and was in its very nature an Invasion of the right of private companies to conduct their business as they saw fit, provided it was not conducted in a manner manifestly inimical to the public welfare. The upper house had sent the Beveridge amendment to passage quickly, quietly and without a dissenting vote, but the feeling held Nevertheless that some of the mem£bers voted as they did simply because they felt obliged so to vote. One of those who in the public mind It was held had cast his vote in favor of the beef-inspection law rather unwillingly, was none other than Senator Lodge of Massachusetts. Possibly it was Mr. Lodge’s wellknown bent toward conservatism and the old ways that Impelled people to think that he was in mind if not In heart opposed to carrying government Inquiry into the business of private concerns to any greater lengths than they had been carried. The house changed the meat inspection measure by transferring the cost of the work from the pocketbook of the packer to the pocketbook of the government and by striking out the clause which made obligatory the placing of the date upon the inspection stamp. When the measure came back to the senate in its changed form one of the first senators to get opon his feet for the purpose of denouncing the changes was Senator Lodge of Massachusetts, and the •leech that he made upon a subject matter no loftier than the din upon a packing house floor and the consequent duty of the government to force the hand of the packers to lay bold on the broom of cleanliness has been declared since to be the greatest speech made at the first session'of the Fifty-ninth congress, and when this statement was made by those who have passed Judgment the speeches of Bailey, Knox and Spooner upon the constitutional question involved in the railroad rate measure were not lost to sight nor to memory.

There are often sneers at Massachusetts, because, as the rest of the country has it. she arrogates to herself a certain scholarly distinction denied unto the other common wealths of the country. Possibly the sneer at times is justifiable, because the old Bay State not only holds herself distinguished above all others in matters intellectual, but she is too fond of letting the conceit spread into other fields where she stands not even second, nor yet perhaps twentieth. Massachusetts, however, generally does send big men to the senate of the United States, and in the main big men to the house of representatives of the nation. In the hearing of such a speech as that of Henry Cabot Lodge upon the Beveridge amendment to the agricultural bill the living sneer of the dead and gone Mark Hanna expends itself ineffectually. Hanna said that “in Henry Cabot Lodge a good historian was spoiled to make a poor statesman."

Mr. Lodge was talking about the pork packing Industry, of corn beef, of sausages and of bob real, and yet this man rose to the heights of a great orator. His speech was as withering as contempt for dishonesty In business methods, coupled with a mastery of the language of irony and scorn and biting satire, could make it. While the senator from Massachusetts was speaking not a colleague moved in his seat, not a whisper was heard, nor was one of the papers which littered the senate's desks allowed to rustle. Even Mr. Tillman, whose love for Mr. Lodge is not transcending, looked upon the Massachusetts man with a much more sterlingly honest expression of admiration in his face than he probably would have cared to putke manifest, for It was the Massachusetts senator who only a few days before bad lif the senate and in the Tillman pres-

ence called the statement of a friend of the South Carolinian “ a deliberate and unqualified falsehood.” Senator Wlnthrop Murray Crane is Mr. Lodge’s colleague in the senate. Mr. Crane is no orator as Mr. Lodge is, and he knows it. Mr. Crane pales in the presence of a speech predicament and for the first-time in years the Bay State has onp man in the upper house of congress who cannot be eloquent when occasion demands. Senator Ctane, however, is a pacificator who reaches a high mark of abil-

ity. He certainly is a worker, and Massachusetts, and the country, for that matter, at times needs works as much as it needs words. This touching upon the representation of Massachusetts in the upper bouse of congress brings to mind the last great speech of Senator Geprge Frisble rtoar. It was upon the subject of the convention between the United States and the Republic of Panama. That speech was doubly a prophecy. In it he spoke of his own coming death, and then, quoting in part from John Bright, he said: “I see one vast federation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to' the calmer waters of the Pacific main, and I see one people and one language, one law and one faith, and over all that wide continent a home for freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and every clime."

On closing the last speech that he delivered in the senate of the United States, Senator Hoar said: “I do not expect myself to see the accomplishment of that vision, but I believe it is not far off. The eyes of children now born, the eyes of men now within the sound of my voice will see it far on its way to accomplishment. In spite of a difference of opinion on one great question, I am confident that the career of peaceful empire and of peaceful glory will be along the Bame path, with the same chart and compass, with the same guiding stars, with the same rule of faith and rractice that this nation has followed from the beginning." In congress at times there is presented a fine question of ethics to which the higher moralists may give answer if they can. Many a representative finds his conscience and his apparent duty to his constituents at loggerheads. Demand comes from home that he speak in support of a measure at which his own sense of right revolts. Is Le to speak or is he to keep silence? Possibly the answer that springs most readily to the lips is “yes," and the three lettered word has as a basis for its utterance the thought that a representative, being a representative, should do as those whom he represents direct. There are other sides to this matter, however, some of them shadowed in doubt and others of them clear in the sunlight Doubtless a representative should vote as his district demands, but have the represented ones the right to expect their member to stand up in the face of men to advocate a measure with reasonings and with arguments in the truth of none of which he believes, and in the setting forth of which he utters no word without making his lips lie to his heart? Flippant persons to the contrary notwithstanding, most congressmen have consciences. The house of representatives is composed for the far greater part of men of decency and of honor —poor men in this world’s goods they are in the main, and their poverty Is their praise. It was hinted in press correspondence from Washington time and again, and not infrequently plain statement was made, that scores of Republican representatives were opposed at heart tp, the railroad rate legislation urged by President Roosevelt and demanded by the people. • Those Republicans who held that the law which was sought was better off than on the statute books voted for the law against their qwn inclinations and belief because their constituents demanded that i they should so vote, but may it not be said to their everlasting credit that most of the representatives who thought the legislation wrong refused to play the hypocrite and the liar in oratorical- pleadings for that which they held to be bad in principle. It is no hard task for a layman of

ordinary intelligence to tell within the span of a speech whether or not the well spring of the eloquence is in the heart. Voice and manner betray the hypocrite, though the words themselves are a-fair mask for the lie. The speech reads „well in the Congressional Record and in the other public prints. The constituents find sincerity in the written words, but the listeners have caught the false notes in every sentence of the • tongue’s utterance.

Members of congress—considerations of conscience in the matter aside —do not care' to be marked for hypocrisy by their feJow members, even though the excuse of orders from their constituents be theirs to comipand. In this may be found the reason why so many representatives sitting at one session of congress, members who usually are heard when matters of great public moment are tefore the house, had nothing to say upon the railroad rate bill. The country knows today that one of the chief promoters of the rateregulating measure was a man who thought that the legislation was conceived in iniquity. He had the courage of his convictions at the outset — or thought he had —but later without undergoing in the least a change of heart he changed his attitude, and the railroad rate measure goes into history inseparably connected in the public mind with the name of a representative who almost unquestionably was a foe rather than a friend to the legislation. Are a renomination and a re-election worth the price of public hypocrisy? There were Republican representatives a few years ago who yearned Jsl speak their mlndß on the subject of tariff revision. That which they wanted to say would have been unpleasant to the ears of the majority of the party members. Loyalty to party kept most of these men silent, and no one, perhaps, blames them for their silence, for possibly party good is paramount. The few plain speakers on tariff revision were in the main those Republicans who were certain oi the countenance of their constituents in that which they had to say. It is highly probable, however, that Samuel W. McCall of Massachusetts would have said what he did say if tnere hadn’t been a revisionist Republican in his district. There are some men whom party considerations can’t throttle. It was not a bit pleasant for Mr. Cannon and others to hear the heretic McCall say in his cold, blunt but forceful way: "Now, the people of Massachusetts are only thinking a little in advance o! some of the people of this country. Soon this idea will invade New York and Illinois and Ohio, gathering force as it moves; and I say to you that if we do rot treat protection as a rational principle instead of as a castiron. immutable set of schedules, we are likely to have the Democratic party and then possibly the deluge." There was prophecy in that. Mr. McCall’s boldness in the tariff revision matter calls to mind another showing of the courage in which he was one of two chief figures. Most party men probably will look upon it as simply ( a bit of Massachusetts “holler than thouism,” the outgrowth of anti-imperialist Pharisaism, but it looked like the genuine courage article nevertheless.

John Sharp Williams proposed to the Philippine tariff bill an amendment promising ultimately freedom to the “little brown brother.” It was pu. to a rising vote. Every Democrat stood “affirmatively" upon his feet The Republicans, all save two, sat as if spiked to their chairs. The two who rose affirmative and defiant, daring to vote with the Democratic enemy, were Samuel W. McCall and Rcckwood Hoar —true son of h'a father