Jasper County Democrat, Volume 9, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1906 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. From our Special Correspondent: Finally the Senate has finished with the Rate bill. The Allison amendment, which may be Senator Allinson’s or may be someone elses, has been incorporated. The fateful words, “in its judgement,” have been stricken out and the Interstate Commerce Commission is left without specific instructions to do something it will have to do anyhow. No, the bill has not passed. There are still some speeches to be made by gentlemen who want to get into the Congressional Record. But the Senate is as good as done with the bill. Now comes the question how far the House will agree to the amended bill, and there is a prospect of a long and perhaps stormy conference over the measure. No one yet knows whether it is constitutional or not and the bill at the best will vest the rate-making power in the courts rather, than in the Interstate Commerce Commission. This of course may not be a great loss. The courts presumably are as honest as the Interstate Commerce Commission, but the mere idea of a broad court review to be a useless sort of government circumlocution vesting the rate making power witti the courts where it had as well be put in the first place if the courts are to have the ultimate settling of it. Only the embers of the BaileyTillman- Chandler-White House feud remain. Senator Bailey said his say and the correspondents of the papers he pitched into seemed to have no objection to being denounced as “deliberate and malicious liars.” So the,active eruption in that direction is over. If it had been a northern senator so describing a Southern correspondent, there might have been a sequel, but as the case stands, probably nothing more will be heard of it.

t t t One of the local papers came out last week with what is alleged to be an authoritive launching of the Cannon boom for the Presidency. It claims that the Presidential bee has lit at last and that there is being prepared by some unnamed Representative a speech which will be delivered in the House some time during the week, naming ‘'Uncle Joe” as the real thing in presidential timber and putting the thing in such a shape that the old war horse “of the Republicans can but coyly say “Yes.” This is a piece of gossip that is given for what it may be worth. There is no authentic record of a man yet refusing the nomination for the Presidency when it was definitely tendered him. Speaker Cannon says he has enough trouble running the House and is not particularly after the nomination. But it is possible he might be induced to do violence to his feelings if he were violently approached. There is just one thing against the suggestion, and that is that it is little early for the real boom to be launched. Presidential candidates are not usually named so far in advance of the convention and it is just possible if the Cannon boom is launched at this time that it may wither with some other booms already launched that probably never will get into the convention hall.

111 One of the most important conventions that has been held in Washington for a long time is now in session. It is the joint meeting of the Association of American “Physicians and the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. It will be recollected that this Association was the outgrowth of the commission appointed by the President to study the subjec'.. It has had the effect of bringing some of the best minds in the medical profession to the study of consumption and has resulted in the first organized fight that has ever been made against the Great White Plague. It was pointed out by one of the speakers last week that the ravages of tuberculosis in the United States in a single year wipe out more people and cause a greater amount of loss and, suffering, save perhaps the actual money loss, than the Galveston Hood, the San Francisco earthquake and the Baltimore and Chicago fires combined. Dr. Billings, in addressing the convention, saidjrnnkly that the medical profession had come to the conclusion that there was no specific drug for the cure of tuberculosis. The medical profession had been twenty-five years in arriving at that conclusion, and the average layman was now 25 years behind the medical profession and still clung to the idea

that there was some specific against the disease. Dr. Billings said, and the convention agreed with him, that the only hope for the work lay in a broadcast campaign of education among the people. The masses must be shown the real facts, namely that tuberculosis was neither hereditary nor contagious, though it was communicable from a consumptive to a well person if the most sanitary life was not led and the greatest care taken against spreading the media of contagion, namely the sputum from the consumptive patient, If this were done, and it could easily be done, there was no danger to be apprehended and the plague could be stamped out. There was a world of interesting material in the convention and the work of education and eradication outlined were so sane and simple that it made one wish to help the cause along by showing just how much and how little there really was to be dreaded from the disease. It may be said however that the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis has a lot of simple and interesting reading matter prepared on the subject which it is willing to distribute, and any one who is interested in the matter can help themselves and help the work by communicating with the Association.