People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1893 — A PALLIATIVE ONLY. [ARTICLE]

A PALLIATIVE ONLY.

Nothing lint Nattonnllam Can Cure the Evils Under Which the People Groan. Those persons who cry out “paternalism," whenever the people strike a blow in self-defense, are likely to feel badly over the McMahon bill for regulating the price of coal which has just passed to its third reading in the New York senate. The bill is presented as the outcome of an investigation by a committee into the Reading deal and possible remedies. The committee finds that federal legislation alone can deal with the matter effectively, covering as it does several states, but meanwhile it is thought New York can dosomething. The McMahon bill will require all persons engaged in the transportation of anthracite coal to be used in the state and all coal dealers in the state, to take out licenses, without which they are forbidden to do businesa The carrier’s license shall fix a maximum rate per mile to be charged for railroad transportation and the dealer’s license a maximum rate per ton to be charged for coal at retail, exclusive of charge for delivery. The board of railroad commissioners, which is to issue the licenses, will fix the maximum rates and revise them every three months. Not over $4.50 per ton is under any circumstances to be charged in New York city or Brooklyn. Fines, with revocation of licenses, are provided for breaches of the law. The coal people say that the bill is unconstitutional, and we should not be surprised if it were so. The state constitutions are drawn so strongly in the Interest of “vested interests,” that there is always a good likelihood that any measure for the relief of the people will be found unconstitutional. Considerable constitution tinkering of a radical sort is going to be necessary to prepare the way for nationalism. Meanwhile thn McMahon bill suggests certain reflections. Its drastic way of going at the trouble as if it meant to help the people without much regard to who got hurt, is in cheerful contrast with the average anti-trust law. At the same time the method is the wrong one. Instead of a system to check the extortions of private coal dealers while leaving them a monopoly of the business, municipal coal yards should be established to sell at cost, a necessary result of which would be that private coal dealers would go out of business. This distinction between attempted public regulation of businesses left in private hands and the direct public assumption of such businesses, represents precisely the difference between the empirical and Symptomatic remedies of the superficial reformer and the scientific radicalism of the nationalistic method which deals with diseases of the body politic by a constitutional treatment going to the root of the eviL The root of the evil in this matter of the coal supply extortion is private greed. The McMahon bill proposes a system of checks and balance to hinder and modify this evil principle while leaving it in force; the nationalist plan of municipal coal yards, supplemented as soon as possible by national management of coal mining, proposes to eliminate altogether the motive of greed by making the business a public one.—New Nation. —The ring politicians of both old parties are beginning to wonder “where they are at.” They were astonished beyond measure when Harrison appointed Jackson, of Tennessee, a rockribbed democrat, to the supreme bench; and completely paralyzed when Clevedecided to make Judge Gresham bis secretary of state. The populists simply smile at such things and remark: “We told you so There’s no difference between ’em. They’re twina”— Lincoln (Neb.) Alliance Independent i