But, Governor, you would not issue an edict against changes of any sort in our laws?"

Of course I would not. Many excellent laws have been passed during this last decade, and I do not recall one that I would repeal. I am not a reactionary. Yet I thoroughly believe that if Congress and the several Legislatures were to make the necessary appropriations covering a period of five years, and adjourn for five years, we should have a period of the greatest prosperity ever enjoyed by any people. We should then know what to expect. Now when Congress is in session no man dares open his safe until he has read the morning papers.

At

"Threatened changes are sometimes worse than actual changes. In December, 1893, a friend of mine in Ohio went to Boston to sell his wool. He was offered a certain price by a merchant there. He wanted a fraction more, and he started home. The next morning he read President Cleveland's Message advocating free raw material. the first stop of the train he telegraphed the Boston merchant, I will sell at the price you offered.' He received this answer, 'We, too, have read the President's Message.' Schedule K in the tariff law has not been seriously disturbed, but I can give you the address of a ranchman in Wyoming who told me some months ago that he had 600,000 pounds of wool and 20,000 sheep pelts for which he could not get an offer. He may have sold after Congress adjourned. The idea of changing the tariff to meet changed business conditions is the rankest nonsense. It matters relatively little what the tariff is, business will adjust itself to it in time. It is the uncertainty that frightens people. Armies are frequently stampeded through fear of attacks from unknown forces and unascertainable numbers, but very seldom stampeded in the heat of battle. A general revision of our tariff law, to go into effect in one year, would paralyze everything. If the law could be changed during a night and with. out knowledge of anybody, we would survive almost anything. Anything is better than uncertainty."

"Do you see any ground for fearing another panic?"

I do not. A panic is an acute condition. Business depression is a chronic condition. Panics are manifestations of fears, depressions are realizations. Neither the panic of 1893 nor that of 1907 lasted ninety days.

Nothing ever feared by man could have caused a panic in 1896. Business was then far past the panic stage. It was dead.

"I give place to no man in my admiration for Grover Cleveland. Few men, however, are always right or always wise. Mr. Cleveland was a consistent believer in free trade. He was a consistent believer in sound money. He therefore told Congress that the greenbacks should be retired, and business was frightened. He said that the purchasing clause of the Sherman silver law should be repealed. He was right; but business did not know, and it turned pale. He then said that both of these evils were as nothing compared to what we were suffering with the protective tariff, and recommended immediate free-trade legislation; and business jumped overboard. If he had whispered to Congress that perhaps we had enough silver for the present, and recommended the repeal of the purchasing clause and an immediate adjournment, and intimated strongly that he would veto any other new legislation, the period of his Administration would have been our period of greatest prosperity. The panic did not last long, but the effects of the panic lasted four years.

"Business is no respecter of parties. Disturbing legislation will ruin business just as quickly when the Republican party is nominally in control as when the Democratic party is actually in control.

"Don't be shocked at what I am about to say, and don't abuse me for saying it, but examine the record and see if I am not historically correct. During our more than a century and a quarter of National history no man has ever walked the streets in vain for work, no man has ever gone home to find his wife in rags and his children hungry, because of dishonesty in public office, because of late or early frosts, because of droughts or floods, because of grasshoppers or bollweevil, because of cyclones or earthquakes; but millions have suffered the loss of employment, which is worse than all the plagues of Egypt, through the lack of statesmanship at Washington. Nothing has prevented 1911 from being the most prosperous year we have ever seen except new legislation and threatened legislation. Our mines are still big with ore, our forests are still extensive, our soil is yet fertile, labor is willing, and God's promise that harvests shall follow seed-time was never more certain. No man can predict what 1912 has in store, unless he

can predict what Congress and the Legislatures will do this winter.

66

Lest I be misunderstood, I am free to say that new laws are necessary sometimes, and amendments to laws are frequently desirable, and it is occasionally wise to pay the price and make the changes. Unfortunately, however, experience proves that one good change results in a desire for ninety-nine more changes, only a few of which are desirable. When one man has advanced his political fortunes by advocating and securing needed changes, then every ambitious politician thinks he can be equally successful in the same way, and we get this mania for new legislation which just now constitutes the only impediment to the material prosperity of nearly one hundred millions of people."

"Will there not come some improvement when the pending tariff legislation is finished and out of the way?"

If I had asked him about the Day of Judgment, the Governor could hardly have looked more quizzical as he answered:

"You're taking a long shot with that question. How soon do you expect the pending tariff revision to be finished? You want a guess from me? Well, I'll put the date at least the other side of March 4, 1913. How do I reach that conclusion? I'll tell you. The President last session vetoed three tariff bills, giving as his reason for two of these vetoes that his Tariff Commission had not yet reported on the wool and cotton schedules, and therefore no man could know all that there is to be known on these subjects. In spite of a partisan majority against him in one house and a combination majority against him in the other, it proved impossible to muster the necessary two-thirds to override his vetoes.

"Meanwhile he had thrown the whole weight of his official authority behind the statement that Chinese tariff walls, and rates which more than measure the difference between the cost of production here and elsewhere, have served their day and gone. Following some such line of reasoning, he will tell Congress, at the opening of the December session, what it ought to do, and Congress will promptly proceed-not to do it. Congress may be trusted to stand true to its record for never accepting instruction from a commission. It never treated seriously a commission of its own creation; and one created by the President out of hand, after Congress had declined to give him

to; and even their general loyalty to him as the nominal leader of their party will not prevent their answering: Personally we are fond of you; but on economic matters we parted company a good while ago, not by our wish, but by yours. You turned your back flatly upon the protective policy to which the Republican party for fifty years stood committed, and for whose maintenance we have repeatedly accepted responsibility to the people of the country. If we are forced to vote

on your tariff programme, we may be moved by our belief in party solidarity to give it an outward show of support; but that is the most you can ask of us.'

"So we must wait, in your judgment, till after another Presidential inauguration and the convening of a new Congress before we can hope for any improvement in lines of business affected by the tariff?"

"Bless you, no. It is not necessary to wait as long as that for an improvement, if the people are willing to look the situation frankly in the face. There's practically a year and a half before us in which we can absolutely count on no change in the tariff law. That's long enough for a good deal to be done in the way of relieving the stagnation. As things stand now, I might not be willing to recommend any big and risky new enterprises, but I can't see any reason why current business should not pick up and go straight along as it does ordinarily in fair weather. In fact, it seems to be picking up now. There may be a relapse when Congress gets fairly to work with its talk. Much will depend."

T

HE dam at Austin, Pennsylvania, went down at a little after two o'clock one Saturday afternoon. Inside of two hours every managing editor in New York had the first facts on his desk. The local correspondents-editors of small town papers, most of them, in the neighborhood of Austin— saw to that. Then the maps and railway guides were hustled out, and everybody was trying to find out where Austin was and how to get there. It didn't take long to discover that it was an overnight trip. Two correspondents and a telegraph operator left New York that evening at 8:30 for the "Sun." But the paper couldn't hear from them before the next evening. The story that Saturday night had to come-somehow. So the job was tackled from the office in New York.

was the

The afternoon's despatches from the local correspondents were confused and incomplete. Even these didn't come from Austin itself, for every telegraph wire there was down. The telephone was a more promising agency, as it looked from New York, but a very few minutes of work proved that this was no more effective than the telegraph in reaching the scene of the disaster. One shred of a telephone wire in a road-house a mile above the flooded town only direct communication that stayed in the air. This wire was very busy. It had spread the first news to the little cities near by, and it was constantly occupied with the work of calling relief. Still, it was possible to talk from New York to half a dozen towns within a radius of fifty miles of Austin, and soon the hospitals, the newspaper offices, and the telephone centrals in these places knew in a general way what had happened. If you were a telephone central in a small town, and some one called up to ask for doctors and nurses and blankets and food, the chances are you would ask why they were wanted.

From the Sun" office perhaps a dozen calls went through to the neighborhood of Austin that first night. A hospital in this town had sent doctors and nurses. A hotelkeeper in that town had just returned from driving over in his automobile to look at the flood. One or two of these calls suggested Here was a man who had lived in

others.

Austin. He could tell how the town had looked, the size and age and condition of the dam and who owned it, the names of its chief industrial plants-details that were necessary about a town that had jumped out of obscurity only when the first block of concrete jumped out of its dam.

In this way the men in New York went ahead to get the story without dependence upon the small town editors near Austin. But through the evening despatches began to arrive from these correspondents as more definite information was obtainable by them. From Williamsport, Olean, Port Allegany, Coudersport, these messages came. Philadelphia, closer to the scene than New York, was a clearing-house for news.

The despatches went to the man in the New York office who was handling the stories obtained by telephone and then written inside. An element of luck came into that evening. A newspaper sometimes has friends who are anxious to help it in an emergency. So on that night a priest called up from Port Allegany to ask whether his experiences in Austin that afternoon would be interesting. A man sat in a booth in the New York office and for twenty minutes listened to that priest's first-hand account. It took threequarters of a column to tell his story. Another friendly soul in a town equally far away volunteered a long-distance description of the dam and some of its history, the names of its owners, and the fact that they lived in an up-State town in New York; useful information because it gave the paper an opportunity to get from the owners a statement about the causes of the break.

Gradually the facts were assembled as the evening progressed; repetition was eliminated and the story took shape. It may be imagined that the job of constructing a smooth-running narrative out of this patchwork made putting together the pieces of a many-membered jigsaw puzzle seem very childish and simple. But by midnight the thing was done and the paper had been put to bed.

Meanwhile the men who had been sent to Austin were with the representatives of other papers in a parlor car on the train for Philadelphia. They had left New York before

A string of coaches and a puffing engine aimed up the mountain were very welcome sights to the newspaper men when Keating itself was reached. This train was already filled with men and women from the neighboring towns, some of whom had been in Austin on the preceding night when the fire was shooting sparks as high as the hills that shelve into the valley. They were able to tell the first straightaway stories of the flood that the correspondents had heard. In one seat was a man whose team of horses had

been washed away. He had climbed to safety on the steep bank of the road by grasping a sapling and swinging himself up. In another was one who had found a man and a woman with their two children on the fringe of the tide. The man and the smaller child were still living.

It was an hour and a half before that train had every one's consent to move. The winding climb up this foothill of the Alleghanies and the drop down the other side filled another half-hour.

The station at Austin had been washed away, and there was nothing to suggest a disaster in the place where the cars finally halted, although it wasn't a hundred yards from the valley where thirty feet of water had tumbled on the afternoon before. The correspondents stepped out of the train into ankle-deep mud and climbed a slippery bank of wet clay. Then they stood on the rim of the valley, the path of the flood, a quarter of a mile wide. In the center was the tangled heap of boards and bricks and plaster that had been the principal street. The flat plain that extended up the valley until it reached the broken dam a mile above had been the residential district. The boards that had been houses were piled on splintered wreckage as high as a three-story building. Below, to the right, lay another waste-overturned locomotives, cars torn from their trucks, and smoldering débris where the railway shops and kindling yards had been. Then the valley turned a corner on its way to Costello, the smaller town below, which had been partly destroyed.

Out on the flat plain where the gangs of wreckers were hauling down shattered houses was the newspaper man's material. Fast-flowing little streams, bridged by planks, still rushed down from the dam. In the drier spots

were men and women who had seen the tossing water throwing up its clouds of hemlock logs. Every one of them had a story to