ERNEST HAMLIN ABBOTT, Editor-in-Chief and Secretary LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT, Contributing Editor

THE OUTLOOK, June 30, 1926. Subscription price $5.00 a year.

Volume 143

The Paris Charleston

F

RANCE-the prize perpetual political Charleston dancer of Europe--has just worn out in rapid succession two of her Premier partners. The hall where this endurance exhibition is being staged is the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the French Parliament. The legislative orchestra to whose syncopation the contestants have to try to keep step has been producing partisan jazz strains that have proved too much even for such veteran perform ers as Briand and Herriot. To the dissonances of the "Budget Blues" and the "Currency Slide" these leaders have been trying to execute the complicated figure known as "Forming a Cabinet." Briand gave up recently after several months on the floor. Herriot jumped into his place, at the invitation of President Doumergue as master of ceremonies, but he quit exhausted after twenty-four hours. Then Briand, after this brief rest, entered the competition again for a tenth time, to the blare of the Conservative cornets, the wail of the Socialist saxophone, the racket of the Radical rattle, the beat of the Democratic drum, and the clash of the Communist cymbals. Whether he can stand the pace or whether the nationalist, Poincaré, or the mystery man, Caillaux, may be called upon, remains to be seen.

Briand's late Cabinet was forced out of office by the failure of its financial and economic retrenchment program. M. Peret, the Finance Minister, tendered his resignation, and the whole Ministry went out with him in order to give the Premier an opportunity to attempt to form a "National Union" Cabinet including representatives of all parties except the Royalists and Communists. But, despite the critical emergency in which the country finds itself, due to the depreciation of the currency, Briand was unable to get enough assurance of cooperation from other party leaders to make him feel certain of his position and power to act.

The President then gave former Premier Herriot a chance to try his hand at

June 30, 1926

making up a Cabinet based on the support of the left-wing groups in the Chamber. This, it is believed, represented a shrewd move on the part of Briand. Herriot is the leader of the Radical Socialists, who have been clamoring for a tax levy on capital as a means of solving the nation's financial problems. Herriot's attempt to form a Cabinet reveals the fact that he cannot muster the support necessary to carry through this program. The issue of a capital levy thus is disposed of, and it is made evident that the way out of the present situation must be found along other lines. Whether Briand or another leader succeeds in organizing an effective Government, it is a step in advance to have established the fact that the remedy for the troubles of France must be sought in moderate conservative principles.

The Kaiser
Keeps His Property

B

ECAUSE the referendum in Germany failed to approve the confiscation of the property of the princely houses of the various German states, it is not to be assumed that a majority of the German people would not like to see such prop

Number 9

property has been confiscated with the fall of royal houses. If the monarch as long as he rules is the state, his property is the state's property. Confiscation of his property is therefore not in the ordinary sense a seizure of private possessions. Nevertheless many Germans who are republican at heart were afraid that confiscation might open the way to Bolshevism or Communism. Moreover, it was felt that bankers would be less likely to extend credit to a country that had seized royal estates. The proposal was to use these estates for the unemployed, war invalids, and other dependents, and the establishment of free agricultural land for the peasants and farm laborers.

If this property had been appropriated without compensation, no return of the Hohenzollerns to power would have been conceivable. Now the Hohenzollerns, as well as the other princes who have ruled in the German states, keep a foothold in the Fatherland. Still those fifteen million voters who cast their ballots for confiscation have given fair warning as to what would inevitably happen in case of any attempt to restore the monarchy.

Economy and a Surplus

erty confiscated. The vote in the refer- N

endum was almost fifteen million in favor of confiscation and only a little more than half a million against it; but the proposal was lost because less than half of the qualified voters cast ballots. The opponents of the measure for the most part stayed away from the polls; and these together with such voters as would not have voted anyway for one reason or another prevented the vote from becoming effective. When it is remembered that in the United States the vote cast in an election is often less than half the number of registered voters, it is not surprising that under the circumstances less than half voted in Germany. Even so, the total vote lacked only five million of constituting a majority of the electorate.

There was nothing really radical about the proposal. In other countries royal

INE days before the end of the fiscal year President Coolidge revealed the fact that the Treasury has a surplus of $390,000,000 and has reduced the National debt during the year by $836,000,000. This is a brighter picture than the one which Treasury estimates outlined when the present tax law was pending a few months ago. The official estimates then were that the provisions of the bill would run the Treasury very close to a deficit if not into it.

The President wisely said, however, that the present surplus cannot be taken as a dependable forecast of the revenue. that will be produced in other years. He looks for a smaller surplus next year and, unless rigid economy is practiced, the possibility of a deficit in 1928. He said, however, that the present condition of the Treasury demonstrated "the correctness of the theory that reduction of

tax rates economically applied will stimulate business and thereby increase taxable revenue." In the same connection, he warned that any lack of prosperity would reduce the Government's income, and that expenditures should be planned accordingly.

The President discussed the possibility of further tax reduction, and said the point to which it may be carried "cannot be stated until the new tax law has had sufficient opportunity to become fully effective and experience has shown what revenue it will produce." The political enemies of the Administration will, of course, remind the country that they predicted a big surplus and said that the Administration could safely have recommended a much more liberal reduction of taxes. The indications are, however, that taxpayers are fairly well satisfied with the reductions they got and that they will not worry because the Govern⚫ment has more money than it needs to spend.

The House Waits upon the Senate

TH

HE Congressional stage is set for one of those agonizing and probably long-drawn finales that have so distressed the country in recent years. They are usually bloody spectacles, too. Worthy bills are slaughtered ruthlessly. Others are deliberately strangled. And at the last, after the panic has somewhat subsided, it is usually discovered that some bills which had the good wishes of practically everybody have been forgotten and crushed in the scramble.

The practical certainty of such an ending to this session was realized when the Republican organization lost in an effort to adopt a resolution for adjournment on June 30. The successful opposition consisted of Democrats, insurgents, and a considerable sprinkling of organization Republicans. The leader was Representative Martin B. Madden, of Chicago, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and therefore ordinarily counted upon as one of the chief lieutenants of Speaker Longworth. Mr. Madden's main objection to adjourn Iment was that the Rivers and Harbors Bill is not yet a law, and he frankly said that his principal interest in this bill is in the clause providing for the deepening of the Illinois River and the Chicago Drainage Canal, a project strenuously objected to by many because

of the alleged danger of lowering the water level of the Great Lakes. Farm relief legislation also figured in the opposition to adjournment and, once adjourn ment was indefinitely postponed, a number of measures for which hope had been abandoned were revivified.

The decision of the House not to adjourn came, not because of the state of its own calendar, but because of the condition of the Senate calendar. The Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Bill had passed the House, but had hung fire in the Senate until the diagnosticians came to regard its case as hopeless. It was the Senate's "move" in farm legislation, too. It still had the Haugen Bill before it, and also was tinkering with an amendment to the Jardine Co-operative Marketing Bill, embracing several of the essential features of the Haugen plan. The House decided to wait and see what the Senate was going to do.

After the Haugen Bill-What?

H°

OPE for passage of the Haugen Bill by both houses was considerably revived after the decision of the House to postpone adjournment. There were evidences of an inclination on the part of both Senators and Representatives to pass the bill and the "buck" at the same time, leaving the burden on the President. Secretary Mellon's statement was taken as a warning that the Haugen Bill --in fact, any farm relief legislation of a similar character-would encounter the veto.

Those who have participated in the fight for so-called agricultural relief, however, did not abandon it. The attack, it appears likely, is merely to be shifted to another point.

The movement, apparently, has gained in frankness. Its object has always been

to make the tariff protect agricultural producers; but this object has not always been plainly stated. Following the Mellon analysis of the Haugen Bill, however, some men began to say what they have all along thought. Senator Capper, of Kansas, who has always managed to remain strictly regular, declared that, "if one is to accept Mr. Mellon's analysis of the proposed farm relief measure, he must of necessity condemn the protective tariff by the same logic." Senator Johnson, of California, somewhat irregular but well inside the regular Republican lines, vehemently denounced Mr. Mellon's work as a crucifixion of all farmers except the few who are genuinely pro

tected by the Fordney-McCumber tariff. And Senator Borah, of Idaho, whose progressivism never has carried him beyond the point of political safety as a Republican, condemned the Administration's attitude toward agriculture while asserting his opposition to the Haugen Bill on the single ground that the equalization fee makes it unconstitutional. Governor Hammill, of Iowa, who may be regarded as in some sort the political spokesman of the agricultural demand, said: "The tariff was passed and made effective as to industry. Agriculture is making the same demand and can see no good reason why the American market should be preserved for industry and not for agriculture."

Following these and similar expressions, the well-known Washington correspondent, Mark Sullivan, wrote to his newspapers that the new way determined upon to help the farmer "is to remove the advantages of other fields." He belongs to that comparatively small group of Washington correspondents who write with entire frankness of what goes on at Washington.

Senator Robinson, of Arkansas, the Democratic leader, made the publication of Mr. Mellon's statement the occasion for a speech which amounted to an invitation to Western Republicans to join with the Democrats to "tear down this tariff wall." Such a movement may not reach far or it may. At least, there is very little doubt that there is a movement to shift the agricultural attack from a demand for special privilege for itself to a demand for withdrawal of what is regarded as special privileges to others.

The Wide Roaming Reed

S

ENATOR REED, of Missouri, annoyed because he was unable to get Wayne B. Wheeler on the witness-stand during the hearings on the wet bills, finally got him there in the hearings on the Pennsylvania primary. Having got him there, duly sworn, Reed made Wheeler tell the story of his life-what his salary was in 1897, whether or not he ever practiced law except as counsel for the Anti-Saloon League, and the minute details of the way the League was organized, about thirty years ago, in the various States. None of this or anything else that Senator Reed asked or that Mr. Wheeler answered had anything to do with the Pennsylvania primary. The justification

for calling Wheeler appears to have been the suspicion that the Anti-Saloon League spent some money in the Pennsylvania primary, as perhaps it did; but Senator Reed got no information on that point, and apparently did not try to get

any.

What Senator Reed did get was the frank statement from Mr. Wheeler that the Anti-Saloon League sometimes has

ter which Senator Reed's committee is investigating. The Senator is irascibly insistent that witnesses confine their testimony quite strictly to the questions he asks. The witnesses cannot, of course, insist that the Senator confine his questions to things having at least some remote bearing on the question at issue. The Northern Pacific Lands

expenses and an occasional honorarium for making speeches. Mr. Wheeler named several of them-Upshaw of Georgia, Barkley of Kentucky, Cooper of Ohio, and, on the Senate side, Willis and Fess of Ohio. Senator Willis has denied that he has received such money since he has been Senator, but the others have either admitted it or said nothing about it. Why should they not admit it? For all that Senator Reed and the daily press have made much of it, why should not Senators and Representatives who believe in prohibition make speeches in favor of it, with reimbursement for their expenses and time?

It is a fact concerning which there has never been any concealment that all sorts of Senators and Representatives make speeches on all sorts of subjects for all sorts of pay. The Chautauqua platform recruits its summer staff very largely from the two houses of Congress. Chambers of Commerce and other civic bodies, according to the common understanding, frequently pay Senators and Representatives for making speeches on the tariff, the income tax, waterways improvement, and all sorts of subjects on which those men will have to act in their official capacity. Nobody has ever suggested that any Senator or Representative advocated a protective tariff, for instance, because of the speaking fees that he might get for advocating it.

A great many Senators and Representatives, Senator Reed prominent Reed prominent among them, practice law for fees-and, undoubtedly, for larger fees than the Anti-Saloon League has ever paid. It is by no means a thing unknown for Senators and Representatives to leave Washington when important matters are pending and go home to try lawsuits. Members of Congress may have run away from their duties to make prohibition speeches, but Senator Reed has not shown anything of the kind. And, anyhow, it has nothing to do with the mat

subsequent acts Congress undertook to give to the Northern Pacific Railroad Company about 40,000,000 acres of land, then practically without value. land, then practically without value. The grantee was to make these and other lands valuable by the construction of a railroad line through them from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean.

It

was a contract. Has it been complied with? Both sides say not, and a joint

committee of Congress is trying to ascertain the facts from the records running through sixty-two years.

The Northern Pacific says it has never received all of the lands to which it is entitled and is demanding possession of some additional millions of acres, of which 2,600,000 acres are lands which the National Government has protected and developed for a quarter of a century as National Forest lands. The Forest Service declines to surrender them without protest. It declares that the Northern Pacific has never complied with its part of the contract and that, far from being entitled to millions of acres more, it should be deprived of part of what it it should be deprived of part of what it already has received. This is the tangle which the joint committee, headed by Representative Sinnott, of Oregon, must unravel.

The Forest Service came into the contest only when National Forest lands were claimed under the grant. Prior to that time business pertaining to the Northern Pacific land grant had been handled by the Department of the Interior. But, becoming at last a party in interest, the Forest Service has gone beyond the effort to retain these particular lands and is attempting to eliminate from the grant about a million acres claimed by the company in the so-called second indemnity strip. The assertion is also made that the Northern Pacific has obtained by fraud and misrepresentation as to the classification of mineral lands 2,500,000 acres which should be restored to the Government, and that it has dis

carded worthless lands to which it may have been entitled and claimed instead valuable acreage to which it has no right.

The Forest Service already has succeeded in recovering 220,000 acres of lands by uncovering errors in early records. This adjustment has been agreed to by all parties to the contest. This agreement, however, does not affect the larger contention.

The joint committee is expected to conclude its hearings within a week or two; but adjournment will probably postpone a final report until the next session. Meanwhile, by agreement, all patents of land to the Northern Pacific under its grants are suspended.

Honesty Recognized

O

UTLOOK readers will, we are sure, be glad to hear that Charles L. Carslake and the Rev. John B. Adams have been offered reinstatement in the Federal Prohibition Unit.

The stories of their honesty, energetic enforcement efforts, and subsequent dismissal from the service for doing their sworn duty were recently related in these columns by Ernest W. Mandeville.

When these articles came to the notice of the present Deputy Prohibition Administrator of New Jersey-Captain Jesse L. Thompson-telegrams offering their old posts immediately went out to Mr. Carslake and Mr. Adams. Captain Thompson, an ex-army officer, as is his chief, General Andrews, wants to accomplish real enforcement of the Volstead Act. With a cork foot, a weak heart, and only one-half of his normal breathing capacity through the loss of one lung, Captain Thompson is laboring valorously in active charge of the field force of one of the wettest, if not the wettest State in the Union.

Many of those who are in the closest touch with this energetic captain are unaware of his physical condition and the heroism heroism displayed by his unceasing efforts to whip into shape an efficient enforcement body.

He has not spared himself. After long days in his office he has uncomplainingly led in person many an important night raid against the main sources of bootleg supply. In his attempt to combat the New Jersey Rum Ring this officer is continually meeting obstacles which would discourage in short order a less coura