his strength most plainly. These posts include the diplomatic and consular services, customs and internal revenue collectorships, federal judgeships, and the bigger post-offices of the country. Of late years it is not too much to say that the power of appointment to these offices has been taken from the President and usurped by the Senate. The "advice and consent of the Senate" has developed into the "compulsion of the Senate." Presidents have disregarded Senatorial nominations and made their own selections at the peril of having confirmation withheld and their appointments rejected. Senators have pushed their Constitutional prerogatives to the uttermost, and used them to build up their personal power in the States they represent, with little thought to the character of their nominees or their fitness for office. Being an undying body, tenacious of the privileges that are theirs by right, still more tenacious of such as they have been able to extort by pressure, it has been no easy matter for a President to withstand them single-handed. Most Presidents have in fact thrown up the unequal struggle, and blindly accepted the Senatorial candidates. Not so President Roosevelt. In all such matters he has but one test, that of efficiency; and he is inexorable in applying it. As at Albany, so at Washington, he wages no war on the party leaders. He consults them at every turn, and listens to their suggestions; but he makes no appointments on their recommendation unless and until he is personally satisfied of the character and capacity of the nominee. Other things being equal, a Republican will get the post. But if the Republican candidate is manifestly unfit, as he usually is in the Southern States, no amount of political backing, no references to the man's usefulness in 1904, no Senatorial insistence, will move President

Roosevelt to appoint him. More than once, to the scandal of the politicians, he has gone outside the ranks of his own party and forced the appointment of a Democrat on the novel and refreshing ground that he was the man best fitted to fill the vacancy. And the Senate, grumble as it may, dare not, in the face of a jubilant and approving people, refuse confirmation. President Roosevelt nowhere exceeds his Constitutional rights. He shares heartily and willingly with the Senate in the work of selection. All that he insists upon is that the man selected shall be the best; and so long as Senators keep a single eye on that essential he welcomes their advice and cooperation most cordially. Their privileges remain as they were; it is only the standard by which they are to be exercised that has been changed. A small thing after all, it may be said. On the contrary, this alteration of standard is little less than a revolution. It revives the Presidential authority, it knocks the bottom out of all that is left of the spoils system, it makes public office a public trust in fact as well as name. So long as President Roosevelt remains at the White House, and possibly for much longer, the sinister league between party politics and the civil service that debased and demoralized both, is dissolved. In the Army and Navy, too, the same simple principles have been rigorously enforced. Extraneous influences that had nothing to do with efficiency had wormed their way into the American Army with an almost English facility. Here again President Roosevelt was not as one working in the dark. There is little about either service that he does not know both from the inside and the outside, and in his first Message to Congress he put his finger unerringly both on the evil and the remedy. For the future, he announced, promotions would

No

be made "solely with regard to the good of the service and to the capacity and merit of the man himself. pressure, political, social or personal, of any kind, will be permitted to exercise the least effect in any question of promotion or detail; and if there is reason to believe that such pressure is exercised at the instigation of the officer concerned, it will be held to militate against him." Mr. Brodrick might conceivably say and mean as much; Mr. Roosevelt practised it. One of his first official acts was to appoint as Chief of Ordnance, with the rank of Brigadier-General, a captain who stood twenty-ninth on the list of the officers of his corps. Almost for the first time since the Civil War the Army has ceased to be the playground of political favorites; seniority and privileged incompetence no longer direct it, and the upward path is at last thrown freely open to the admirable graduates of West Point. Of equal decisiveness was the President's intervention in the miserable SampsonSchley feud, a sort of Buller episode magnified a hundred-fold, and disputed for over three years with a passionate ferocity. Mr. Roosevelt wound it up with a couple of stinging rebukes to General Miles and Admiral Dewey that killed the controversy and taught both services a lesson of discipline that will be long remembered. It may indeed be said without the least exaggeration that in every branch of the administration the impress of his resolute character has made itself felt in the direction of an efficiency and a public-spiritedness where fifteen months ago all was slackness and "politics."

It is on this, the administrative, side, that the Presidential office shows its strength. Its weakness is no less apparent when there arises any question of legislation. In his Message of last December Mr. Roosevelt "most

ear

nestly invited" the attention of Congress "to the wisdom, indeed to the vital need, of providing for a substantial reduction in the tariff duties on Cuban imports into the United States." To this course, he added, "we are bound by every consideration of honor and expediency." On the one hand, the United States, by putting an end to Spanish rule, had, at the same time, destroyed a market for Cuban produce that had been cultivated for centuries. Unless, therefore, she intended the work of liberation to end in bankruptcy, she lay under a heavy obligation to provide an immediate and sufficient outlet for Cuban sugar and tobacco. And, on the other hand, a reduction of the Dingley tariff schedules in favor of Cuba had been promised by Mr. McKinley in return for the island's admission of American suzerainty and the cession of certain ports and coaling-stations. Cuba had fulfilled her part of the bargain; it remained for the Americans to fulfil theirs. The need, as Mr. Roosevelt said, was vital. The island, exhausted by the struggle with Spain and deprived of her chief market, was industrially crippled. To save her from absolute ruin, to give her the essential start on her Republican career, and to put the copingstone on Governor-General Wood's excellent work of redemption, all that was required was a fifty per cent. reduction of the Dingley rates on her two main exports. Practically all Americans approved of this reduction, not because it would bring them in return the exclusive control of the Cuban market for food stuffs, textiles, and machinery, but for grave reasons of national prestige and good faith. Some powerful "interests," however, opposed not only that but any measure of relief. The beet-sugar, the canesugar, and the tobacco growers joined forces in a determined and brilliantly

captained "lobby." Behind them and more or less openly in sympathy with them, stood the Republican stalwarts proclaiming that in Cuban reciprocity they detected the cloven hoof of "tariff-revision." The Democrats seized gleefully on the chance to drive a wedge into their opponents' ranks, and in the end relief was witheld, the President beaten, and his party torn in two. The most popular President that the United States has yet possessed had failed to pass through Congress a simple act of justice which had the enthusiastic backing of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand Americans. This, too, in spite of the fact that both Houses were controlled by his own party. Mr. Roosevelt alone came out of the discreditable fiasco strengthened in the esteem of the people. He fought for the right with unwavering firmness; he is fighting for it still; and in the long run, no doubt, he will triumph. But he has not triumphed yet.

Neither

This gives some measure of the difficulties ahead of him in raising the far more hazardous question of the Trusts. In spite of all we hear of them, the Trusts are not a political issue. Both parties, Republicans no less heartily than Democrats, abuse them in public and pummel them in their State and national "platforms," and both parties support and are supported by them in private. dare take too open a line for fear of alienating the campaign contributions of which these gigantic corporations may well afford to be prodigal. Neither party up to the present has evolved anything that could be called a Trust policy. Both are playing for position. At the same time the connection between the Trusts and the Republican party is popularly supposed to be more intimate than between the Trusts and the Democrats. This is partly because the Republicans are,

broadly speaking, the rich man's party, the friends of capital if not its slaves, and the upholders of a tariff for protection. Whatever vague fear there is of the Trusts, and there is a good deal, all the ignorance of them and, therefore, all the prejudice against them, all the tales that are told of their "conscienceless" methods and underground influence on politics, give aid and comfort to the Democrats rather than to their opponents. And on paper and during election time the Democrats are undoubtedly the more violently hostile of the two. Whether the responsibilities of office, if they could get it, would not soften down their enmity is another question. In their present position of greater freedom they have at any rate put forward one proposal that within certain narrow limits might be efficacious, had they the chance and the courage to apply it. They suggest that the import duties should be taken off every article the production and distribution of which are controlled by a Trust. There is at least something definite in this proposal, something indeed far more definite than the Republicans, if left to themselves, would venture to suggest. Their instinct, or the instinct of their leaders, is to let well enough alone, to do nothing that will "disturb business." It is their attitude both towards Trusts and Tariff Revision; and President Roosevelt never gave clearer proof of his boldness than when he declined to allow his party to be muzzled on either question. Mr. Bryan's appeals to fear and hatred, his furious yell of "Destroy the Trusts!" his avowed ambition to "put stripes on the millionaires," are things that the Trust magnates, knowing the conservatism of their countrymen, can afford to laugh at. It is different when a man of Roosevelt's character and position, sanely and conservatively but with a terrible resoluteness,

brings the question on to the carpet. The President knew well enough what he was risking, the enmity of capitalists, disaffection and possibly revolt in his party, perhaps his own chance of re-election. But he saw the danger of leaving the Anti-Trust movement to be exploited by the fanaticism of Mr. Bryan and his followers; and he saw that that danger was increased by the silence and inactivity of the Republicans and the bewildered state of the public mind. He therefore took up the question himself not as an enemy of capital, but in the interests of capital, to save it from an unjust and disastrous assault. His general view of the evolution of modern business has been expressed over and over again. He does not believe that it is possible or desirable to go back from the large organizations to small ones in ordinary industry, nor yet from large railway systems to a discordant tangle of ill-connecting and desperately competing small lines. The age of competition, he realizes, has passed or is passing. At the same time he has come to the conclusion that the natural tendency towards amalgamation has been proceeding too rapidly, that there is serious danger in the prevalence of over-capitalization; and that "methods of governmental regulation" ought to proceed step by step with the development of new business conditions. "Governmental regulation," because State regulation has been tried and proved useless. What then does he advocate? Nothing new, nothing revolutionary. The one definite proposal he has put forward is that the same publicity should be demanded of the Trusts as is now exacted from banks and insurance companies. "The first thing to do," he has said, "is to find out the facts; and for this purpose publicity as to capitalization, profits and all else of importance to the public, is the most useful measure.

The mere fact of this publicity would of itself remedy certain evils, and as to the others, it would in some cases point out the remedies, and would at least enable us to tell whether or not certain proposed remedies would be useful. The State acting in its collective capacity would thus first find out the facts, and then be able to take such measures as wisdom dictated." Whether the State has the power to demand such publicity is a matter for the Supreme Court to decide. Complete authority to regulate and control the affairs of great industrial corporations would seem to require a Constitutional amendment. If so, the President advocates such an amendment; and that is as far in the way of positive suggestion as he has gone. That there is nothing very radical in all this may be shown by two facts. One is that the House of Representatives has already expressed itself in favor of the sort of Constitutional amendment that the President desires to see passed. The other is that one of the biggest corporations of all, the Steel Trust, has voluntarily discarded the old policy of mystery, and now presents to the public each year а straightforward and intelligible statement of its gross earnings by months, its expenditures, its profits, and its disposition of the net gains. At the same time, the President does not hesitate to use such powers as are conferred on him by the Sherman AntiTrust Act. He has already haled the Northern Securities Company before the Courts on the ground that its consolidation of two competing railway systems was "an unlawful combination or conspiracy to monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, trade or commerce"; and he has also directed the Attorney-General to inquire into the so-called Beef Trust. "I am far," he admirably said, "from being against property when I ask that the question

of Trusts be taken up. I am acting in the most conservative sense in property's interest. When a great corporation is sued for violating the AntiTrust law, it is not a move against property; it is a move in favor of property, because when you can make it evident that all men, big and small alike, have to obey the law, you are putting the safeguard of law around all men." And from the same sober standpoint he defeds the proposed Constitutional amendment. "I am well aware that the process of Constitutional amendment is necessarily a slow one, and one into which our people are reluctant to enter, save for the best of reasons; but I am confident that in this instance the reasons exist. I am also aware that there will be difficulty in framing an amendment which will meet the objects of the case and yet will secure the necessary support. The very fact that there must be delay in securing the adoption of such an amendment ensures full discussion and calm consideration on the whole subject and will prevent any ill-considered action."

This is the entire sum of the President's policy, and obviously it does not carry us very far. Could it be put into practice it would combat but one of the Trust evils, that of over-capitalization. It would protect the stock holder and the investing public, but it would hardly touch the consumer. And it is as a consumer and purchaser of the Trust's goods and products that the average American is chiefly interested in the problem. What he dreads more than anything else is the power of the Trusts to raise the prices of the prime necessaries of life; and it is for this reason that he is gravitating more and more towards the possibility of hitting them by means of the tariff. The President, however, while not opposed to a mild form of tariff revision per se,

emphatically maintains that it has nothing to do with the Trusts. "The question of regulating the trusts with a view to minimizing or abolishing the evil existent in them is separate and apart from the question of tariff revision. . . . The real evils connected with the Trusts cannot be remedied by any change in the tariff laws." That is trenchant, but is it true? Granted that the smaller competitors-very few of the Trusts are complete monopolies-would be swallowed up by a removal of the tariff duties on their industries, and that the Trusts would thereby become monopolies in fact, it is still possible to think that the unrestricted competition of foreign goods and products would force a certain maximum of prices beyond which it would be dangerous to advance. On the whole the chief value of the President's intervention in the Trust issue is this: he has brought sobriety, caution and sincerity to bear on a question in the discussion of which these three qualities have been woefully deficient. He does his own thinking, and he means: business; and the people, who are at once anxious and utterly befogged, be lieve in him implicitly. Whether as the result of his campaign anything will get itself written on the Statute Book is quite another matter. The people, as I have said, dearly love a leader; but the politicians do not, and' I am not sure that the Constitution wholly approves of one. It will be oneof the most interesting features of Mr. Roosevelt's Presidency to see whether his methods succeed in getting things done as speedily as Mr. McKinley's. That they are more inspiriting to watch is beyond argument; but the Presidential disabilities set forth at the beginning of this article make one question whether there is really room. in the American system for a Presi dent of Mr. Roosevelt's resoluteness: and vigor. So far it must be said that