within the purview of a law intended to regulate such combinations.

It should be observed that those most vehement in denouncing the creation of a special privilege for labor unions through their exception from the provisions of antitrust legislation are at least relatively quiet with respect to special privilege in general. They are not much concerned about the special privileges which saturate the whole fabric of our industrial system. Their denunciation of special privilege as it is supposed to affect labor unions, therefore, falls a little short of carrying conviction.

There is no proposition in this bill or in any other bill which this House has been asked to consider which even remotely involves the withdrawal or the destruction of the powerful elemental privileges which vitalize business trusts. The only thing aimed at is the regulation of these trusts. We leave their privileges unchallenged. But we say to those possessing them that they must be moderate; they must not be indecent in their greed; they must not push their advantage over the rest of us too far.

This being true-and who is there to challenge the fact-is it necessary to be so scrupulously consistent as to insist for the mere sake of consistency on classifying the labor union with the business trust? They surely differ in fundamental character, as I think I shall be able to show presently. And if they do thus differ, then the contention that labor union and industrial trust should be statutorily bundled together is without merit. It is designed to destroy the labor union without greatly impairing the power or even sharply limiting the greed of the business trust.

Those on the other side of this question proceed on the theory that business combinations are essentially the same as labor combinations. Is this true? I think not.

The better to examine the issue involved, let us for the moment lay aside the fact of combination and look at labor and at business in their naked form.

No man on this floor or in this country, Mr. Speaker, will deny that any wage earner has a right as an individual to refuse to work for any other person. Yet there is not one on this floor, and perhaps not in this country, who would not deny the right of any owner of railroads, stores, or factories, of ships, pipe lines, or coal operations, to close them down arbitrarily. The difference is instinctively and universally recognized. What is the nature of this difference?

It does not lie in any discrimination against the property owner or in favor of the wage earner. There is no discrimination as to the faculty common to both-their individual working power. The property owner has precisely the same right to refuse to work on his railroad, his steamship, his pipe line, or in his store, his factory, or his mine as the wage earner would have to refuse to work for him. Within the limits of their labor power either would have the right to sell or to withhold it as he pleased and on the terms he pleased. But the property owner possesses something which the wage earner does not. It is the possession of this that puts the property owner in a different

class from the wage earner as far as the responsibilities of that position are concerned.

It can not make any difference to you whether I work or not. The public is not concerned in what I do or fail to do so long as I do not become an actual charge or otherwise a burden on or a threat against it. It is very different in the case of a railroad, a mine, a store, or a factory. All these, for one thing, monopolize public rights-rights of way, terminal sites, dock sites, building sites, and other valuable privileges. For another, they assume, and indeed possess, the function of public servants, thus creating a public interest in their business. The difference of obligation between mere wage earners and owners of businesses charged with a public interest is bound up in the fact that the latter own businesses of that kind.

Mr. Speaker, it is my contention that inasmuch as owners of businesses charged with a public interest must not individually be allowed to prevent the best utilization of such businesses, any combination among those owners for preventing or regulating that utilization is properly subject to statutory adjustment or prohibition. On the other hand, inasmuch as wage earners may individually refuse to work for other persons no combination among wage earners to refuse such work is in itself properly subject to any statutory prohibition or even regulation that would not be applicable to an individual wageworker.

To prohibit or to regulate combinations of property owners, whose property is charged with a public interest, to the exclusion of combinations of wage earners would be both consistent and sound. The inconsistent and unsound thing to do— yea, and the impolitic-would be to treat wage-earning combina-. tions as though they were identical in character with combinations of businesses charged with a public use. Subjecting both kinds of combination to the same statute or to the same regulatory commission would be widely and not unreasonably regarded as an attack on labor organizations in the interest of combinations controlling property privileges, rights of way, building sites, dock sites, mining opportunities, water power and timber holdings.

And this brings me, Mr. Speaker, to a consideration of the political aspects of this case. Is any political party prepared to assume the responsibility for what labor organizations are bound to interpret as an attack on labor organizations in the interest of combinations controlling property privileges? Our party for years has professed itself the friend of the toiler. It has strongly defended him against the aggressions of organized greed. In many platforms it has placed itself on record as the proponent of policies designed to secure the emancipation of labor from its thralldom to monopolistic combination. Yet there have been those who seriously proposed that the Democratic Party should bundle combinations of wage earners together with combinations of monopolistic privilege and subject both alike to a common statutory regulation. Happily this proposal has been flatly rejected.

MEXICAN SITUATION.

Wednesday, May 27, 1914.

Mr. BAILEY. Mr. Speaker, I hold no brief for Gen. Villa. I am not here to defend his methods. I am no apologist for the atrocities he is alleged to have committed. He may be as guilty, as red-handed, as merciless, as ferocious, and as diabolical as the gentleman from Wyoming [Mr. MONDELL] insists that he is. Let us grant that he is the monster he is said to be; that he is as ruthless and as bloodthirsty, as savage and as pitiless as the Hearst propagandists have made him out. Does he stand alone in this? Has he been more cruel and more pitiless than the great American general in the Philippines who issued the order to "kill all over 10"?

Or, for that matter, can we be quite sure that our own immediate record in Mexico shines with mercy and gentleness and forbearance in comparison with that of Villa and his "bandit" followers? In a recent issue of the Citizen, published at Winsted, Conn., I find a letter from Sergt. John F. Ryan, marine detachment, U. S. S. Vermont. In it Sergt. Ryan gives a faint hint of what has been going on down at Vera Cruz since the American occupation.

Some bluejackets just had a scrap about a half hour ago—

Writes Sergt. Ryan

and killed six more Mexicans. All of the murders

Note the word

that are being committed on Mexicans are being done by the bluejackets and not the marines. So, if you read about them in the paper, do not think that I am implicated in any of them, as we only shoot the Mexicans who try to kill us.

This hardly calls for comment. But it is something to the credit of Sergt. Ryan that he feels ashamed of some of the work that has been done down there, and that he is anxious to have those who know him understand that he has had no part in the "murders."

In its edition of May 8 the Chicago Tribune prints a letter from William A. Loehrl, first-class gunner aboard the battleship Utah. Gunner Loehrl describes the battle of Vera Cruz, and in the course of his narrative he says:

We more than got peppered by the Mexicans. All those beasts are good for is pot shooting. By pot shooting is meant climbing up high buildings and then firing down on us out of windows. We no sooner had our battalion together than we started in. It did not take long, when-bang-down goes one of our fellows with a bullet clear through his head. Death was instantaneous. That worked us fellows up to a savage mood. Kill? Right and left. We put the field guns in the middle of the streets and let fly. We had mercy on nobody, which was proper. Nobody showed a bit of cowardice. Murder and plunder was all we wanted, and we more than gave it to them. For every 1 of our fellows killed we shot down like dogs about 10 Mexicans. It was rather hard for me to kill at the start, but when the fellow next to me was shot through the chest I became as savage as the rest. The fellow that was shot next to me let out a piercing cry and died in about 30 seconds. Firing ceased at about 10.15 p. m. Tuesday. We had about 150 prisoners, of which we court-martialed about 80 and shot them the same night. That's biz. Show no mercy is our policy now. We took the prisoners and made them dig trenches for us around the entire city. Made them clear the streets of the dead and pull around our 3-inchers, etc. But we never torture them. We kill them just as fast as they show themselves, but never torture them. They would torture us if they were given the chance. We have plenty

*

of grub, as we get a fresh supply from the ship every day. You have no idea how fast we kill them off. Perhaps you would like to know what we do with the dead ones. We take a horse and wagon and fill the wagon with bodies and drive to the outskirts of the city. There we go to an oil tank, sprinkle crude oil on them, and put a match to the pile. Up goes the whole works. What the flames do not consume the buzzards do.

All this merely goes to show that war is hell; that it makes monsters of men who otherwise may be gentle and kind and tender of heart; and it should tend to moderate the transports of indignation which the acts of a Villa or a Carranza excite in some of our friends on the other side of this Chamber. And it is well to remember that Villa is not the first leader of a revolution, not the first captain of a popular army, to be denounced as a bandit. George Washington was so denominated by King George and by his Tory sympathizers in the revolting Colonies. Like opprobrium was heaped on Grant by those who openly or secretly sympathized with disunion. But Villa executed prisoners taken in battle, so the press dispatches say. Perhaps he has done so. If so, he was but following the example set by our own Army of conquest in the Philippines. Few of the little brown men wounded in battle or captured by the invading host lived to tell the tale. And the water cure was a popular torment administered to the natives in the name of benevolent assimilation.

Yes; war is hell. It too often embrutes those who engage in it, and it turns even the noncombatant into a savage lusting for the blood of the enemy. Doubtless Villa is all that he is represented as being. But let us remember as we go along that there is a very practical side to the banditry with which he stands charged. He is indeed confiscating the great landed estates as his victorious rebel forces fight their way toward the capital city. But he is not appropriating the land to himself. He is not confiscating it even to the revolution. He is turning it over in 60-acre farms to the disinherited citizens of Mexico and leaving behind him as he marches hundreds hitherto hopeless to whom the door of hope has been opened.

At bottom the revolution in Mexico is a peasant uprising-an agrarian attempt to overthrow an order established in rapine, corruption, and tyranny. The constitutionalists have a program big with economic and social possibilities, a program which contemplates the restoration of the soil of Mexico to the millions who inhabit it; and we may understand the Hearst hysteria when we learn that some of his vast holdings have been taken over and brought under the beneficent provisions of the Mexican constitution for the benefit of disinherited Mexicans. The Hearst ox has been deeply gored.

That President Wilson realizes just how grievously that particular ox has been gored is pretty clearly to be inferred from the interview with him recently reported by Samuel G. Blythe in the Saturday Evening Post. Referring to the clamorings in certain quarters-on the other side of this Chamber among othersfor the restoration of "order" in Mexico, the President is quoted as saying:

My ideal is an orderly and righteous government in Mexico, but my passion is for the submerged 85 per cent of the people of that Republic who are now struggling toward liberty.

Mr. Blythe quotes him further:

I chailenge you

He said

to cite me an instance in all the history of the world where liberty was handed down from above. Liberty is always attained by the forces working below, underneath, by the great movement of the people. That, leavened by the sense of wrong and oppression and injustice, by the ferment of human rights to be attained, brings freedom.

Is there anyone on this floor who dares challenge President Wilson at this point? Or is there anyone here who dares challenge him in what follows, likewise reported by Mr. Blythe:

It is a curious thing that every demand for the establishment of order in Mexico takes into consideration not order for the benefit of the people of Mexico, the great mass of the population, but order for the benefit of the old-time régime, for the aristocrats, for the vested interests, for the men who are responsible for this very condition of disorder. Na one asks for order because order will help the masses of the people to get a portion of their rights and their land; but all demand it so that the great owners of property, the overlords, the hidalgos, the men who have exploited that rich country for their own selfish purposes, shall be able to continue their process undisturbed by the protests of the people from whom their wealth and power have been obtained

The dangers that beset the Republic are held to be the individual and corporate troubles of these men, not the aggregated injustices that have been heaped on this vastly greater section of the population that is now struggling to recover by force what has always been theirs by right.

They want order-the old order, but I say to you that the old order is dead. It is my part, as I see it, to aid in composing these differences so far as I may be able, that the new order, which will have its foundation on human liberty and human rights, shall prevail.

Mr. Speaker, I beg to voice the fervent hope that what the President is striving for may be attained-the establishment of a new order founded on human liberty and human rights. And in voicing this hope here before the American Congress I feel that I am likewise voicing the fervent hope of the people of this great Republic. I can not believe that they want for Mexico an order founded on tyranny and injustice, on murder and usurpation, on aristocracy backed by force, on privilege sustained by the strong arm. But, with the great peacemaker at the other end of the avenue, I believe they desire for Mexico an order established on a foundation of human liberty and human rights. 48120-13533

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