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the land owners, and government boards or bureaus.

"But, see the effect of this system!" cries this pro English faddist. "No grafting! Efficient government!'' et cetera.

How much more there is in the political situation of British cities than lies simply in their contracted municipal mechanism is quickly seen when one investigates matters of actual practice. Take the subject of franchises. These are not granted by the city councils; they are procured through "powers" from Parliament. When President William Murphy, of the Dublin Tramways Company, wishes to add a mile of track or a new powerhouse to the company's plant; when the city of Edinburgh wants a tiny bit of a new park; when Brighton, on the south coast, reaches out for more piers or beach space-each of these (and every franchised company in the kingdom, as well as every municipality, seeking similar local or spe cial social facilities must go up to London and apply for the m-lobby for them? never! -in Westminster, at and around the Houses of Parliament. They must as a usual thing do it through a ring of legal solicitors, whose fat fees are indeed a feature in British municipal outlay. In these circumstances, of course, the municipal council members get none of the honest graft. Another point: Permanent national government depart ments, with "probing" powers into all municipalities unlike anything we have in the United States, are the Board of Trade and the Local Government Board, with head offices in London. Without consent of the one, for example, municipalities can not issue bonds beyond certain limits; nor without consent of the other can they municipal ize public utilities. Again, British municipal councillors seldom have opportunity to graft in suburban real estate jobbing, because the land surrounding a city, bang up against the last solidly built street, is usually the property of one or a few big landholders. These take all the unearned increment, when they choose to sell. Such little fish as councillors or their relatives, or courthouse and city hall loafers, get no show at this respectable graft. Therefore, no scandal here for the newspapers. Other barriers to possible would-be gratters among council members can be seen in such facts as these: Civil service control is worked on municipal employes so fine that if one of them

becomes active as a citizen about election time his department manager "gives him notice." The well-nigh irremovable "Town Clerks" (not elected by the people) have a tight hold upon much of the financial administration, at times including conventional perquisites, in which no enterprising councillor can exert a self-regarding influence. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales-each country is so small, so parishlike in its social make-up, that possibly weak brethren are sustained in rectitude by the moral encouragement of their neighbors' tongues. There's no mixture of races among the voters; there are few get-rich quick millionaires, like our Pittsburgh fellows, given presents of fortunes annually by a Government trick of taxation; there have been no hailstorms of luck dropping from the skies, such as have struck our chaps in America who got in early on the city franchises; there are, by ten millions, less than half our population in the kingdom. Consequently, from such various points, there has been only a small fraction of the area for the play of graft in Britain that there has been in the settling, the developing, the appropriation of wealth in the modern Golconda, the United States. The British land owning class was legally in ahead of all other absorbers of community productiveness. Really, also, monarchy and nobility-aristocracy, in a word-has had some deterrent effect in bridling ill-regulated avarice among British public officials. There's not one middle-class Englishman in a score who would not prefer to have his name in the ten column list of newly recognized ribbon or medal wearers annually printed in the Morning Post rather than to gather unto himself ducats by the peck. There's not a low caste business man in a hundred who would risk, through being caught in a fishy municipal contract, missing the occasional nod of the high caste nob in the big house up the hill. All these little things count in keeping councillors straight. Besides, there's no Presidential election every four years, with thousands of postmasterships and other federal plums falling from the party's big tree, through the shaking of the national machine. It is thus easily seen why in Britain a party's national politics and local politics are not interwoven in one beautiful patriotic institution, like ours, and how

even members of city councils can be given some free reign, when their acquisitive propensities have contracted room for fruitful play. Above all other things, too, Englishmen are every day made aware of the disgusting brutality of their law courts in dealing with unconventional or petty theft.

Before leaving this point of the superior British municipality, as compared with the corrupt American-(Say, my lad, there has been and there is today, many a good, straight American city council, let us not forget!)-some little mention ought to be made in passing of the queer views of their own that British municipalities and other governmental subdivisions have as to mine and thine. When, for instance, a municipal undertaking, such as a gas or a tramway system, yields a surplus over expenditures, as some of them sometimes do, and it is turned over to "the relief of the rates" (local taxation) middle-class praise is lifted to heaven. But why the gas consumers or the street-car fare payers (mostly of the working class) should thus turn any of their cash over to the propertyholders of a community can be understood in the fact that the property holders compel them to, but it is a frivolous irrelevancy to have it done in the name of honesty. Why, when a street car company, as in the case of the United Tramways of London, wants to extend its lines over into the suburbs, the governmental subdivisions thus invaded should sweat it for the privilege up to the point of forcing sequential fares to the last limit the traffic can bear, such action is regarded as anything but a form of community graft, is past the ordinary American barbarian individualist's ken. Why, when a municipally owned and operated undertaking which employs 4,000 workingmen sees its entire force changed in four years, through discharges and resignations, and the community concerned does not call for a halt on this plain symptom of public oppression of the workers, that's another problem in ethics. Why so little is written by American worshipers of British municipal ways on the scandals that crop up regarding council control of the liquor traffic, there's another one. Our friends of Britain do not dwell in print on their collective shortcomings, nor shout in chorus about them from the housetops, as we do with regard to ours. Over there,

they have already done publishing aught about the colossal horrors of the Boer war army peculations, as shown up in the investigations-long after the war.

But at this moment we are concerned with democracy. What is the traditional prevailing American conception of democracy? It is, in brief, that the people shall rule. This idea provokes the merriment, even the derision, of the pertly oracular Secretary of the Short Balloters. He writes: "It will be hard, but perhaps it will help if I take the liberty of warning you against the greatest catch phrase of all-namely, 'the people' pronounced 'pee-pul;' or, worse yet, 'the plain people,' who I believe have certain supernatural virtues not possessed by 'the people.' It is lèse majesté to allege that there are any limitations to the people in either morals or learning." Yet, despite the young gentleman's lofty contempt for them, it's the people who are to rule in America, if the American idea of democracy is to prevail. The test of democracy is not, as the Short Ballot Secretary imagines, a matter of trustworthy office-holders. The test is in the location of sovereignty. Where with whom-is the governing power to lie? The American reply is: With the voters-first, last, all the time, in every necessary circumstance, to the ultimate practical point. The struggle over rule by all the people or rule by supermen chosen by the "best people" is past in this country. The Hamiltonians are dead ones. They wanted small ballot-boxes and few of them. They were the original short balloters.

The "clumsy initiative and referendum devices' (our young Secretary's phrase) is being almost invariably used in the commission cities because the alternate method by which unrestricted power is intrusted to representatives is infinitely more clumsy, and more costly, and slow, and unbusinesslike. The people of these live democratic. cities grew tired of parting with their sovereignty to a succession of temporary oligarchies. Each referendum city may today know where it is on any public question of sufficient importance to go voting over it. Not so, when trusting to representatives. Sidney Webb, defending the British method and opposing the referendum before a Cooper Union audience, explained: "It happens in England that a government taking power on one set of

issues finds that it has some time to deal with an entirely new set, on which it can not know the state of public opinion." Precisely; an admission of the necessity of the referendum. By it the people can tell their representatives what is wanted of them.

Office-holders are "good" or "bad," just as they obey the sovereign voters. There was never a superstition with less foundation than that in good public men. These are good or bad, in their public capacity, just as they do what each of us wants them to do. The masses of American citizens are better than the best leader among them. There's not a more topsy-turvy reading of the present public situation than to suppose, as our young Secretary does, that "the Progressives are in fact simply the followers of certain conspicuous, well known, and wellbeloved leaders." On the contrary, political "leaders' are usually but "followers." On putting their ears to the ground they interpret the rumble the people are making and proceed to orate accordingly. A fructifying question with the American citizens is how to bring to the front in public activities the non-politicians-scholars, philosophers, unselfish seekers of the general good-who might be genuine leaders in the progress of the nation, but who don't care to be officeholders at the cost of first becoming mere politicians. There are numbers of good strong men-perhaps "the best men"-in every community ready to perform service for their fellow-citizens who wouldn't walk across the street for a nomination, or give a dollar to a machine for its support, or beg any man for a vote, or as partisans fight to hold an office when once in. The initiative and referendum has opened up a nonpartisan road for such men to follow and do good, while keeping out of office.

But-the short ballot. How short? It depends. A democratic people, if wise, will never allow it to be so short as to loosen their hold by a single hitch on the law-making power, or the law-interpreting power, or the law-administering power. The people in Oregon might shorten their ballot so that the Legislature, and not themselves, should elect their United States Senators. Is there any probability that they will? The people of New York might cut down the ballot by an important special degree if they were to omit from it candidates for judgeships. Indeed, aristocratic Short

Balloters in New York City once brought about a vote on that economy of votingpaper, but the people at the polls gave big majorities against it. The people of Oregon and California might have reduced their ballots by about fifty legislative questions last year, but in a contrary spirit they welcomed the long ballots necessary to print the questions, and they gave discriminating auswers. The people of no American community, it is a certainty, will permanently tolerate a ballot so short that their commission government may independently control the local civil service commission, or the school board, or the licensing system. In nowise should the wage-workers of a community let slip from themselves their due influence over occupants of the bench, of any degree. The Chief of Police, as well as the Police Judges, ought obviously to be the direct choice of the majority in a democratic community. A District or City Attorney elected by the voters might see his duty to all the people in a much clearer light than one appointed by a commission. A live question for the voters is what forms of property should be taxed, and a matter intimately connected therewith is the man or men who should administer the taxation, especially the assessment. There is a great deal more in municipal government than "simply business." Big problems in sociology are involved. The wage-workers, for instance, plainly have special reasons for seeing to it that the police do not overstep their rightful authority, while “a business men's commission" might have the contrary interest of stretching coercive police activities to the utmost.

True democrats have valid grounds for supporting the commission form of administration in so far as, in abolishing city councils and adopting direct legislation, the community itself becomes the ruling deliberative body. Every voter is then a legislator. Councils have been regarded as possessing one advantage in being a school for developing lawmakers-practical debaters on public issues-but this advantage passes over to the entire body of voters when they themselves are the lawmakers. They then exercise an uninterrupted sovereign power over their legislative measures and their public servants, both. In doing so, they must have ballots commensurate to their voting func tions-both short enough and long enough

EDITORIAL.

By SAMUEL GOMPERS.

There was one object prominent at every moment, in every hall, at every

THAT ASININE CANARD: "GOMPERS DESECRATED THE NATIONAL FLAG!"

parade, in every place that I visited in my seven weeks' trip to the Pacific Coast early last autumn. It was the American flag. It took the supreme post of honor on every occasion. It was, as a matter of course, held aloft not only at the head of every procession of the wage-workers, but invariably in the front rank of every separate union on parade. A thousand trade unionists were found proud to be color-bearers on these occasions, to wave the stars and stripes, symbols of America's democratic ideals. Never, so far as I observed, did I speak in a hall which was without the American colors as the chief if not the only decoration. Scores of newspapers of the various cities I visited, in their illustrations of hall, or street cortège, or park stand, where I was present, show the flag, every time in its appropriate place as usual on public occasions among American citizens. Here, before me, as I write, is a file of clippings including such illustrations, all with the flag afloat as our nation's emblem of freedom and humanity. One picture, of an open carriage, in which I am seated with three San Francisco labor committeemen, exhibits in and immediately around the carriage no less than five national flags. If, before all men, in all the world, in all history, evidence conclusive can be found for anything, past the least and last quibbling of pusillanimous and stubborn dissent, that evidence can be had of the truth that neither myself nor any other trade union speaker, nor any organization or assemblage, during the course of my trip, or at any other time, in a single thought or act, ever once failed in the respect due our country's flag. Had any man ever had the hardihood to stand up, before the crowd in the street or the audience gathered before a speaker's stand, at any of labor's demonstrations while I was on that trip, and to say that I or the other trade unionists present were "desecrating the flag," he would have been laughed at as a fool or pitied as a lunatic.

The part the flag played as a significant feature in labor demonstrations in that western trip was no more than is customary in the American Federation of Labor. We have, at our headquarters in Washington, a flag which is carried year by year to the scene of our annual convention, in whatever city this may take place in the United States or Canada, and hung near the chairman's desk in the meeting hall. It is a celebrated flag, as well known, perhaps, as any ever displayed in any State of the Union. It was made on special order of the convention at New Orleans, 1902, nine years ago. It measures twelve feet in length. It is of the finest silk spun for such

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terest of sour's tam ficers on the Pacific Coast known for arma tax the military service. It has been se army were contacting a campaign by means of street h*-*-res and totam a mew to prequicing public sentiment against the army and tacontaging enlistment. The latest reports have to do with disturbances in Los Angeles and Oakland, Cal. At the latter place two prominent labor agitators-Mr. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, and Mr. John A. Kelly, Supervisor of San Francisco and President of the Building Trades Council were specially active. The War Department is in possession of photographs showing these speakers standing on the American flag and addressing their audience. The photographs are sent officially sad are duly authenticated."

article finisheith a long quotation from an obscure Socialist
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