Mr. COCKRELL. But you can not serve a master and be independent.

Mr. ELKINS. Yes; but he must serve somebody; now who is his master?
Mr. COCKRELL. He serves Congress now.

Mr. ELKINS. Oh, you want a parlimentary government.

Mr. COCKRELL. That officer is independent now. I want the Department of Labor to remain just as it is; just as it has proved a success, and has been beneficial and acceptable to the country.

Mr. ELKINS. I think Congress has a good deal to do without managing executive bureaus.

Mr. COCKRELL. We have proved so eminently successful in that matter that I think we ought to be allowed to go on and have credit for it.

Mr. HALE. Let me ask the Senator, is it not true that the Department of Labor, doing this work in reference to the great interests of labor, has remained unmolested since it was organized? It has never been considered a political department, and no Administration has interfered with it or removed the head of it. Under Republican and Democratic administrations it has gone on as a separate, a distinct, and independent Department. Will those conditions be observed, and will they apply when you put it into one of the political departments?

Mr. COCKRELL. Necessarily they can not be, for you then make the head of that department subordinate to another. The Secretary of Commerce is not going to let that Department remain as it is to-day, to go on and transact its business as it does to-day; but he will supervise its reports in every way, and will direct and control them. He will direct what appropriations shall be made; he will pass upon everything; everything will have to be done in subordination to his will, and so, necessarily, the Department will become political. Everything that you can bring up as to the efficiency of this Bureau must eminate from its remaining as it is. You can not better it. It would be an untried experiment to have this Bureau made subordinate to some one else. As Mr. Gompers says, in his letter of January 20, 1902:

The creation of a Department of Commerce with the provision for the subordination of the Department of Labor will minimize the importance of labor's interests and minimize the present Depart ment of Labor. Against such a procedure, in the name of American labor, I enter my most solemn protest

Necessarily you subordinate it. Take the Census Office, for example-an independent Department. It is now controlled by the Director of the Census. Put it under the Secretary of Commerce and it becomes a mere bureau. The Director of the Census will do nothing without the approval and sanction of the Secretary, and it is idle for Senators to say that when you place these departments under a Secretary you will have them administered just as they are administered now. It can not be. No Secretary will take the responsibility for the administration of these offices and yet have no control or influence over them. He would be an incompetent Secretary if he did. He would admit his incompetency to control and direct them. You want them placed there, and the object in placing them there is that they may be under the control and direction of the Secretary of Commerce.

Mr. GALLINGER. Will the Senator from Missouri permit me?

Mr. COCKRELL. Certainly.

Mr. GALLINGER. Will the Senator assert that the Secretary of the Treasury interferes with the administration of the Marine-Hospital Service or the Coast and Geodetic Survey?

Mr. COCKRELL. Most unquestionably. I am delighted that the distinguished Senator from New Hampshire has mentioned that, for I did not want to refer to the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, because it occurred under a Democratic Administration.

Mr. GALLINGER. What I mean is in the administration of the duties of the office. Mr. COCKRELL. In the administration of the office of United States Coast and Geodetic Survey one of the most efficient and able men who ever occupied that office was removed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and it was deteriorated in every way, as the distinguished Senator from Iowa and others who know of that circumstance can testify. It was greatly lowered. Its usefulness was impaired, and it was with some difficulty that it was maintained without being wiped out.

Mr. GALLINGER. Well, but still it has remained under the Treasury Department. Mr. COCKRELL. Certainly, it has still remained under the Treasury Department, but the Secretary of the Treasury interfered. He controlled. He directed. The Secretaries always have done it, and you can not get a strong man, who feels the weight of his responsibility as Secretary of Commerce, to take under his wing and be responsible to the public and to the world for the administration of a bureau under him and yet expect that bureau to act_independently. The propositions are incongruous and incompatible. When the Department of Labor comes under the

Secretary of Commerce it will become subordinate to him and must bow to his will, and the Department will be controlled to a greater or less extent.

Now, what is the reason for the transfer? Why shall we take a Department of Labor, which has proved so eminently successful and is so satisfactory and against which no complaint is made, and transfer it to this new Department? Why shall we make an experiment and place it in a subordinate position, in defiance of the protests of those at whose instance it was organized, when no one can show that any benefit will be derived by anyone from the change? It is an experiment, a trial, and one that will prove unprofitable and unbeneficial to the interests of labor.

Mr. MONEY. Mr. President, I do not know that I shall vote for the pending bill, however much it may be amended. It may be made much better than it is, I know. I think the title should be changed, for one thing, and that the new Department should be called the Department of Commerce and Industries, to anticipate a number of other departments, the creation of which will probably be urged in a very short time.

I rise to say a few words because of the speech just made by the distinguished Senator from Missouri [Mr. Cockrell]. I believe the Department of Labor, now an independent Department or Bureau, should be maintained in its independence. It was instituted, in the first place, because of the demands of the laboring elements of this country for a representative in the capital to give statistics that would be for the enlightenment of this country upon their relations with the capital of the country. That it has been administered, through changing Administrations, without a change in its head is an evidence of satisfactory work. The public has received with grateful acknowledgment the achievements of that Department. They have been satisfactory to the Congress, and, as far as we know, to the Executive. To maintain the absolute independence of this Bureau from any political influence is the first question. Now, it is a patent fact, and nobody knows it any better than the gentlemen who press this bill, that the change from an independent to a subordinate place changes it from an impartial, nonpartisan bureau for the purpose of gathering statistics and information into a political bureau of a political department; and, as the Senator from Missouri says, no Secretary will be responsible for any bureau or department under him, or any officer who is subject to his direction (and he should not be so held accountable), unless it or he is directly responsible to him.

Everybody knows that this Department chief, the Secretary of Commerce, like the Secretary of the Treasury and the other Secretaries, will be a political appointment. Such officers are the political advisers of the President on all questions of public policy. They are his advisers as to appointments to be made to carry out and execute the laws of Congress. In the Department of Labor, as it now exists to-day, no sort of political influence is exercised as far as I know. I know nothing about the political views of the chief or of the subordinates under him. I know that their work has been approved. It has been of the very highest order of merit. It has been accepted, not only in the United States but abroad, as presenting the most authentic statistics and information ever compiled for the use of the public anywhere. And now we have here the great laboring organizations of the country and the unorganized labor of the country, for whom the distinguished Senator from Ohio [Mr. Hanna] has said he has the warmest interest and feeling, with a demand for a nonpartisan, impartial, independent department that can look after their affairs, so far as concerns statistics and information. They will not be satisfied if the Department is transferred to a department which of necessity will make it a political bureau, as the other bureaus are to a greater or less extent.

Mr. President, what advantage is it to the labor of the country, organized or unorganized, that this independent, impartial, nonpartisan Bureau shall be made a political one? Its very merit and usefulness will have been destroyed when that is done. We all know that there will not be a single report made from that Department, when it becomes a bureau of another and a political department, which has not been revised and lead penciled and corrected and sent back for revision over and over again until the views of the party in power are carried out and expressed. Everybody knows that the bureau officer who in his report declined to lend himself to campaign exigencies would speedily be invited to tender his resignation, and if he did not do it, he would find himself superseded by a new appointee.

Mr. ELKINS. Mr. President

The PRESIDENT pro tempore. Does the Senator from Mississippi yield to the Senator from West Virginia?

Mr. MONEY. Certainly.

Mr. ELKINS. Speaking of the political feature of the case, is not the Commissioner of Labor now appointed by the President, and is it not a political appointment? Does it not change with changing administrations?

Mr. HALE. No; it does not.

Mr. MONEY. It has not changed.

Mr. ELKINS. The office is not held for life.

Mr. MONEY. It does not change with the change of administration.

Mr. ELKINS. Why not? It may.

Mr. MONEY. It continues during Democratic and Republican administrations. The work has been thoroughly nonpartisan, and it was made an independent Department in order that it should be so.

Mr. ELKINS. Yes; but the head of it

Mr. MONEY. And if it had not been so the demand of labor interests would not have been met.

Mr. ELKINS. The head of the Department changes.

Mr. MONEY. It has not changed.

Mr. ELKINS. It can be.

Mr. MONEY. Oh, it can be, but it has not been; and it has not been changed because it was not intended to be a political office. Every single other officer in this Government who could be made political has been made political. We know that political influences have dominated the Navy and the Army, which should not have any political influence at all. Some of us believe that political influences have dominated more than once a great coordinate branch of this Government in rendering decisions upon the most important matters that ever came before the American public. Wherever politics can intrude itself it has done so.

Here are the laboring people of the country, who have an independent department to meet their wishes, to give out impartial statistics and information to guide and regulate them as well as the capital with which they come in conflict. A conflict must forever and ever go on between capital and organized labor. I say necessarily, not that there need be any injury done by one to the other, but the interests naturally conflict. One wants what he can get and the other wants to keep what he has, and consequently the two will always be in natural conflict. The part of this Congress is to try, if possible, to be a buffer between these two hostile elements, and to enact such legislation as will prevent any outbreak or such a divergence of interests as will lead to conflict of the most serious character between capital and labor.

One of the things proposed was an independent and nonpartisan bureau of labor, and it has acted, so far as I know, and I have examined its reports with great interest, in that nonpartisan capacity. Its function has been performed impartially. It has met the demand of the laboring people of this country; it has been satisfactory to all concerned, and I see no necessity for, but on the contrary I see a great evil in, putting that independent department in another department, to be subjected to the will of a political chief appointed on account of his politics and as a political adviser. We all know that the mere department work of a Secretary is as purely perfunctory as anything can be. He can not read the papers he signs, and he can not sign half of those which bear his name. A boy with a rubber stamp imprints the Secretary's name upon papers he never saw and never will see. It is the necessity of the service. It is due to the multiplication of business that comes from the enormous aggregation of population and an enormous increase of wealth, and which comes with such leaps and bounds that it can not be estimated for in the annual estimates for appropriations submitted by the several heads of departments.

Now, Senators, you who vote to put this Department under a political chief (and you will know you are doing it when you vote that way) will not have put under obligations any single one of the labor organizations or the independent working people of this country. You know very well that they do not want a political chief to handle their statistics. Gentlemen may say figures will not lie, but it depends entirely upon the men who handle the figures whether or not they will lie. They can lie well enough if they are in the hands of a liar, and they can pervert the truth when they are in the hands of a partisan.

I do not claim that I am the champion of the laboring people of this country. I am not here with a commission from the laboring people, but I am here sympathetic with all the working people of this country and other countries, the people who create the wealth and pay the taxes and fight the battles. While I am without any commission from them or anyone else or any expectation with respect to the matter, I am here to say that when this clause is voted into the pending bill you will have destroyed the interest which the laboring people have in this Department; you will have nullified its usefulness, and you will have made it a part of the machinery of the political conduct of this Government which they believe is inimical in its influence to their interests.

Now, Mr. President, here is the Coast and Geodetic Survey, mentioned by the distinguished Senator from Missouri. That Bureau, he says, under political influence has deteriorated. I have known a good many heads of that Bureau. I once had the pleasure of examining one of them, a distinguished scientist, since transferred to

a better and higher field of usefulness; and I wish to say that I do not know a more
accomplished gentleman than the one who now presides over the Coast and Geodetic
Survey. I believe it will be to the interest of the country, if this bill is to become a
law, that that Bureau should be transferred to the Department of Commerce.
The whole motive, the whole reason, for establishing a coast and geodetic survey
at all was to assist commerce. Its business is to survey, plat, chart, and mark the
coasts of rivers and harbors in this country and all other countries touched by our
commerce; and in that instance-

Mr. ELKINS. I should like to ask the Senator from Mississippi a question.
Mr. MONEY. Certainly.

Mr. ELKINS. If your argument is good with respect to a nonpolitical, nonpartisan, independent Bureau of Labor, let us get a more efficient, nonpartisan, nonpolitical service in all directions than we have at present. If that argument is good with respect to the Commissioner of Labor, it is good for every other bureau. We might better and purify and hold the Administration aloof from politics if we would put every other bureau of this Government upon the same footing that the Labor Bureau is. If your argument is good as to the Commissioner of Labor, and it is an able argument, I admit, why not treat all the rest in the same way?

Mr. MONEY. I take pleasure in answering the very pertinent inquiry of my friend the Senator from West Virginia. He is one of those gentlemen who will take a whole loaf or no bread. I am satisfied with a crumb. You know it is impossible to take the departments out of politics. It was never intended that they should be out of politics. It belongs to the system of this country. It is institutional. The President must have political advisers, and he must call those to the head of the great departments who are in sympathy with him, and who approve his policy and will advise him, because the great party which elects him to his place expects him to appoint people who are in accord with his views and the views of the party which elected him. And, as suggested to me by the Senator from Georgia [Mr. Bacon], he always does it.

But here is a bureau which in spite of that just and necessary rule has been created and maintained in the fashion in which we now find it, because of the demand of the plain people, who care nothing about politics and who are more interested in winning bread for their families than they are in the success of any party whatever, and therefore, I am sorry to say, show a readiness to shift en masse from one side to another as they may think their bread and meat depend. In recent campaigns thousands of ballots have gone into Republican ballot boxes cast by workingmen who did not believe in the principles enunciated by that party, but who thought that bread and meat for their wives and children depended upon the votes they cast. The capitalists who threatened them did not intend to perform. They were a lot of cowards. They raised their hands to strike, but did not have the courage to give the blow, even if those men had gone on and voted independently, every one of them, for Mr. Bryan. But the capitalists knew the threat was sufficient. They had their hooks in the gills of these people, and the latter could not help themselves. In spite of the fact that the departments must generally be political, that their heads must obey the President of the United States, that they must be in accord with him or leave (and they should be asked to leave if they show an unwillingness to do so), here we have a department which if it can not be made nonpartisan and nonpolitical should be abolished and should not be provided for in any bill or transferred to any other department. When it can no longer be independent and nonpartisan and impartial, then it should at once be extinguished, and not coddled and made the subject of transfer and of debate in this Chamber.

Now, Mr. President, I desire to repreat what I said a while ago, that I do not represent any labor organization whatever. They have never asked me to be their champion, but I can see what the effect of this is and I believe I know the influence and motive that prompt it. They are to destroy the last impartial source of statistics and information which the Government has to-day upon matters of most vital importance as relating to capital and labor, and I tell you that the people, after a while, will tire of this sort of business, this interference in the only affair in which they have sought to be directly represented.

The laboring people of this country, whether organized or not, whether the individual follows the plow or sails a ship, or forges at the anvil, or works at the loom, or whatever he may be doing, ask that they be allowed at least one independent officer who will not have to bow to the dictation of any political officer and can render to the people of this country just, impartial, fair, and nonpartisan statistics and information for their guidance and their information.

Mr. GALLINGER. Before my friend, the Senator from Mississippi, takes his seat I should like to say a word. I always respect his opinions, and I always listen to his eloquence with great pleasure. I wish, as a member of the Committee on Com

merce, to give the Senator an opportunity to disclaim-which I am sure he will gladly do any imputation upon the committee that their purpose in reporting this bill was to destroy this last nonpartisan bureau or department of Government. The Senator says he thinks he understands the influences that are back of it and that led somebody to propose this wicked thing. I am sure the Senator did not mean to suggest that the committee had that end in view when they reported the bill including the Department of Labor.

Mr. MONEY. I am very much obliged to my distinguished friend, the Senator from New Hampshire, for bringing this matter to my attention. I perhaps went too far in saying that, for I can not believe that the Democrats on the committee could have had any such motive. But I do believe that the Republican party are animated by that motive. They have the controlling vote here, and I have seen nowhere along the whole line of progress anything that tended to make for the good of the masses of this country.

Mr. GALLINGER. My only answer to that is that it must interest the country to have the championship of the labor of this country placed in the hands of the Šenator from Mississippi.

Mr. MONEY. Whether the country is interested or not is a matter so immaterial to me that it is hardly worth mentioning. At any rate, I have risen in my place without any sort of thought upon this bill at all, not expecting to say a single word upon it, but I accidentally came in and heard the remarks delivered by my distinguished friend, the Senator from Missouri, which called to my mind at once the remarks I have indulged in here; and if I have reflected upon anybody in any way I am perfectly willing to withdraw it. But what I make is a charge against the Republican party. It may be I am quite mistaken about this thing; I consider that I am as fallible as anybody else; but when I take this in connection with all the other movements of this sort I am compelled to believe that the intention is that it shall all be under political control.

Now, the very situation as it stands, the way in which the Bureau was organized, the purpose for which it was organized, the demand that was made for its organization, the character of its appointment, its standing through successive and changing administrations of different politics, all show to me that the intention was, as I said, to have a nonpartisan bureau of statistics and information for the benefit of the wage-earners and the laboring people of this country, as well as the capitalists and manufacturers of this country. It was made an independent department under a Democratic Administration, and the head of it, so far as I know, is a Republican, appointed by a Democratic President. Everything connected with it tends to show that it was to act independently of any political influence or motive, and so far it has been properly administered.

Mr. President, we are not accustomed here to say anything that will purposely wound anyone, and I hope the Senator from New Hampshire will not think that there is any personal reflection upon him or any member of the committee on either side. I have too much regard for all of the Senators to be at all discourteous or impolite to any one of them.

Mr. GALLINGER. Knowing the kind heart of the Senator, and claiming for myself equal kindness of heart, I gladly withdraw any suggestion I made that may have

been offensive to the Senator.

Mr. MONEY. It was not at all offensive to me.

Mr. GALLINGER. I thought this matter ought to be discussed absolutely without reference to political views or partisan politics, and I am sure the committee had that in view. They may have made mistakes, but they certainly had no purpose of harming the Department of Labor or doing anything that would harm the laboring people of this country. I think the Senator will agree that that is so.

Mr. MONEY. I stated at the time that I was obliged to the Senator for bringing me to that point, and I did not intend to be sarcastic when I said it. I was honest about it. I really was obliged to him; and I am obliged to him for his further remark. I will say now that I accept entirely his disclaimer on the part of the committee of any intention to impair the efficiency of this particular Bureau which affects the labor of the country, either organized or unorganized; but I have attempted to point out, irrespective of the politics of the committee or of the majority, the effect of the measure. Ex necessitate rei. It can not be helped. The probabilities are all on my side of the argument. You can not put a bureau under a political department and make it independent and nonpartisan, unless it is strictly a scientific one. In that case it might be possible. But when it comes to the Supreme Court of the United States, when it comes to the Army and Navy, when it comes to any of the Executive Departments of this Government, we all know and feel that political influence ramifies every single branch of the service, military and civil. It has shown