Wausau pilot. [volume] (Wausau, Wis.) 1896-1940, 1900-06-12
FOR HANNA'S BARREL.
REPUBLICAN SCHEME TO RAISE
CAMPAIGN FUNDS.
1t Is Proposed that the Ways and
Means Committee Sit During the
Summer Ostensibly to Consider Means
for Abatement of War Taxation.


| of the peanut order at every turn of
/ the wheel. There is widespread de-
mand for legislation to reduce the war
taxes which are piling up surplus of
several million dollars a month. 1t has
| been known since tae beginning of the
year that the revenues were excessive.
The Republicans are in supreme control
of every branch of the government.
| Millions of dollars of government funds
have been loaned to favored banks
without interest, and Secretary Gage
has declared that there is danger of
draining too much money from the
| channels of business and locking it up
in the Treasury. Yet the Republicans
have not made the slightest effort to
reduce the revenues.
Now they propose to have the Ways
and Means Committee sit this summer
after the adjournment of Congress and
consider plans for an abatement of tax
alton. This is intended to have several
| results very useful to the Republicans.
They will be able to make pretence
that they are really going to consider
the matter. With the whole range of
governmental revenue they will be in
position to force scores of special in
terests into contributing to Hanna's
campaign barrel on a theory that the
proposed legislation which they may
formulate will benefit or injure the par
ticular interests toward which Hanna
shall extend his predatory paw 1t is
great scheme, and if cajolery doesn't
fetch the funds a threat may be quite
as effective.
Having got the national banking sys-
tenn continued indefinitely by having
practically all the four per cent. bonds
extended another thirty years at two
per cent, Secretary Gage now begins
to call in the two per cent. bonds which
Secretary Window extended years ago
with the privilege of calling in at any
time. Secretary Gage doesn't like to
have these bonds outstanding now.
They form a living evidence of the
crime which was perpetrated against
the people in placing the payment of
the two per cent. bonds for thirty years
out of the reach of the people.
Secretary Gage has done other things
besides standing in with the Standard
OILS City National Bank to the enor-
nous profit of that institution. A few
days ago he appeared before the House
Banking and Currency Committee and
favored a change of the National Bank
ing act, which would permit the direc-
tors of such institutions greater free
dom in borrowing the funds which had
been intrusted to them by confding de-
positors. There is very strictly drawn
clause of the National Banking act as
it stands now forbidding directors and
other officials Of national banks from
borrowing these funds and forbidding
the loaning of over ten per cent. of the
banks capital to any one individual.
These salutary provisions Secretary
Gage calmly declared to be obsolete"
This is Cages way of stating that prac-
tically every National bank in the coun-
try violates the fundamental law of its
organization. Not content with having
the law so fixed that it places the
y
the national banks, these favored in
stitutions violate with impunity the
few safeguards thrown around their
management. and this Republican
Secretary of the Treasury, whose duty
it should be to see that violators of the
law are prosecuted, has the audacity to
go before Congress and declare that a
living law is obsolete. But with this
administration other things are obso-
lete-one is the Constitution and an
other is common honesty.
The administration which is as trucu-
lently British as it dares to be has
had to switch considerably in its treat
ment of the Boer ENJOYS They were
received at both the State Department
and the White House with soft words
and unctuous palms. They are plain
farmer people who would feel more at
home in cowhide boots and working
clothes than in the clawhammer coats
of fashionable society Yet Secretary
Hay felt called on to give them lunch
which was to take the place of the
sympathy and support to which they
were entitled.
tits just as well that the Beers are
not to be received as the diplomatic rep
resentatives of the African republics.
Such reception would muzzle them to
unwelcome silence. 1t is much bet
ter that they should travel throughout
the country, as they intend doing, to tell
the DeODlp in their nlaip and homnlv
fashion of the crime which Great Brit
ain is committing in South Africa.