The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1904-05-11
AN ANOMALOUS GOVERNMENT.

AN ANOMALOUS GOVERNMENT.
The letter of President Roosevelt to
the secretary of war, appointing Gen.
Davis governor of the canal strip and
making rules and regulations for its
government, shows the anomalous
character Of the authority there set up
and the far departure from American
standards. Nothing in this whole dis
startling to an American of old fash
Toned ideas than this exercise of an
absolutely autocratic authority over
territory that is now the property of
the United States, and supposedly
within the jurisdiction of its constitu-
ton and under the protection of its
laws.
The long and short of it is that the
president, by stroke of the pen, dele
exercised by the representatives of the
whole people to an official body,
against which there is practically no
possibility of protest and from any of
whose injuries or abuses there is no re-
course. The canal commission is to be
supreme over life and property and all
other interests on the isthmus. 1t is to
exercise all authority, executive, legis-
lative and judicial. 1t is to create civil
and criminal tribunals, it is to preserve
order and punish crime, it is to acquire
property at the public expense on it's
own motion, it is to build up a civil
service and to do, in general, any and
all those things which any govern
ment, either the most free or the most
despotic, assumes to perform.
1t is fitting, perhaps, that a territory
stolen outright from a friendly govern
ment, a country to possess which we
had to break through treaty bonds and
profess ourselves shameless to all the
world, should be so administered.
There is no form or pretense of Amer
lean citizenship there. There is to be
absolutism of the most antique and
hardened type. There is to be, as there
was in distant dependencies of the an
Gent monarchies of the world, an ire
sponsible commission with an auto
cratic head reporting to it's distant
chief, but so possessed Of local author
ity and so fortified against remon-
STRANGE or reproof that it possesses all
the elements of an absolute despotisn.
There is to be a satrapy down on the
isthmus, whose only check will be that
it must send an occasional report to
the imperator at Washington.
1t is highly amusing to see how n.y.
pocrisy and pretense enters into the
least detail of the creation of this
anomalous political entity. President
Roosevelt, with a serious face, admon-
ishes Gen. Davis and the commission
that they must construct a civil serv-
ice according to the rules and regula-
tons prescribed in the reform act ..as
far as practicable" No other express
sion sums up so well the disposition
and the wishes of President Roosevelt.
He is a reformer "as far as practical
able" He is sincere and hon
est man 'as far as practicable"
He is a friend and a believer in
American institutions @as far as prac-
ticable.' The modification and the
sorrow and the shame of it all is that
political exfgencies teach him the inn
practicability Of combining any of
these admirable qualities to any con-
siderable extent with the work of the
practical politician. President Roose-
welt has consented and helped to con-
struct petty colony down on the 18TH
mus under conditions which the Theo-
dore Roosevelt of twenty years ago
would have regarded with absolute
horror, and held. to be as impossible
under the flag of the United States as
the deliberate restoration Of slavery by
law.