Waterbury evening Democrat., 1906-02-28
Foraker Makes His
 Promised Speech.
OPPOSES THE ! H BILL B |,
A Large Number of Spectators a, We'll as Many Senators Listened to Foraker's Discourse-The
 Santo Domingo Treaty.

Washington, Feb 2S.-The senat
 committee on foreign relations to-da, lby a party vote agreed to report favor ably the Santo Domingo treaty. {
 number Of amendments were added t, the treaty before it was reported. Immediately after the conclusion o l the senate business to-day, MT Forake took the floor to deliver his promised speech on the railroad rate bill. Tn, galleries were filled and there was ;
 large attendance of senators. Mir FOraker conceded that some evil exist ill connection with the railroads
 but urged that all of them could b,
 more effectively met by amending tn
 Elkins law than by passing the pend ing bill He announced his regret a differing from the president, but sai( he could not see his way clear to pur sue any other course.
 He gave a general review of tht history of the railroad development o1 ~the country and passed to the consid eration of the evils of the ssyten which he said are necessarily incident to the upbuilding of so vast an inter est. His attitude towards the pending railroad rate bill was correctly out lined in his first paragraph, in which he said of the bill, Tt is so contrary to the spirit of our institutions and of such drastic and revolutionary char sacter that, if not in its immediate eff fect,.at least as precedent, the conse- quences are likely to be most unusual and far reaching"
 He discussed the railroad evils as of three classes, excessive rates, re bates and discriminatiOns.
 He found little to complain of under the first heading, but said there are some instances of charges that are too high and he thought prompt and ef- fective remedy should be provided.
 A more serious evil he found in re- bates, and he traced the present exten- sive railroad consultations to the fact that the supreme court decisions against pooling had left the roads without protection from the rebate system except to resort to some gen eral understanding. Referring to the Elkins law, he said:
 "There has been no serious attempt to enforce this law to prevent discrim- nations as to localities, but a glance at its provisions will suffice, to show that it is as broad, direct. explicit and efficient to remedy that kind of an evil, wherever it may exist, as 1t has been found to be as to personal dis crimlnation. That the law has not been tested in this respect is not due to any fault of the law. but because no one has seen fit to invoke it."
 "The fault" he added, "is not with the existing law, but with the officials who have not enforced it."
 Announcing his own position, he said:
 T believe in the court plan, as con- tradistinguished from the rate making plan, not alone because it is much simpler, much more expeditions, much more efficient and without expense 10 the shipper, but because, in addition to all that it avoids all legal and consti- tutional questions. while the rate mak- ing plan as set forth in this bill en- counters a number of such questions that are of the most serious character and some of them, in my judgment, fatal"