The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-12-01

was yet in the Senate. a pure type of man and a high type of statesma n :. There was Dan Voorhees,. one of the foremost orators and most generous men of his generation. Ben Harrison was his colleague, and worthy even Ben Hills steel. Vance was there from North Carolina. q wonderful combina- tion--f ,ldier. orators tatesman and as ready in debate as any man who ever broke silence in the Senate,
 The new members were Hawley, Harrison. Hele. Frye. German, Conger, whom Joe Blackburn swore to be 'even meaner than he looked. and that's impossible; Van wyck,. who. &C., shag leather in his pants" like the elephant. Now, any one who ever looked at old Vans trousers was bound to think of the surplus hide on Jum- bos legs Perhaps there was no man at the National Capital who dreamed that the day was not distant when the new Senator from Rhode Island would be the most powerful individual Sem ator who ever sat in that body. So far as I know .,h ehas engaged in debate hilt to hilt, with tut two adversaries, and they were giants-John c. Carlisle Of Kentucky, in the fifty-f1rst Con- grSss. on the Mckinley tariff. and Will liam Lindsay. of Kentucky In the nifty third Congress. on the Wilson tarin. Here were two profound thinkers en- gagged by a man who got his kpowl- edge standing by the loom. And strange H is, that both these jurists utterly overthrow the practical man,
 Aidrich, after making the Dingley tariff to suit New England, gave us our present imperfect gold standard. ~x~f4A a rrrrr above half billion of which, is nearly 50 per cent. flat. And, strange to say. he now allows the Treasury to make monthly purchases of 100000 ounces Of silver for minor coins. when good husbandry imperatively demands that the subsidiary silver coin should De made of the Biand-Allison full legal tender silver dollars.
 Senator Aldrich is generally supposed to be out of sympathy with the new evangel, 1iippantly called the octopus chaser. But that is a crusade that must run its course. Congress passed the sherman law that requires the rail- roads to compete, and to emphasize the thing killed the pooling bin. The roads went ahead competing. for that is all that rebate is--competition. To illustrate: Two merchants are rivals at the cross roads. They have cases of boots they bought. perhaps rom the same jobber at the same price. The goods are marked say. $3.50 pair. and sold at that figure to their regular customers. respectively; but grasp. ing fellow comes along and these store- keepers get to competing for his trade. He will get the boots at $3, perhaps less, a pair. That is rebate. Here was the meat trust, the steel trust, the oil trust-all grasping feilows-and they made the railroads compete for their business. and thus got rebates.
 But along comes Senator Elktns with a law that makes it criminal to com pete. for that Is all the anti-rebate law Is. What is the poor octopus to do? The sherman law commands 1t to com pete; the Elkins law forbids it to com pete. The octopus is thus in the fix De Braeey was in the novel of Iyanhoe- Ceour de Lion with battleax in hand is in its front and burning Torquilstane Is in its rear.
 One of these days somebody will come forward with wisdom enough to compose the difficulty. The first effec- tive move will be the destruction of competition. The next will be to serve the public atsso low a cost that compe- tition will stay dead. That is the only possible solution; but the solon who would propose it now would soon find himself out of job.
 I wish I could get Aldrich.s opinion of that wonderful oration, Beveridge's debut in the Senate, the marvellous speech on the Philippines.
 Washington. November IS.
 Copyright. l907A by E. w. Newman.)