The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-12-20
1RHIEI IHHIHHEl ElNIM nlIla

clusion of the present session it will be found that the sixtieth Congress 'shas outdone every other American R'Congress in the number of bills intro duced, and that it has outdone every other legislative body in the world as the snake outruns the snail Forty thousand bills will have been offered, printed and filled away. Nine-tenths Of them have called for the appropria- ton of money and seven-eighths of these call for the appropriation of money for private purposes. The oth- CT tenth represents more kinds of ideas about matters of government than the best political economist could hope to classify
 No one has yet had the hardihood to attempt to tell exactly how much money is asked for la the flood of 4o.- 900 bills that pour down upon the de- voted head of modern Congress. But that 1t is a sum beyond the grasp of most people Is appreciated by those ac- Quainted with the terms of the aver age bill. First in importance with
 respect to numbers comes the pension
 list of bills Nintroduced. More than twenty thousand people have come be-
 fore the Sixtieth Congress asking for
 pensions and increase of pensions
 which they could not get under the
 operations of the general pension law.
 Every member of each House has
 long string of pension bills, and wniie the majority of these never get furth-
 er than a committee pigeon-hole, the t aggregate amount of money they ask
 goes away up into the millions.
 The next largest class of bills tnN
 troduced IS those flor the relief Of" this person or that or of organizations and corporations. There are thousands Of these. From the foundation of the government down to the present there have been people who felt that the
 government has done something or
 emitted to do something which en- titles them to get some money from its
 Treasury on moral, If not on legal grounds. These people beset their rep- resentatives in Congress to try to get them the money they seek. If all of these claims were paid at face value, fl would take about as much as the
 cost of the whole Civil War to meet them. The great majority of them originated in that war. Here is a church and there a school-house, here
 is a lodgeroom of a secret order and there an eleemosynary institution which was destroyed or damaged by Federal troops. They air seek fepar- ation at the hands of the government. Then comes the private individual He or his relatives before him were loyal 60 the Union during the great struggle and now they want pay for property taken, damaged, or destroyed by the Federal troops.
 But so long as men want to come to Congress and their usefulness is meas tired in the eyes of their constituents by the number of bills carrying an ap- propriation that they get through, so ionE will the average member try to get all these bills passed It Is this tbat has led 6 thoughtful member or the House to propose ari amendment to the Federal Constitution whose pur- pose it is to protect Congress from the insistent demands of it's individual
 members. He proposes a constitution al inhibition against these private pen- sion and private claim bills. providing that Congress cannot pass them where they are covered by existing general law. That his amndment will never become a part of tn eConstituton teens to go without saying
 After the private bills in numbers and importance come those providing for the erection of public buildings. The representative who does not in- troduce from one to dozen of these bills is a rare one indeed. It Is gem orally regarded by the voters of a con- gressionaI district as sign of greater statesmanship for their representative to get a public building appropriation than 1t is to frame an important and far-reaching law. A public building approprition spells a return to Con- gress where the framing of a great law would not. An intance of this kind occurred at the recent election Representative Hepburn was the au- thor of the rate law, yet his consti- tuents preferred man who would pay less attention to law-rnaking and more to getting appropriations for his dis trict With sundry instances of this kind as lightho ouses in the dangerous seas of legislation the average repre- sentative steers his bark in the appro- priation channel He asks for build ing in every town. Last year they asked for public buildings whose to- tai cost would have been $125,00 ,00O. Congress took off thel hundred million and gave them the $25,000.000.
 What applies to the public building question applies with equal force to rivers and harbors. To the people of that section 1t is vastly more impor- tant that Squidunk Creek should be deepened than that the Panama Canal should be dug. If all the money had been provided, for deepS waterways that was asked for by individual mem- bers of congress last session. 1t would have made the request of the Rivers and Harbors Congress seem like beg gar asking a man for quarter.
 One thing Is certain, if every bill calling for money that has been intro duced in the Sixtteth Congress should be passed. the Ways and Means Com mittee of the House would have to work day and night for many years to come to devise sufficient means of raising enough revenue to meet the expenditures under them. Some years ago there was a representative who boasted that he had gotten greater ap- propriations for his district than any one else in Congress. His opponent for the nomination rejoined that if every other representative was as un- patriotically devoted to public piund- CT, the Treasury could never meet the appropriations of Congress. But the plea fell on deaf ears.
 With 4s5 men in Congress each of