Sec. 4. From and after the 1st day of June, 1920, it shall be unlawful for any alien, other than a seaman, to enter or attempt to enter the United States without a passport duly viséd by a person duly authorized by the Secretary of State to issue such visé: Provided, That this section shall not apply to nationals of Great Britain domiciled in the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the Bermudas, or the Bahamas, or to nationals of France domiciled in St. Pierre and Miquelon, or to citizens of Cuba, Panama, or Mexico.

Sec. 5. From and after the passage of this act every citizen or person, other than a seaman, owing allegiance to or entitled to the protection of the United States and departing from the United States or any of the possessions thereof for any foreign country, except the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, St. Pierre, and Miquelon, Panama, the Bermudas, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Cuba, or departing from the United States or any of the possessions thereof by way of any of said countries for any other country shall be required to bear a valid passport..

The names of Stephen G. Porter, John Jacob Rogers and H. D. Flood, signed to this report as managers for the House, and of H. C. Lodge and G. M. Hitchcock for the Senate, will excite little surprise among a people accustomed to see politicians stand quietly where they are hitched, but the signature of William E. Borah will occasion keen disappointment among many who had expected better things of the Idaho Senator.

What reception was given this complete subversion of a fundamental American tradition? A supine press uttered no word of warning; an unconscious public, occupied with the vain effort to make both ends meet, gave no attention to what was passing; and it looked as though a complaisant Congress, without a single word of protest, would rivet permanently on the limbs of a toopatient people the new chain of government control with which they had been temporarily bound during a period of war.

combined with Mr. Palmer's espionage system and Mr. Archie Stevenson's list of eminent undesirables, the experiences of James H. Maurer and Morris Hillquit and other economic radicals during the war attest.

The protestants, amusingly enough, were supported by Chairman Johnson, of the Immigration Committee, one of the foremost among alienhaters and witch-burners, who was peeved because the jurisdiction of his committee was infringed. Defenders of the measure relied on the familiar argument concerning alien disturbers and the upset condition of the world. On the vote the conference report was rejected by the emphatic majority of 192 to 97.

Despite the fierce nationalism of the war period, national lines in government are breaking down. We are face to face with an international government conspiracy against the liberties of the people. We speak soberly and advisedly. There is already sufficient evidence of the international operation of government spy systems. This precious scheme of passport control is only another ramification of that international class government by which the world's rulers propose to keep economic disturbers at home in jail where they belong, and thus to make all countries safe for things as they are.

The theory of it is plain enough. Since the war for democracy was brought to a triumphant close, right is of course everywhere victorious. Those who criticize or oppose existing government are therefore perverse disturbers who deserve to be locked up. Hence the wise and good of all lands unite to lock them up and prevent their migration. Nothing could be simpler-granting only the wisdom and goodness of governments.

The

But who any longer really believes in the extraordinary wisdom and goodness of the politicians who fill the offices in all the governments, including our own? Getting oneself chosen to public office does not change dross into gold. record of our Department of State during the five years now happily past is scarcely such as to make thoughtful persons wish to turn over to its functionaries uncontrolled power to determine who may enter and leave our ports. Truly man is a strange animal.

of the Congressional Record of April 21 occupied with this measure, and no less than 28 pages of the Record of April 28.

The value of standardized containers is plain without argument, and it is interesting to see how Congress sets about getting them. The bill brought in by the Committee on Weights and Measures provides in section 2, for example, that round stave baskets shall be of four sizes only, of half-bushel, bushel, 12-bushel and 2-bushel capacity. As to the bushel basket: "The inside diameter at the upper inner edge of the top inside hoop shall be 17 inches; the average inside depth shall be not less than 1034 inches; the web shall consist of 20 intersecting staves, each not less than one-eighteenth of an inch thick and of such length that they will form the sides and bottom of a basket which shall contain 32 quarts, standard dry measure." The man who makes for sale a basket with 21 staves or with an inside diameter of 18 inches at the upper inner edge of the top hoop, or a basket of any other sizes than the four prescribed, subjects himself to a fine of $100 or imprisonment for sixty days.

If one makes a one-peck hamper he must put in it a bottom one-half inch thick; if a half-bushel, bushel, or 11⁄2-bushel hamper, a five-eighths-inch bottom. Thus we go on through more than a folio page of closely printed matter sagely specifying the exact detail of each kind of container that may be manufactured.

This done, the bill authorizes the secretary of agriculture, "whenever he finds it necessary," to prescribe other specifications, but without changing the capacities. That is to say, having provided a straitjacket, Congress wisely gives the secretary the power, if the victim cannot live in it, to change the dimensions of the jacket.

Of course some persons are inclined to find fault with our entire present method of salvation. through enactment of new penal statutes. Such might be inclined to say that it is not an intelligent thing for the highest legislative authority in the land to spend a large part of two legislative days wrangling over the number of staves in a peach basket or the thickness of the wood in its bottom. They might even urge that it would be wise to turn over the working out of such details to a competent administrative authority, who could proceed in cooperation with the producers concerned to establish regulations adapted to local conditions. Some of these scoffers, even if they did not agree with Congressman Wingo that "this bill is typical of socialism," might in their hearts share his view that it is "damphoolishness gone to seed." Such persons, however, are undoubtedly bought with Russian gold; they have probably been bribed from Moscow to aid in confusing our measures so that we may be brought to anarchy.

We share no such views. Like all other red

How It Is Done

We cannot refrain from some curiosity, however, as to just how these "savings" are made and what part of them is real. First of all, it is to be noted that the House figures are not final. Cases have been known in which the House made an economy record, only to be overruled by the Senate-with an apparently perfect understanding beforehand as to what was to happen. The House this year cut the river and harbor bill to $12,400,000, and the Senate raised the amount to $24,000,000. The House gave the Army $377,000,000; the Senate added $42,000,000 more.

The House appropriated $214,000,000 for pensions; but in addition it had already passed the so-called Fuller bill adding $65,000,000 to the Civil War pension roll, and that measure has since passed the Senate and received the approval of

the President; while a further bill granting a service pension to Spanish War veterans at he age of 62 is rolling merrily along on the way to enactment. Economizers wisely decline to let the right hand know what the left hand doeth.

Another type of saving appears in the railroad deficiency bill. Director General Hines asked for $420,000,000 to wind up the affairs of the Railroad Administration. The House Committee on Appropriations discovered that $30,000,000 of this sum was already provided under the transportation act. Further, it found that the Railroad Administration holds nearly $90,000,000 of liberty bonds thrown back on it by employees unable to pay their subscriptions in full. These bonds the committee simply ordered transferred to the War Finance Corporation at par, thus reducing the assets of that organization by $90,000,000 and "saving" the people that amount. At least, that sum does not appear in the tax bill.

Not wholly dissimilar is the largest House saving in the sundry civil bill, as brought out in the debate of May 7. Of the total of $1,036,000,000 called for in the estimates, no less than $446,270,652 was requested by the Shipping Board. The board will have $60,000,000 available on July 1, and during the year it expects to receive from various sources at least $140,000,000 more. So the bill carries no direct appropriation, but simply makes available the balance of July 1 and the sums to be received during the year. We thus "save" four hundred and forty-six millions, yet mar ge to spend at least $200,000,000 of the sum requested. Truly, economy is an interesting game on the eve of an election.

But more than this, as Representative Byrns pointed out in the House on January 29 last, partisans anxious to make an economy record for campaign purposes cut appropriations only to make up the required sums later in deficiency bills. Thus the 1920 estimates asked $71,473,000 for the War Risk Bureau, the House cut the amount to $50,000,000, thus "saving" more than $21,000,000, only to add $55,000,000 in a deficiency appropriation. It cut the $21,000,000 asked for vocational training to $13,000,000, and then had to add $12,000,000 in a deficiency act. The country would appreciate a little more plain honesty and a little less partisan jockeying in such matters. The word is going around Washington that bureau chiefs have been told that they need not cut their organizations because of reduced appropriations, as they will be taken care of in deficiency bills.

To say all this is not to minimize in the least the good work of Congress. A cut of $763,000,000 from the departmental estimates for army, navy, and fortifications is an occasion for real gratitude, even if it does leave a total of $821,000,000 appropriated by the House for those purposes.

It is no simple matter to get down from the enormous military expenditures of the war. But

the members of the House, with ear closer to the ground than the departmental chiefs, to say nothing of the army and navy experts, realize that there are no votes in appropriations that run into the billions. Despite the monstrous military propaganda of the past five years, the great body of Americans are not yet converted to the discredited system of European militarism. So long as that is true, their servants in Congress will not dare go too far in military appropriations just before an election.

Sundry Economies

An examination of the sundry civil bill discloses some interesting facts. It carries $428,000,000, as against $127,000,000 in 1916. Of the $300,000,000 additional in this year's law, all but $19,000,000 is directly chargeable to the war. The sum of $125,000,000 is appropriated as compensation for soldiers, $46,000,000 for their hospital treatment, $90,000,000 for their vocational training, and $21,500,000 for the return of bodies from France. Wherever one looks at increased government expenditures he finds the name of Mars written at the foot of the bill.

The increase of less than $19,000,000 over 1916 in the normal expenses covered by the sundry civil bill is easily explained by the increased cost of labor and materials-but even that is largely a war cost. Unhappily, in order to keep down expense, many valuable services are being starved, despite Mr. Good's statement that "the reductions will not prevent the healthful and vigorous functioning of every needed governmental activity."

The present bill carries practically nothing for construction of public buildings, building appropriations being almost exclusively for maintenance. Indeed, an appropriation to repair a leaky roof on the Treasury building was opposed by some watchful members. Perhaps they thought no obstruction should be put in the way of anything's getting into the Treasury. Requests for practically $70,000,000 for building construction were refused, on the ground that such appropriations would necessitate additional taxes and would further have to be carried out at abnormal costs. This of course means simply that such expense is being deferred; and as the committee indicates, "when these conditions improve it will be necessary to build additional facilities for the Lighthouse Service, to build additional public buildings for government activities, to improve the highways in the national parks, and to make other needed construction outlays."

More serious than the delay of the building program is the failure to provide for the continued expansion of the scientific and technical activities of the government (which, by the way, are responsible for little more than one per cent of the present year's expenditures). It is on this side that the government is performing services indis

pensable to the people; yet it is here that picayune economies are effected at serious cost to the efficiency of the entire work.

Justice and the Law

One appropriation that well-informed and thinking Americans of the old school will not greatly regret to see curtailed is the sum put at disposal of the Department of Justice for "detection and prosecution of crimes"-not that Americans do not want crimes detected and prosecuted; but they have had so much experience of the methods of the attorney general that they do not care to furnish added facilities for work in his Bureau of Intimidation, Publicity and Propaganda. This year Mr. Palmer got $2,600,000 for his purposes; for next year he wanted $3,500,000, but declared himself able to get on with a million less. He proposed to spend a million in the campaign against alien radicals and anarchists, half that sum in reducing the cost of living and prosecuting profiteers, and the rest of his appropriation in running down other crimes. The House allowed him two millions in all-about two millions too much, as Mr. Palmer's office is run.

In discussing this item on the floor, Congressman MacCrate remarked aptly:

This bill carries an appropriation for books for the Department of Justice. It seems to me among those books there should be the Constitution of the United States, the Federalist, and a copy of the Revised Statutes of the United States, for I do not believe that outside of the Department of Justice there is such ignorance of the limitation of the powers of that department as there exists in the department.

No radical leader in this generation has done more to unsettle the nerves of the American people than has the Attorney General. He has awakened class antagonism to a greater pitch than any preacher of class warfare. He borrows the bitterest terms of denunciation and hurls them indiscriminately here and there and elsewhere at portions of our people. Whenever the country seems ready to settle down and the national nerves are about normal he breaks out, crying, "The Republic is endangered.”

It is important to get clear both the facts and the meaning of the wide-open breach between the Departments of Justice and LaEmasculating bor; for it has a signficance far a Department beyond anything merely political or personal. The bitter fight now being waged between employers and employees has here come to a head within the administration itself.

It has long been an open secret in Washington that the entire Department of Labor is under fire. In a notable speech delivered on April 23, Congressman Huddleston, one of the few men at the Capitol who dare call their souls their own, declared plainly:

The Department of Labor has been practically emasculated by this Congress; its employment service, intended to get men jobs, has been disbanded; every criticism that could be uttered has been cast at the Department of Labor and at every officer connected with it upon the false charge of some partiality to men who work and to their organizations.

With a significant joining of ideas, Mr. Huddleston went on:

When Mr. Gary stood at the Industrial Conference, he held industrial conditions of America in the hollow of his hand; he decided against the rule of harmony and fair consideration of labor disputes; decided in favor of the old and not a new enlightened system, for the old conditions of economic war between the men who work and the men who employ. Because of him the Industrial Conference failed.

We are in the midst of a tremendous anti-labor drive. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace; for the industrial leaders of the country have apparently made up their minds to have it out with labor here and now. A great openshop (anti-union) movement, which started with the Associated Industries of Seattle, is rolling eastward like a devastating flood, destroying established labor relations. The breaking of the steel strike and "the strong-arm suppression of the coal strike" were but important incidents in what is now evident as a country-wide movement to put labor in its place.

In this struggle the Department of Justice of the United States, unhappily, has squarely taken sides-with the employers. Mr. Palmer rushed into the coal strike with his injunction, doubtless illegal, though never subjected to test, owing to the pusillanimity of the miners' leaders. The attorney general carried on his Communist raids with the most extravagant publicity. When the "outlaw" railroad strike broke out, he hastened to declare that it was led by radicals and revolutionaries, and he even had the temerity to bring in the name of William Z. Foster, who for weeks had been sitting quietly in his own rooms in Pittsburgh writing the history of the steel strike. Mr. Foster promptly and properly branded the attorney general's statement as a falsehood. It is a sore misfortune that Mr. Palmer's course has been such as to convince thousands of thoughtful and peaceable wage earners that in the days to come employers may rely on the Department of Justice to help them break strikes or accomplish other ends in opposition to labor.

The Department of Labor, on the other hand, has pursued the method of conciliation and adjustment in the contest. Witness Secretary Wilson's efforts in the coal strike, and his attempts to administer the deportation law so as to avoid,. so far as possible, intimidating labor and doing injustice to the alien worker. But "he that is not for us is against us"; the anti-labor interests and

their congressional henchmen have therefore marked the department for slaughter, and have already begun, in fact, killing it by inches.

Post and Palmer

It is against such a background, and not as a mere isolated incident, that the attack on Assistant Secretary Post must be viewed. When that able and conscientious official on May 7 appeared before the House Committee on Rules to defend himself against charges brought by the Committee on Immigration, he came in reality not as an individual, but as the representative of an idea and a point of view almost diametrically opposed to that of Mr. Palmer's department.

For months the Department of Justice has been carrying on a campaign of terrorism, nominally directed against alien "reds," actually "aimed at manual labor as a class" and designed "to strike terror into the heart of every foreigner in this country and to make him feel that he dare not claim for higher wages or take part in a strike," to quote again the congressman previously referred to. In this campaign Mr. Palmer had to have the cooperation of the secretary of labor, who under the law has sole authority to determine when a warrant of deportation shall issue.

On December 21 the "soviet ark" set sail; though certain individuals among its passengers unquestionably came within the statute, it is now morally certain that a great proportion of the group were illegally deported. For the injustice and inhumanity of that proceeding the secretary of labor must bear his full share of responsibility, and likewise for the decision that the simple fact of membership in the Communist party was cause for deportation.

However, with a more intimate knowledge of all the facts involved, and possibly, too, a keener sense of the actual course of public opinion, Mr. Wilson plucked up courage to resist the "ship or shoot" demand of the Department of Justice in that vast number of individual cases in which liability to deportation was not clearly shown by the evidence. Thereupon the labor baiters started in full cry after Assistant Secretary Post, who had acted for the secretary of labor in most of the cases. The House Committee on Immigration trumpeted forth charges against Mr. Post of violation of law and sympathy with anarchists, and Representative Hoch, of Kansas, rushed in where angels fear to tread with a resolution calling for the impeachment of the assistant secretary.

This resolution had to be smothered, but matters had by this time reached such a pass that the Rules Committee was obliged to give a hearing to Mr. Post. That gentleman gave an extremely good account of himself. He had no diffi

culty in convicting his critics, the Immigration Committee, of ignorance of the law or worse, and of failure to put into their report the evidence on which his official decisions were based-evidence which, as he conclusively showed, justified his action in cases where deportation warrants were canceled.

Not only did he thoroughly vindicate his own position. By showing the impossibility of relying on the findings of some of the immigration inspectors, before whom deportation hearings must be held under the law, he pointed out the running sore in the Department of Labor, namely, the activities of the commissioner general of immigration. His showing, indeed, was so striking that the Rules Committee felt obliged to summon both the immigration commissioner and the attorney general to make reply to his statements of fact. Meantime the Committee on Immigration, which has been particularly blatant in its criticism of Mr. Post, has rather drawn in its horns. As the truth of the situation is gradually disclosed, the position of the assistant secretary of labor becomes stronger and stronger.

A Report We Did Not See

One announcement we do not remember having seen is that the public debt increased by $246,000,000 during April. Of course it didn't, but that is no reason why we should not have had an announcement that it did, judging from earlier experience. At the beginning of April, for example, we were regaled with a Treasury report that the debt had been cut by $705,660,000 during March, standing at the figure of $24,698,000,000 when the month ended. On the same basis we expected to read that the debt rose by practically a quarter of a billion during April, standing at $24,945,000,000 when we entered the merry month of May; but if such an announcement was given out it escaped our attention.

What actually happened was that by reason of heavy seasonal tax receipts during March and light ones in April, receipts exceeded disbursements by $561,500,000 during the first month, and failed to equal them by $188,071,000 during the second. So we redeemed certificates of indebtedness during March and issued new ones during April. The latter process has continued during May, and it has been found necessary, under existing financial conditions, to raise the interest rate on the latest issue to 51% per cent.

For the fiscal year up to the end of April, excluding principal of the public debt, Treasury receipts exceeded disbursements by $402,379,000. Taking into account changes in the principal of the public debt and in the general fund of the Treasury, the national debt appears to have increased by just about that amount. The disagreeable fact must be faced that we are not yet making