Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/621

Rh. Little or no heed is given to the primary question of capacity and public interests. Political considerations—that is, ability to help or to harm some one—control all elections and appointments. What is the next thing done? It is the preparation, introduction, discussion, and passage of the measures thought to be essential to the preservation of civilization. Here again political considerations control action. Such measures are introduced as will strengthen members with their constituents, or promote "the general welfare" of the party. Very rarely have they "the general welfare" of the public in view. Sometimes they seek to change district boundaries in such a way as to keep the opposition in a perpetual minority. Sometimes they have no other motive than the extortion of blackmail from individuals or corporations. Sometimes their object is to throw "sop to Cerberus"—that is, to pacify troublesome reformers within the party, like the prohibitionists and the civil-service reformers. Sometimes they authorize investigations into a department or a municipality with the hope that discoveries will be made that will assist the party in power or injure the party out of power; it happens not infrequently that they are undertaken to smother some scandal, like the mismanagement of the Pennsylvania treasury, or to whitewash some rascal. Sometimes they create commissions, superintendents, or inspectors, or other offices to provide rewards for party hacks and heelers. Finally, there are the appropriation bills. Only a person ignorant of the ways of legislators could be so simple-minded as to imagine that they are miracles of economy, or that they are anything else but the products of that clumsy but effective system of pillaging known as log-rolling, which enables each to get what he wants with the smallest regard for the interests of the taxpayer.

It is, however, during the debates over these wise and patriotic measures that the public is favored with the most edifying exhibition of the universal contempt of the legislator for its interests. They disclose all the scandalous practices of a political campaign. There are misrepresentations, recriminations, and not infrequently, as in the case of Sumner, personal assaults. A perverse inclination always exists toward those discussions that will put some one "in a hole," or enable some one to arouse party passion. For this purpose nothing is so effective as a foreign question, like a Cuban belligerency resolution, or a treaty for the annexation of Hawaii, or a domestic question, like responsibility for the crime of 1873, or the panic of 1893, or a comparison of party devotion to the interests of the "old soldier." Not the slightest heed, as has been shown on several occasions during the past few years, is paid to the shock that may be given to business or to the disturbance of pacific relations with foreign powers. In fact, the greater the danger involved in the discussion of a delicate