'defeat for Russia and triumph for Japan. Russia will be driven out of China for a century to come. Her prestige in the Far East is gone and Japan is in the ascendant, her national security accomplished and her station among the great Powers of the world recognized.

As the result of the peace of Portsmouth the United States beyond a doubt stands higher today in the estimation of the world than ever before. In the person of President Roosevelt this nation has held the scale evenly balanced between Japan and Russia, has resolutely kept them to the work, and in spite of jealousy and bitterness has made their reconciliation a durable benefit to the world. Mr. Roosevelt gains immensely thereby in renown and popularity. When the time comes for further honors, he will be almost invincible. Whether he sought it or not, by this last act he has fixed himself more firmly in the popular regard. The opposition was already broken and disorganized. He has swept it away. What he now protests that he will not seek or accept he will find himself forced to take if it is thrust upon him by the overwhelming sentiment of the country.

MORE MUDDLING OF GOVERNMENT

[August 21, 1907]

I BELIEVE in a national incorporation law for corporations engaged in interstate commerce. I believe, furthermore, that the need for action is most pressing as regards those corporations which, because they are common carriers, exercise a quasi-public function, and which can be completely controlled in all respects by the Federal Government by the exercise of the power conferred under the interstate commerce clause, and if necessary under the post-road clause of the Constitution.-From President Roosevelt's Provincetown speech.

Always more law, more law, like the daughters of the horse-leech crying "Give! Give!" When will the Presi

'dent's clamor for new legislation end? When will he give the legitimate business interests of the country a breathing spell?

The grave defect of Mr. Roosevelt's corporation policy is that he has no policy. He has advocated a constitutional amendment to enable the Government to suppress the trusts; he has advocated publicity as the first essential step in controlling these corporations and secured the agencies of such publicity; he has promised the strictest enforcement of the Sherman law; he has explained why "good" trusts should not be prosecuted at all; he has advocated Federal licenses for all corporations engaged in interstate commerce; he has undertaken to have receivers appointed for corporations that violate the law; he has advanced the astounding doctrine that under the postroads clause Congress can control any common carrier that transports the mails; he has demanded and obtained the power through a commission to fix railway rates; he has declared that no criminal, high or low, whom the Government could convict would escape punishment; he has explained why the criminal prosecution of these criminals. is generally inexpedient-and now he has arrived at a Federal incorporation law as the sovereign remedy.

Mr. Roosevelt prosecutes a few big corporations, and a dozen State Governors set up in business as uncompromising trust-busters. Mr. Roosevelt gains a Federal rate bill through Congress, and twenty State Legislatures, bereaved of passes and free transportation, begin to regulate railroads. Their powers had lain dormant for years; their duties had been neglected with solemn and studied care, but under the inspiration of Mr. Roosevelt's success and Mr. Bryan's applause a frenzy for regulation runs from one end of the country to the other. In only one of these twenty States, New York, is any of this regulation shaped along the lines of rational intelligent statesmanship.

To make confusion worse confounded a sharp conflict of authority has arisen between State authorities and Federal courts in half a dozen States. Judge Jones, of the United States District, has enjoined the authorities of Alabama, including every sheriff and every solicitor, from enforcing the new rate law against the Louisville and Nashville Railroad until its validity can be determined. In the same State the Southern Railroad surrendered to the authorities because it feared to conduct its case in the Federal courts on account of a bitterly hostile local senti

In North Carolina it made a similar surrender for the same reasons, and the Governor of North Carolina, in an outburst of patriotism, explains that while he would have called out the militia to enforce the decree of State courts against Federal courts, he would not have ordered his State troops to fire on Federal troops.

More legislation has been passed in a single year than the courts can dispose of in the next three years. Of this mass of railroad legislation not a single act has yet been upheld by the United States Supreme Court. The validity of even the national rate law is yet to be determined, and Secretary Taft admitted in his speech Monday that the United States Supreme Court has never 'decided the question whether Congress could delegate to a commission its power to fix rates.

From every economic point of view the situation of the railroads is perplexing, if not precarious. The National Government and forty-five State governments are seemingly set on doing the same thing in the same way. Any railroad long enough to cross a State border is subject to from three to twenty different regulations and regulators. Not content with supplying the deficiencies of Federal regulations, the States are trying to exercise coequal and co-ordinate powers, thus creating forty-six different masters for the railroad interests as a whole to

serve.

Whatever crimes railroad manipulators have committed in the past, whatever stupidities their present management may be guilty of, the roads cannot be subject to forty-six kinds of rates and forty-six different masters and survive. They would be ground into bankruptcy between the upper and nether millstones of State and Federal authority, to the lasting injury of every wage-worker, to the semi-paralysis of all business and appalling damage to all honest industries.

It is double folly to invent new schemes of regulation and excite new unrest when acts already passed are yet to be worked out in practice and tried out in the courts. Never before in the history of the country has so much actual administration been crowded upon the courts, and especially the United States courts. Never before has the Supreme Court been called upon to grapple with so many radical and fundamental questions involving the control of property and business. More and more the power of government is drifting into the hands of the judiciary to create general suspense and uncertainty, for the machinery of the courts moves slowly, while the machinery of legislation is revolving at the highest speed.

Is it surprising that the business interests of the country are stunned and bewildered, or that the whole financial fabric is twisted and tangled?

Nothing is settled. Nothing is certain. The demand for new experimental legislation goes on before the older experimental legislation has been tried and tested. Confidence is shaken, and confidence is the mother of credit. Credit is weakened, and without credit the business of the country cannot be carried on. This is a simple fact which is worth a pound of all the theories that even so versatile a genius as President Roosevelt can invent.

Although New York is the richest city in the world, the municipal government cannot obtain money to carry on needed improvements or pay contractors in full for

work already done. Neither at public nor private sale has the Comptroller been able to dispose of bonds already authorized. Other cities, no matter how good their credit, are having equal difficulty in borrowing money. Wall Street declares that railroad bonds cannot be sold on account of Mr. Roosevelt's unwise regulation of railroads. and his prosecution of rich offenders.

The courts can enforce justice and prevent injustice, but they cannot 'decree confidence and credit. Neither can Legislatures legislate confidence and credit. Mr. Roosevelt cannot proclaim confidence and credit. We are not censuring the President for enforcing the anti-trust laws and upholding the power of the Federal Government over interstate commerce. It was time that power was vindicated.

For twenty-four years The World has urged the authority of the United States Government to protect the people from the rapacity of trusts, monopolies and great corporations. The Sherman law, which The World insistently advocated, was a tremendous triumph for public opinion, but it remained dead until Mr. Roosevelt quickened it into life. Mr. Cleveland regarded it with indifference; Mr. Olney, his Attorney-General, treated it with open contempt. Then came Mr. McKinley, with Mark Hanna brazenly selling to corporations the privilege of violating the law in exchange for campaign contributions. There is no more shameful chapter in American history.

Is it surprising that financiers and trust managers came to regard the Sherman law as a rather disreputable joke? If the United States Government showed no respect for its own statute, how could individuals be expected to volunteer such respect? The belief was generally established in financial circles that the anti-trust act was only a convenient decree for filling campaign chests, and that the purchase of immunity was a sacred duty which every manager of a great corporation owed to his stockholders.