The Treason of the Senate

WE have now read the records of the three chief men of the Senate--Aldrich, the master of the Republican machine; Gorman, the late leader of the Democratic machine; Spooner, Aldrich's chief lieutenant, the chief spokesman, chief legal adviser, and chief floor-manager of the great senatorial "merger" to license and protect "the interests" in levying greedily upon American labor and capital, especially upon America's annual twenty billions of interstate commerce. There is a fourth leader, younger than these three and newer to the Senate; but, because of his aggressive abilities and because of the death of Gorman, he is rapidly pushing to the front. If this young man, Joseph Weldon Bailey, is reëlected by the Texas legislature next winter, and if the present so-called Republican but really Aldrich majority is replaced before 1913 by the Gorman kind of Democratic majority, he will be the leader of the Senate. We have found the Senate to be the citadel of the present unfair distribution of our national prosperity, the chief cause of the elevation of luxurious chicanery and of the depression of honest industry; therefore, it behooves us to scan Bailey's record carefully.

Of course, in the House, in the Senate, and on the stump, Bailey has spoken as strenuously for people and country as any other politician. He is not surpassed in that respect by any of the rest of the band of expert raisers of dust over the Senate arena as a cover for the acts of treason. But words are not significant of the real man. If words meant character, Judas himself with his "Hail, Master!" would rank as a very Jonathan of fidelity. Let us disregard Bailey the talker. Let us ask only, What has Baileydone?

He came to Washington, to the House, fourteen years ago last December, when but twenty-eight. His obstreperously uncon

Click for a larger version

SNAP SHOT OF SENATOR BAILEY

-52-