IN Allison of Iowa the Re-
publican-Democratic "mer-
ger" for betraying the peo-
ple to "the interests" has
about its craftiest senatorial
agent. If he were a man of
courage and decision, and
if he "represented" a Rhode
Island whose senators could
flout its public opinion, not
Aldrich but Allison would be the leader of
the "merger." His skill at duplicity needs
no other tribute than the fact that, despite
an unbroken record of forty-three years of
betrayal of the people to "the interests,"
especially the people of his own state, he
has been a senator continuously for thirty-
three years. How politically careless have
we been, how short-memoried, how credulous
of words and neglectful of deeds, how easily
tricked by cunning appeals to prejudice! We
have been struggling with the great thieves
operating through railways and tariffs,
and have not seen that it was the Senate
that determined our national laws, super-
intended the distribution of our prosperity,
and selected our national judges. We
have been defeated because we have not
realized that it was our Allisons and Al-
driches and Lodges and Baileys in far-
away Washington, in the Senate, who were
making our struggles futile--were making,
and are.

Allison's public beginnings were in 1863,
when he, a poor Dubuque lawyer of thirty-
four, was sent to the House because about
all the best young men of that then sparsely
populated state were at the war. He found
Congress, which the people thought ab-
sorbed in patriotic labor, really possessed
by and busy for the great graft-seekers
through war contracts and Union Pacific
and other Western enterprises in vast land
and franchise looting. Like him who
journeyed from Dan to Beersheba, young
Allison had fallen among thieves. But
they did not despoil and despitefully use
him; they made friends with him. Like
latter-day Joe Bailey, he was poor; but,
unlike Joe, he did not have to wait until
he was a senator before he suddenly struck
"pay-dirt" in quantity. To go into that
part of his career in detail would be to re-
tell the stupendous graft story of the Union
Pacific Credit Mobilier, etc.; Allison was
more or less active in and for all of those
huge "loans" and land grabs which cost
the people and netted "the interests"
thousands of millions, besides licenses in
perpetuity to extort rents and exorbitant
freight rates. He was hand in glove with
the chief "developers of the resources of
the country"--with John I. Blair, Morris
K. Jesup, Jim Fisk, L. B. Crocker, Oakes
Ames, and the rest.

One typical instance: It came out in
1873 that our poor young patriot had been
for some time owner of at least sixty thou-
sand dollars of Dubuque and Sioux City
stock; that he got it soon after his début
at Washington, along about 1867, when
with his aid the road got the valuable favor
of a Congressional act saving it from the
just forfeiture of its charter (act of March
2, 1867). Before the Congressional ( Wil-
son) investigation committee, compelled
by the public scandal over the many vast
and open robberies with Congressional aid,
they asked Allison on February 1, 1873,

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