Vol. XXII.

No. 262

The re-election of Senator Lodge is one of the events that gratify and encourage Republicans throughout the country in the midst of the senatorial elections which awaken apprehension. Fortunately he was elected by Republican votes and did not need the two Democratic votes which he received.

Certain Democrats, particularly those in the Montana legislature, affect to believe that when a member of that party votes against his party candidate, he must have been corrupted. This is not an unnatural opinion coming from the state of a Democratic copper king who was once ejected from the senate for corruption, but there is not in Massachusetts a half dozen men of any standing, who believed that those two votes were obtained by any improper influence. There were several other Democratic members of the General Court who preferred Senator Lodge to the Democratic candidate, who was unknown in politics, and this fact is sufficient to explain how two voted as they pleased and not as they were told.

It is a reflection upon the impulsiveness and bitterness of politics, and not upon Senator Lodge, that

after his long and brilliant career in public life he must escape defeat by a narrow margin. The time will come when it will be a wonder that he was not returned by a large majority and with general popular approval. Of course he had made enemies, partly by administering patronage and partly by taking an active part in home politics; and of course the wave of insurgency which swept over the country ran high in Massachusetts and was chiefly directed towards him; but there was very little sincerity in the criticisms that he was opposed to tariff progress, because his record was otherwise and not a few of the leading protectionists in the commonwealth felt that he had gone too far in meeting the tariff demands of the reform

ers.

Well, the fight is over and the changes in the Senate are such that he will be nearer the head than before and he will be a giant in the path of reckless adventurers who will seek in the name of progress to unsettle and endanger the laws and policies upon which prosperity depends. No man knows better than he knows the necessity of protection to Massachusetts and he is in a position to expose the danger of the many insidious attacks upon it. This may be one reason why some not very good protectionists opposed him. He has been advised to interpret his success as an instruction to take a new course on the tariff. This is absurd. He was reelected because he favored adequate protection, and not because he is amenable to instruction from its opponents.

His fourth term should be and we believe will be the crowning glory of an illustrious career. He can be and probably will be the leading Republican next to the President and if they work together, which is probable, they can restore their party to the confidence of the country and thus assure renewed and prolonged prosperity.

ALL GOOD PROTECTIONISTS.

The Boston Chamber of Commerce delegates to the Tariff Commission Convention in Washington gave a banquet to New England members of Congress on the 11th of January.

There were only two slight notes of discord. Ex-Governor Guild let slip a worn out expression in favor of taking the tariff out of politics. Congressman Hill of Connecticut told him it could not be done, for the people would continue to vote on the tariff policy of the country to determine whether it should be for Protection of Free Trade.

Mr. Guild replied that the country is committed to the protective policy.

There sat Henry M. Whitney, Bernard J. Rothwell, E. A. Filene,

John C. Cobb, and many others who have said more against protective tariffs than they have ever said for them, and not one of them dissented. Only two years ago most of them participated in a meeting of the Boston Merchants' Association in voting down a resolution taken bodily from the Republican national platform and in adopting a resolution for a "lower level of duties," without knowing or seeming to care whether that lower level would be protective

or not.

But then, that was a long time ago. Since then they have been learning that if they would speak for New England they must be the best protectionists in the country and that all that is necessary to that end is to get a tariff commission which will report facts, the inference being that present and former tariffs have not been founded on facts.

The other note of difference above alluded to came from Mr. E. A. Filene, who said that the fear of general revision is already beginning to paralyze business, and that New England has come to a family reunion "to eliminate any unjust burdens of a tariff law." Governor Foss thinks the unjust burdens extend all through it, and there are scores of the most experienced senators and representatives who think it impossible to lop off a limb here and there without affecting the whole system.

Now that everybody has become a good protectionist the Home Market Club appeals to the Fosses and the Filenes, the Whitneys and the Guilds to let all their little minor differences go and be practical. All they will have to do will be to cease thinking for themselves and leave the whole subject to a few men who will have no principles and no interests and will have nothing to do but to find out the costs of production.

The white dove always hovers over people who settle great problems in some such way as that, especially at the end of a feast.

A hundred years have passed since the birth of Horace Greeley, the best known of American editors and by far the most celebrated printer since Benjamin Franklin. The majority of thoughtful newspaper men would count Greeley as mentally inferior to Henry J. Raymond; the bulk of those who care for the sensational (a large client age) would give James Gordon Bennett the First the crown of leadership; no one would claim for Greeley the vast stores of information that lodged in the head of Charles A. Dana; and he may not have had the magnetism that won friends for Henry W. Grady. But, take him for all in all, Greeley, the country boy, the young printer, the philosopher, the man half-combative and haif benevolent, is a character that will live. His overwhelming defeat for the Presidency did for a few days seem to place him in a ridiculous light, but his death made the laughers ashamed of their mirth. He was a bold man, ready to condemn slavery in the days when Brooks struck down the unarmed Sumner, ready to bail Jefferson Davis in the days of a popular ballad about hanging a celebrated Mississippian on a sour apple tree. Greeley was old enough to remember days in which Pope

was still a fashionable poet; he read the Waverley novels as new books; he could recall the early verses of Whittier and the youthful jests of Holmes; he was sued for libel by Fenimore Cooper; he moved apace with Dickens; he came to New York before she had a railroad and he lived on beyond the days of railroads from ocean to ocean. Every topic that can affect human interests appealed to his restless brain. It is no wonder that Horace Greeley drew forth a volume from James Parton, but it is still better for us of today that we have Greeley's own account of politics, journalism and business as he saw them.

There might be, in the average reader's mind, a faint idea that Greeley, always fond of the experimental, would be inclined to the Free Trade side of the question. Yet his "Recollections of a Busy Life," bright and spirited as the latest letter of the best newspaper correspondent, show us how he recognized the need of Protection and with what bitter contempt he viewed those who wore the Protectionist livery until it was convenient to discard it. School histories are too condensed to give the facts of the great swindle of 1844, and let us be thankful that Greeley has put them