PERTINENT COMMENT
PERTINENT COMMENT THE divine right of the dollar to rule is the political creed of Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, of Rhode Island, dictator of the United States Senate. * * * He is no messenger...
...His present danger, and the system's danger, lies in the example of rebellion set last spring by * * * the Mississippi Valley Senators...
...Here is a splendid tribute to the people.—Chicago Record-Herald...
...The radicalism of a man is more often the eccentricity of doing a thing instead of talking about it.—David Swing...
...Taft credits Mr...
...They bolted the Aldrich tariff...
...He is just as sincere about the divine right of the dollar to rule as was Louis XIV over absolutism...
...Mr...
...The operation of the Darwinian law made him Senate dictator...
...La Follette is a Republican, then he is something else...
...Speaker Cannon and the other defenders of his autocratic power are the arch-pessimists of the United States...
...Leader Murphy complains that the people were responsible for the recent defeat of Tammany...
...He came to the Senate twenty-eight years ago, grounded in the game through experience in a city council, a State legislature, and the House of Representatives...
...When it comes to legislation, a tariff bill, for instance, the control gives them the initiative and direction of it...
...They decide on what New England must have, and they count the number of votes they need, added to their own, to form a majority of the Republican majority...
...Aldrich is the greatest expert at this system that Congress has seen...
...Stand or fall, he will not compromise...
...If such rebellion is not only to go unpunished but even to prosper, the Aldrich control and the old Senate system will totter...
...Aldrich himself has never furnished a more interesting study than now, when, at the height of his power, that power is so seriously threatened...
...The success of the insurgents will mean the triumph of optimism.— The Kansas City Star...
...There seems to have been no sufficient reason for a commission of eighteen and so much expense on the part of the government if Aldrich is going to do all the work and settle the whole business.—The New York Journal of Commerce...
...He was never so arbitrary as last spring.—The November American Magazine...
...Those votes are secured by giving enough Senators what they want out of the bill...
...He is no messenger boy for Wall street, but the Washington embodiment of the Wall street spirit...
...When Mr...
...Were he merely mediocre, the Senate system and its traditions of seniority would make him an influential figure now...
...Aldrich with "an earnest desire to aid the people" he attributes to him a benevolence which even the people of his own State have not known him to possess.— The Providence, R. I., Journal...
...In the opinion of the hidebound advocate of tariff highwaymanry there can be but one kind of Republican.—The Louisville Courier-Journal...
...Last spring the absence of effective Democratic opposition offset, to a large degree, the Republican defection...
...The system is log rolling buttressed by party regularity The veteran Senators, who are mostly New England Senators, control the committee assignments...
...Cannon says that if Mr...
Vol. 1 • September 1909 • No. 46
