EDITORIALS
What Will Taft Do? WORD COMES from the White House that President Taft will veto the wool bill. Indeed, the announcement is made that no measure reducing the duties in the Payne-Aldrich tariff law...
...Notably is this true in Wisconsin...
...In a recent speech to manufacturers, the chairman of this commission, Charles H. Crownhart, referring to the objection frequently raised that many accidents are the result of carelessness on the part of the workman, said: "These employers take little or no account of the psychology of how accidents are brought about...
...Aside from this, however, who is there that does not know that the Woolen Trust is collecting fat tribute from every man, woman and child in the country because of its exorbitant protection...
...He himself said that Schedule K was "indefensible...
...No, dear people, not so fast...
...With his recommendations to Congress and to the country thus in violent contradiction to the findings of his Board, what are we to expect when other reports are prepared...
...But when before has the President shown the same solicitude for the findings of his Tariff Board...
...Sign the La Follette bill reducing the sky-high duties of the Woolen Trust...
...What assurance have we that President Taft will accept the figures of the Board on the woolen industry, in case they do not happen to suit his purpose...
...Why not...
...Be that as it may, if genuine tariff reductions are prevented by the exercise of President Taft's veto power, it is he, not the framers of the bills, who must answer to the ninety million consumers...
...Thus comes the word...
...Mr...
...That was most carefully determined...
...The reasonable employer must take note of the fact that employees do not wish to injure themselves—they do not desire to suffer pain, nor the loss of life or limb...
...They knew the reduction proposed by Senator La Follette, great as it is, does not offer the slightest danger to legitimate industry...
...Wise employers recognize this fact and are looking with favor upon methods of securing justice for themselves in the same measure as it is meted out to their employees...
...Oh, no...
...The legislature of that state at the last session enacted a comprehensive law providing for workmen's compensation for accidents and created an industrial commission to administer the act...
...The excuse he offers —or which is offered for him—is nothing short of absurd...
...That was quite different...
...The day of judicial "guardian angels" is passing...
...Heat and cold, noise, gases, fumes, nerve fag, lapses of memory common to us all, overwork, illness, all disturb the normal condition of men and make them seemingly careless when not so in fact, or when if so, such carelessness is excusable...
...Indeed, the announcement is made that no measure reducing the duties in the Payne-Aldrich tariff law will receive the President's approval...
...They explain accurately the reasons why there has grown up a popular distrust of the courts...
...So they cast their votes for his bill, and for immediate reduction of burdensome and "indefensible" duties...
...President Taft knows it...
...This unrest is finding expression in new legislation governing the settlement of disputes between employees and their employers...
...What few facts the Board did throw together for the occasion were trampled upon by the President...
...Perhaps his stand-pat, high-protection friends who agreed to vote, with wry faces, for his Canadian, free-trade, tariff bill could tell us the true reason...
...And the courts for their part, will find their task of self-redemption much easier if they are assisted thus wisely by legislatures and manufacturers...
...Guardian Angels" WHAT THE STATUS of the workingman has come to be in our courts is made very clear by Mr...
...The exposure of this dishonest schedule by the late Senator Dolliver showed it up to the country in all its iniquity...
...but the courts are becoming restive under the gross injustice perpetrated on the workingman...
...Did he when he framed his Canadian tariff bill and demanded that Congress pass it without a change...
...The courts have been very strict in applying the rule of negligence to the employee...
...Yet the President threatens to veto it...
...And there have been other investigations...
...We must not proceed with unseemly precipitancy...
...Because—and it is the only excuse offered to the public—because President taft desires to wait for his Tariff Board to furnish him with a report upon which tariff revision downward, perhaps, very likely, unless something happens, may be based...
...why the man who labors with his hands is at a tremendous disadvantage in litigation with the man whose capital labors for him...
...And that is a very impressive statement from one who looked upon the cotton schedule, the sugar schedule, the steel schedule, and all the others, and pronounced them, collectively, "the best tariff ever...
...They knew, too, that the relief sought by a long-suffering public has been delayed already more than six years...
...Perhaps it is not the real reason...
...Our own court has made complaint time and again of the harshness of the rules it has made and enforced...
...Let us wait patiently— haven't you learned patience by this time?—until we get a report from the Tariff Board, duly signed, sealed and delivered, and then if the weather is fine and you still insist, perhaps we will get around to a consideration of the reductions which the report of the Board will inevitably show to be necessary...
...And don't you know that it is party disloyalty, half-baked statesmanship and "politics" to meddle with the tariff without consulting the Tariff Board...
...Roe in his articles on "Our Judicial Oligarchy" now runing in this magazine...
...They must meet the issue squarely with a fair deal, or legislation and court judgment more drastic and burdensome are sure to come...
...Senators and Representatives knew this...
...He discredited the work of his own experts when it was found not to lend support to his declarations...
...This presidential tariff revision did not have to wait upon, or depend upon, the findings of the Tariff Board...
...Consideration must be given to the facts surrounding the accidents...
...Crownhart is right...
...Employers MAY NOT LONG DEPEND UPON THE COURTS TO BE THEIR GUARDIAN ANGELS...
...He repudiated, time after time, the figures of the Board showing that there was in fact a difference in cost of production between Canada and the United States...
...Enough has been done in the way of investigation," said Senator La Follette, "—scientific investigation as complete and thorough as it is possible for man to perform—to teach us that the duties in Schedule K are so excessive that it is perfectly safe for Congress to cut them down without fear of crossing the line that measures the difference in the cost of production at home and abroad...
Vol. 3 • August 1911 • No. 32
