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The American Employer

A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF THE BUSINESS
MEN OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA WHO HIRE LABOR

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The Need of a Legislative Reference Bureau.

Nothing could better serve to emphasize the need of some permanent, non-partisan body to which the Congress of the United States might refer bills of great public importance for consideration and report than the debate of the questions involved in the Clayton anti-trust bill that recently passed the national House of Representatives and is now pending in the Senate. This is particularly true as to proposals that involve vitally important questions of political economy-as true as that there is just such need of a permanent, non-partisan tariff commission, which all who are capable of taking a purely patriotic view of our commercial interests believe ought to be established.

Such subjects should be dealt with and prepared for the consideration of Congress by specialists who can devote their whole time and attention to the work. At the head of such an institution should be a body composed of competent political economists, lawyers and practical business men. Individual Senators and Members of the House of Representatives should be left free to give their time and thought to general principles and should have opportunity to view them in the light of impartial, scientific opinion as well as interested importunity. They are far too busy to be burdened with the labor attending committee hearings in such cases, the digesting of volumes of testimony and with scientific research. So far as routine is concerned, the great annual departmental and general appropriation bills alone, with the vast amount of detail and the hundreds of collateral questions of government and policy that have to be considered and voted on in connection with them, are enough to keep them pretty well occupied during an ordinary session.

And, aside from these routine matters, are many problems apart from

those embraced in the appropriation bills that have to be taken up-problems relating to the procuring of the national revenue, to interstate and foreign commerce, to banking, currency, the merchant marine, harbors and waterways. the military and naval establishments, the national defenses, the judiciary, the civil service, postal affairs, Indian affairs, public buildings and grounds, th disposal of public lands, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, conservation of natural resources, irrigation, mines and mining, education, labor, immigration naturalization, patents, pensions, all sorts of claims, contested Congressional elections, our relations with foreign powers, the government of the District of Columbia, Alaska and the insular possessions, and dozens of others.

A good many years ago, instead of itself continuing to consider applications for the protection of inventions, for instance, Congress found it necessary to enact a general law providing for the issue of letters patent and registration of trade marks and prescribing the procedure, and for its administration created a bureau which is now a division of the Interior Department. A Congress has had to do with the subject since has been from time to time t› consider such amendments of or changes in the law as were proposed. Not long after the civil war it became necessary also for the legislature to extricate themselves from an overwhelming mass of applications for pensions. Under general laws the Pension Bureau now has jurisdiction and Congress is relieved of the burden of considering anything but proposed changes in the law, and such relatively few applications as are not cognizable thereunder.

It was the same with claims. As far back as 1855 the Court of Claims of the United States was established and given jurisdiction to hear and determine all "claims founded upon the Constitution of the United States, or any law of Congress, except for pensions, or upon any regulation of an executive department, or upon any contract, express or implied, with the government of the United States, or for damages, liquidated or unliquidated, in cases not sounding in tort, in respect of which claims the party would be entitled to redress against the United States, either in a court of law, equity or admiralty, if the United States were suable." To this court, for investigation and findings of fact, either house of Congress may refer claims for the payment of which provision is made in pending bills. In this way Congress is enabled to avoid much of what was once one of its most arduous, yet as experience has shown, unnecessary, duties. Now it only deals with such cases after they have been heard by the Court and reported on and properly prepared for Congressional consideration.

Another instance was the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1885. This tribunal was established to relieve Congress of the labor of hearing complaints and investigating and regulating the practices of railroads and certain other common carriers. Now, under general laws, on petition of a complainant or on its own initiative, the Commission has jurisdiction to inquire into the management of any such common carrier, prescribe accounts and records to be kept for Congressional and the Commission's information, also to hear and determine complaints, award reparation to injured shippers, prescribe reasonable rates and regulations, require carriers to desist from unjust discrimination or undue and unreasonable preferences, to require them to equip their roads with safety appliances, etc., and generally to see that the laws

relating to the subject are obeyed. By the act of March 1, 1913, Congress further availed itself of the Commission's expert services by directing it to investigate and report as to the physical value of all property owned or used by common carriers that are subject to the operation of the general laws. Still another instance is in the act that created the Department of Commerce only a few years ago. This act provided for a Bureau of Corporations to investigate the organization and conduct of the business of all corporations, joint stock companies and corporate combinations engaged in interstate or foreign commerce, except common carriers subject to the interstate commerce laws, also to gather, compile and publish useful information concerning such corporations and combinations and to gather and supply to the President from time to time such data as would enable him to make recommendations to Congress with a view to needed legislation. It is this bureau that will be superseded by the Federal Trade Commission provided for in the bill that recently passed the House of Representatives, if it should also pass the Senate and be approved by the President. In many respects it has the endorsement of business men throughout the country (see the article respecting the referenda of the national Chamber of Commerce published elsewhere in this number), since it would relieve Congress of work that ought to be done by experts. Other instances are supplied by the acts creating the General Land Office, the Civil Service Commission, the Indian Bureau and the Bureaus of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Public Health, Immigration, Naturalization, Labor Statistics, Mines and Mining, Reclamation, Animal Industry, Plant Industry, Fisheries, Forestry, Public Roads, Standards and others.

Since this plan has proven a success in so many instances, why has not Congress created at least a tariff commission? The tariff is a technical and highly specialized subject; the work involved in hearing testimony, going over briefs and drafting and considering a revision of an existing schedule is enormous. For years an organization, known as the National Tariff Commission Association, composed of important business institutions in thirty-eight states, with an aggregate membership of more than six hundred thousand, has been urging it. The answer is that however the real statesmen in the successive Congresses to which the proposal was presented may have been inclined, the politicians have been unwilling to take the subject out of politics. General principles were not enough for them to deal with. The old logrolling methods must be adhered to. The four thousand or more items of a tariff bill were too valuable as "pork barrel" material to be relinquished to a commission.

For the purpose of procuring information as to the status of labor in this country, however, Congress did pass an act last year creating a commission to make inquiry and report, among other things, respecting the present 'relations between employers and employes, the growth of associations of employers and wage-earners, the extent and results of methods of collective. bargaining and the effect of present industrial conditions on the public welfare. By the terms of the act, this Commission is only to be in existence three years. Therefore, its report must be prepared before long, yet when the President's business reform program was introduced, Congress did not wait to avail itself

of the information to be expected from the Commission's investigations, but yielding to political exigencies, included in the Clayton bill, and the House of Representatives has already acted favorably on, certain provisions that lawyers, economists and business men generally hold to be dangerously subversive and in flagrant violation of both natural and constitutional rights.

Labor demanded immediate action and so strongly backed up the demand that in this bill that was intended to strengthen the laws prohibiting monopoly and contracts, combinations and conspiracies in restraint of commerce, the House Committee on the Judiciary inserted, and the House itself approved. provisions exempting labor organizations from the operation of the anti-trust laws and making them and combinations of their members unrestrainable, and afterwards unpunishable and indissoluble, by judicial decree, for doing the very things which if done by other organizations or individuals would be in violation of those laws; also restricting the power of the federal courts to issue restraining orders or injunctions in connection with labor disputes in cases in which such labor organizations might attempt to do, or might be doing, things in violation of laws other than the federal anti-trust laws, and, to make a bad matter worse, providing further that any member who may be apprehended for having disobeyed such an order or injunction as might still be lawfully issued by a federal.court, may demand a jury trial and have the benefit of all the delay and advantages incident to technical criminal procedure.

There could hardly have been devised a matter of greater importancehow important it is may be gathered from the article that appears in the front part of this number of our magazine-yet this whole bill-anti-trust, laborfavoring provisions and all-was considered in the House of Representatives only a very few days and debated largely under the ten-minute rule. It does not seem possible that any such action could have been taken if those members that did not regard their approval as a mere political expedient had understood its real significance. But it is certain that if it had been referred to, and carefully considered and reported on by, a commission composed of competent lawyers and economists and practical business men, Congress would have been in a position at least to act intelligently.

If such a commission were a permanently established part of the machinery of legislation and if there were a rule requiring reference of such matters to it and general distribution of its findings and reports-as in the case of the Interstate Commerce Commission, for instance-it would seem also that members of Congress need have less fear of the hostility of special interests, for the question in each case would be crystalized, right or wrong would more clearly appear, all might be adequately informed, the sentiment of the Congressman's constituency might be more easily ascertained, and his individual action one way or the other would be more likely to be supported by public opinion.

Present Legislative Situation

The Changes in Public Opinion; What the Proposed Legis-
lation Means; Class Rule; Freedom of Labor Threatened

From an Address to the National Association of Manufacturers
By JAMES A. EMERY

General Counsel, National Council for Industrial Defence

The proposals that are now particularly in the public eye which will be adopted by our legislators at Washington, are not sporadic or sudden expressions of legislative and political opinions. They are the fruits of seed long fructifying in the public mind.

We cannot be blind to the great changes in opinion with respect to the functions of government and the rights of individuals that are taking place all about us. We are in the midst of deep-rooted suggestions of change, that not merely affect the forms under which individuals shall live and move, but changes that effect the very foundations of our government and what we presume to be the principle of personal liberty and representative gov

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hold, or his liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled or otherwise destroyed, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land"-they wrote in that little group of words all the elementary principles out principles out of which has been slowly extended the charter of our own life and liberty.

The man who visits Europe today is struck at once with the persistence of that principle in England as distinguished from the continental coun

ies of Europe. It is sufficient for any officer of the law that he wears a uniform, that he enters into any man's privacy, and his warrant is that he comes in the name of the ruler. And yet in our day policeman or President is equally responsible before the same. law for the invasion of personal liberty. which the ruler under civil law in the continental countries of Europe invades as he pleases.

We find a remarkable expression of that principle in the measure now proposed for the consideration of Congress, the Trades Commission Bill, which undertakes to enlarge the Bureau of Corporations, and possess it of great inquisitorial powers to ferret into the affairs of business and to ascertain all the information which it desires under rules so broad that they

seem

to overstep that fundamental conception and declaration of the security and privacy of persons, of house and of home.

Our government rests upon a written constitution, and into that constitution we wrote what should be the liberties of the people and what should

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