When the bill was finally passed, the Congressman succeeded in adding half a cent a pound to the duty on two of these products and in preventing any reduction on the others. A year later, when the popular clamor against the bill had become acute, the same association that had asked him to vote for increases wrote to the Congressman denouncing the bill as “the most iniquitous measure ever enacted by Congress” and requesting him to explain by letter why he had voted with “the Reactionaries” to pass the bill. When it was pointed out to the association that it had urged the Congressman to obtain an increase of duty on the products in which it was interested, it dropped its demand for an explanation. An influential newspaper published in his district editorially commended him while the bill was under debate for his “intelligent efforts” to increase the duty on manufactured articles in which the district was interested, and a year later the same newspaper in the same editorial column denounced him as one of “the legislative banditti responsible for the Payne-Aldrich measure.”
As with the tariff, so with pensions; the Congressman is urged to obtain local favors without regard to National interests. This is illustrated by the following letter, which the author prints, and which was written by the clergyman of a large and wealthy church:
My dear Congressman: I received a call from James H. —— several days ago, and he told me that he had received a very unsatisfactory letter from you regarding his chances for getting a pension. Now, Congressman, while I know he deserted during the second year of the war, yet there must be some way the matter can be covered up and —— be given a pensionable status. He is at present a charge on my congregation. Every one seems to be able to get a pension. Why not he? Do what you can for him, and oblige.
It may be said that this is a unique instance from which it is unfair to draw a general inference. The confessing Congressman answers, No; that he has “hundreds of such letters filed away. So has every other Congressman.”
River and harbor legislation is another field in which local selfishness busies itself, to the exclusion of National needs. In this case requests are not made by letter but by delegations which come to Washington besieging their Senators and Representatives. “There is,” says the frank writer of this article, “figuratively speaking, between $50,000,000 and $60,000,000 on the table to be divided. The Committee divides it so that every one is satisfied, at least to a reasonable extent.” Every one, that is, but the people at large, the people who have no special interest to serve, and who feel keenly indignant that the rivers and harbors of the United States are developed in a fashion so inferior to that of Europe.
Nor are all the requests for legislation merely. One constituent desired to have this particular Congressman put his name on the free mailing list for all public documents. That this would be impossible, because it would mean delivering to the applicant several tons of documents every month, does not in the slightest detract from the interest of the fact elicited by an investigation that the applicant was the manufacturer of an article made from waste paper, and the public documents would afford a useful source of raw material.
Is there a remedy for such a state of things? The answer is, yes; and, moreover, it is a remedy which Congress can itself immediately provide.
There is no complete remedy, of course. No scheme can be devised which can prevent such a request as that of the constituent last named who wished public documents to use in his private paper business. Requests like this merely mean that in every district individuals will always be found who will request improper favors. As regards these people, all that can be done is to create a vigorous public opinion—an opinion which shall not only make it uncomfortable for any man to demand such favors, but which shall cordially support the Congressman in refusing them and hold him accountable for granting them. We must trust to individual integrity to resist such individual and sporadic attempts to corrupt it.
The case is entirely different when we come to the other favors mentioned. These favors are those which the Congressman describes as being improperly, habitually, and insistently demanded by large portions of a given constituency, with at least the acquiescence of the constituency as a whole. It is futile to expect to cure this type of evil merely by solemnly saying that each Congressman ought to be good. It is futile to ask the average Congressman to cut his own throat by disregarding the requests of his own constituents for special and improper favors in the matter of tariff legislation, river and harbor legislation, and pension legislation; even though these same constituents adopt the beautifully illogical position of expressing a great—and, curiously enough, often a sincere—indignation that their Congressman, as the only means of securing for them what they insist he shall secure, joins with other Congressmen in granting for all other constituencies the same improper favors which are eagerly demanded by his own individual constituency. Moreover, under the present system, the small man, when he asks for something in which his own district is keenly interested, is told by the big man who represents the big interest that he can’t have his little favor granted unless he agrees to stand by those who wish to grant the big favor—and the small man may be remorselessly “held up” in this fashion, even though the small favor he asks is proper, and the big favor he is required to grant entirely improper. When such is the pressure upon the average Representative, there is certain to be more or less yielding on his part, in the great majority of cases. It is idle to hope that reform will come through mere denunciation of the average Congressman, or by merely beseeching him to reach the height of courage, wisdom, and disinterestedness achieved only by the exceptional man; by the man who is so brave and far-seeing and high-minded that he really will think only of the interests of the country as a whole.
On the other hand, it is just as idle for Congressmen to seek to excuse themselves as a body by uttering jeremiads as to the improper way in which their constituents press them to do things that ought not to be done. The individual Congressman can be excused only by frankly admitting that the fault lies with the Congressmen taken collectively. The remedy is simple and easy of application.