The Constitution of the United States expressly declares that no money shall be taken from the Treasury without an appropriation by Congress.
Therefore, when Lyman Gage and Leslie Shaw, Secretaries of the Treasury, took $15,000,000 out of the Treasury and placed it in the Standard Oil Bank in New York City they violated the supreme law of the land. The $56,000,000 which Mr. Roosevelt’s administration has been allowing the National Banks to hold and to use is held and used in violation of the Constitution. What do our big men care for the law? Nothing. The law is for the small and the weak.
It was not your mother or sister or wife, but it might have been, and therefore the thing that happened to her should stir your blood.
A lady who is every bit as good, so far as anybody knows or says, as Mrs. Roosevelt, went to the White House to see the President on business. She wanted to plead for her husband, who had been arbitrarily thrown out of a good office at the instance of a very contemptible cur named Hull, who happened to be a Congressman, and chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs.
A swell-head White House official named Barnes, told the lady that the President was engaged and could not see her.
She remarked that she would wait until the President was disengaged—that she meant to stay until she did see him.
In other words, she placed herself in the position of “the importunate widow.” She was desperately in earnest; her husband had been foully wronged; it was a matter of vital importance to her; and her wifely heart made her brave the rebuff of asinine Barnes.
Mr. Roosevelt had recently returned to the White House from a “progress” through the Southern provinces, during which progress he had exhibited himself to his admiring constituents as the most affable, approachable, genial and generous of men. What was more natural than for Mrs. Morris to think that a little persistence on her part would bring the gallant Teddy to the front, beaming with that glorified grin and extending that cordial hand which had so recently enraptured the people of the South?