It was so nicely and redundantly redundant, so resilient in phrasing, so honestly earnest, that one just had to go along with our President, whether or not one could see how “the highest ideal in society” could possibly be found in a chase after the “impossible.”
At another point in his kindly persuasive Come-unto-me discourse, he pointed out to us how liable a “majority of the people” is to “make mistakes by hasty action and lack of deliberation.” Then, after a paragraph of beautiful foliage, the President cited the anti-trust law of 1890 as an evidence of the advantages and beneficent results of ample “deliberation” before taking action in matters of “grave import”. He explained that the decision of the Supreme Court was at first “misunderstood, or if not misunderstood, was improperly expressed, so as to discourage those who were interested in the federal power to restrain and break up these industrial monopolies. After twenty years’ litigation the meaning of the act has been made clear by a decision of the Supreme Court, prosecutions have been brought and many of the most dangerous trusts have been subjected to dissolution.”
It was all so fine, so lulling if not luring! It made one feel as if he were lost or had gone to sleep looking for himself. But when in a comfortable seat, in the owl car, where the jostle of the wicked world was so toned down and gentled as to permit a little analytic thought, that beautiful illustration of the value of making haste slowly and of long, careful “deliberation” when acting on matters of vast import recurred to us—that Anti-trust Act.
“After twenty years” careful deliberation, the Supreme Court was able to decide what the act meant! Was able, also, to decide what its own prior decisions meant and prosecutions were then brought and “many of the most dangerous trusts have been subjected to dissolution!”
All of it listened very well, but it don’t stand the wash very well. It is matter of common knowledge that during the twenty years the Supreme Court was industriously trying to find out what the Anti-Trust Act and its own decisions meant, the trust organizers and promoters got away with more than eight billions of unearned values—some set the figure above fifteen billions. The Supreme Court made haste slowly in its “deliberation,” while the respectable get-rich-quick Wallingfords were going after the people’s money and going in high-powered cars with the speed levers pulled clear down. No making haste slowly or duly prolonged deliberation with Wallingfords’.
Then, if one will take the trouble to glance at market quotations of the stocks of any of “those dangerous trusts” which “have been subjected to dissolution,” he will find that they have passed through the trying ordeal of “dissolution” without the turn of a feather. All are smiling. Why should they not? Stock quotations show that Standard Oil is over $250,000,000 better off than before its deliberated judicial dissolution. The Tobacco Wallingfords are also many millions ahead of the game since “dissolution” set in. And “Sugar”—well since the Sugar Trust was “busted” and subjected to the “dissolution” process nearly all its controlled saccharine matter appears to be trickling into its bank account. Similar “most dangerous trusts” show similar evidences of “dissolution” since the Supreme Court processed them.
What has this to do with our immediate subject? Nothing whatever. It is a mere interpolation—with a purpose. Its purpose is to evidence what appears to be a practiced habit with our President—a florescence or foliation similar to that displayed in the quotation I have made from his Washington Day Message. In the quoted paragraph, the reader will observe that he first says the Hughes Commission was “without data to determine the cost” of certain very important factors in the aggregate expense of handling and transporting the mails, and then he immediately proceeds to inform us that the Commission finds that the “cost of handling and carriage of paid-at-the-pound rate matter was about 6 cents a pound,” etc.—a virtual impeachment of the Commission’s finding before the finding is stated.
THE HUGHES COMMISSION.
What little space permits me to say of the report of the Hughes Commission may as well be said here.