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The Poetry of the Nineteenth Century.

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With portraits of Reed Smoot, De Forest Richards,
Frank White, Charles N. Herreid, John T. Morrison,
Albert J. Beveridge, George C. Pardee and family,
Samuel W. T. Lanham, L. F. C. Garvin, James B.
Frazier, William D. Jelks, John E. Addicks, Aaron
T. Bliss, Samuel R. Van Sant, Robert M. La Follette,
Samuel W. Pennypacker, Frank W. Higgins, An
thracite Coal Strike Commission, Edward Blake,
Michael Davitt, John Dillon, John E. Redmond,
South African War Inquiry Commission. John St.
Loe Strachey, M. Jusserand, Emilio de Ojeda, maps,
cartoons, and other illustrations.

Record of Current Events..

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With portraits of Woodrow Wilson, Winthrop L. Mar-
vin, A. K. McClure, George Francis Train, Henry C.
Potter, Henry C. King, William De Witt Hyde,
Orlando J. Smith, and Thomas R. Slicer.
The Season's Books for the Young...
By Ernest Knaufft.
With reproductions of illustrations.
Notes on the Novels of 1902..
Index to Periodicals.....

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TERMS: $2.50 a year in advance; 25 cents a number. Foreign postage $1.00 a year additional. Subscribers may remit to us by post-office or express money orders, or by bank checks, drafts, or registered letters. Money in letters is at senders' risk. Renew as early as possible, in order to avoid a break in the receipt of the numbers. Bookdealers, Postmasters, and Newsdealers receive subscriptions. (Subscriptions to the English REVIEW OF REVIEWS, which is edited and published by Mr. W. T. Stead in London, may be sent to this office, and orders for single copies can also be filled, at the price of $2.50 for the yearly subscription, including postage, or 25 cents for single copies.) THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS CO., 13 Astor Place, New York City.

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VERESTCHAGIN'S "BATTLE OF SAN JUAN."

(The painting recently completed by the celebrated Russian painter Verestchagin, and put on view in New York for the first time in the latter part of November. The painting was done with the aid of President Roosevelt's criticism and information. It is regarded as one of the most important works of the famous painter.)

VOL. XXVI.

Review of Reviews.

NEW YORK, DECEMBER, 1902.

No. 6.

Our Slow

Government.

THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD.

The Fifty-seventh Congress of the Wheels of United States assembles in Washington, on December 1, for its concluding session. Its official term ends on March 4, 1903. The Congress which was elected last month will not come together for an entire year, unless it should be called to meet in extra session some time between March 4 and next December. In no other country does a radical change of sentiment, when expressed at the polls, take so long to affect the governing machinery. If there had been an overwhelming Democratic victory last month, the newly elected House of Representatives could not have passed a tariffrevision bill, or any other measure of importance, until some time in the early part of the year 1904. Furthermore, the Democrats in such case could scarcely have obtained control of the Senate until two years more had elapsed, and they could in no case have obtained control of the Presidential office and the Executive Government until March, 1905. Thus, if the people of the United States had deliberately made up their minds, in 1902, that the Republicans had been in power long enough, and that the Democrats ought to have a chance to carry on the affairs of the country for a while, there would have been required at least three, and probably four, years in which to give that determination its full effect. What we should need three or four years to accomplish, our British friends, under their constitution, could bring about in three or four weeks. Both systems have their merits and their shortcomings.

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tion. Thus, practically all of the legislatures. which were chosen last month (and there were legislative elections in many States) will be in session and at work within two months after the date of the election. Questions of State government entered to no small extent into the electoral campaigns of the present year; and with our election of our State legislatures, governors and other State officers, mayors and municipal officials, county officers, school boards, local and State judges, and so on, the American citizen is not without opportunity to overhaul pretty quickly a large range of governmental mechanism.

The House

Fairly

As for the machinery of the federal Government, it is probably well for Responsive. us that our numerous checks and balances, and our highly deliberate processes. tend to steadiness. Few of the things that belong to national policy are of a sort that demand swift response to popular judgment. Our Constitution, upon the whole, works exceedingly well, and there will have to be a far more widespread dissatisfaction than exists at present before it can be changed even in respect to a few details. But probably, if it were to be done over again, there are not many people who would favor the present delay in calling together a newly elected Congress. Most people would have the new Congressmen meet a year earlier than now. Since, however, the reapportionment every ten years keeps the seats in the House of Representatives fairly distributed among the different sections, States, and population elements, the members are acquainted with popular sentiment, and usually as responsive to it as could be expected. This year, the election does not show any marked change of public opinion, and the outgoing Congress can do its winter's business, which will be varied and important, with a feeling that it has been sustained in an appeal to the country. It will know what the people expect of it.

As to the Senate.

A more difficult problem is that of keeping the United States Senate equally in touch with national opinion and duly responsive. The difficulties arise from several considerations. One of these is the secondary election of Senators. The two seats in the Senate for each State have come to be the most highly coveted prizes of success in American public life. The Constitution directs that Senators shall be chosen by the State legislatures. The candidacy of ambitious and powerful men for seats in the Senate does not, as a rule, await the assembling of the State lawmak ing bodies. Since the legislatures have to choose the Senators, the would-be Senators make it their business to choose the legislatures. The whole public life of not a few of our States within the past few years has been demoralized by the struggle for seats in the Senate at Washington. This clause in the Constitution, which specifies that the Senators shall be chosen by the legislatures of the States, has abundantly proven itself an unwise and improper restriction. The States should have been left to choose their Senators as they like. Some States for a long time,

THE PEOPLE ENDORSE PRESIDENTS

BOLICIES

UNCLE SAM: "I guess I can get ready for Thanksgiving now."-From the Inquir Dadelphia) November 8.

in that case, might have preferred the present plan of election by the two branches of the legislature; but most of the States, and in our opinion all of them, as the result of an unrestricted opportunity to test different methods, would have come at last to the plan of direct popular election of Senators.

Every year brings fresh confirmation Direct Election of the desirability of such a change, of Senators. and upon few subjects are the people of the United States so nearly agreed. On a question of this kind the one set of men wholly incapable of expressing a wise or valuable judgment are the Senators themselves, who are the beneficiaries of the existing system. The members of the other House, on the other hand, have no reason for expressing a biased judgment; and when they vote, as they have done, with entire, or practical, unanimity,-in favor of an amendment to the Constitution allowing the States to elect their Senators by popular vote, nothing could be in more shockingly bad taste than the determination of Senators themselves to prevent the question from coming before the States for an expression of final judgment. It is not necessary, of course, to change the existing system in those States which prefer to keep it; but liberty ought to be given to every State to elect its Senators by direct vote, as it elects its governor, if it so chooses. Delaware remains today without any representation in the Senate at all, as the result of a legislative deadlock produced by the aggressive determination of one rich man to fight his way into the Upper House of Congress.

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ator.

In many States it has become plain As a Possible that the legislatures are rendered Party Issue. less fit instruments for their important lawmaking, financial, and administrative duties by reason of the fact that in at least two out of every three of their biennial sessions they must subordinate all other business to the struggle for the choice of a United States SenIf the Republican party will not respond willingly to what is not merely a popular whim, but an intelligent and profound conviction, the Democrats will do well to make a party issue out of this question of the election of Senators. They have already done it nominally, and they should follow up the proposition as a distinctive party tenet. In their last national party platform they declared in favor of "an amendment to the federal Constitution providing for the election of United States Senators by direct vote of the people." The Republicans, on the other hand, omitted all refer

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The States

Another difficult problem that relates and Their to the United States Senate has to do Senate Seats. with the equal representation of growingly unequal States. As a condition upon which to get the Constitution adopted at all it was necessary, in the convention of 1787, to remove the opposition of small States by recognizing the principle of equal State sovereignty. And so the Senate was shaped somewhat on the analogy of a congress of ambassadors. However true it may have been that the Union as originally formed was a federation of separate States, it is far less true of the country as it stands to-day. Two-thirds of the existing States never had any rights at all of separate sovereignty, but were parts of the common national domain, rather carelessly and unscientifically divided off into administrative provinces called by us Territories, and then singly or in groups erected into States, and admitted on equal terms to participation in the federal Government. The earlier admissions have almost invariably been justified by subsequent results, this being particularly true of the great series of States lying in the Mississippi Valley. Texas and California were above ordinary rules. Each was an imperial acquisition, and there could be no question about prompt admission to statehood, and about the moral, as well as the legal, title of each to equal rank in the United States Senate.

Recent

to the Union.

But the later admission of a number Admissions of States lying on either side of the Rocky Mountain zone was imprudent, because experimental. There was a chance, to be sure, that these great areas would acquire population rapidly, and become the actual equals of Mississippi Valley and Eastern States. But But since the scattered inhabitants of these areas were comfortable and well off under their territorial governments, there was no proper reason for making haste to admit them to the Union. Most of the undue and undignified precipitancy that was shown was the result of supposed political necessity and sheer moral weakness in the Republican party. The party had its lesson

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Comparisons.

There were ample reasons of a difSome Useful ferent sort why Utah should not have been admitted with its present boundaries seven years ago; yet its deficiency of population alone gave reason enough why it should have been kept on the waiting list for a good while to come, inasmuch as it has not even at this moment one-sixth of the average population of the forty-five States of the Union. put it differently, the average citizen of the United States, in admitting a State like Utah, so far as the Senate is concerned, waives in favor of the Rocky Mountain man five-sixths of his own representation. Montana still has population enough for only one member of the House

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