No Hope for Dawes?

Tireless, if footsore, is Vice President Dawes in his advocacy of a majority cloture rule for the Senate. Having previously spoken in Alabama and in New Hampshire, last week he turned up in Colorado with his proposition:

"It is absurd to maintain that the original rules 8 and 9 of the Senate providing for majority cloture, which were in effect for the first 17 years of its existence, and which were abandoned only because the small membership of the Senate made them unnecessary, did not accord with the spirit of the Constitution or of American institutions.

"They did accord with them, and if these rules had continued in force, the system of legislative barter would not have grown up and the will, at times, of an individual Senator or a minority of the Senate could not be substituted for the will of the people as expressed in the manner and by the method prescribed by the Constitution.

"To reestablish the majority cloture provided for in the rules of the Senate during the first 17 years of its existence, and thus check the intolerable evils which have arisen because of its absence, would be a return to the first principles of the American Government and of American institutions and not a departure from them."

Even before these words were out of Mr. Dawes' mouth, it was indicated that he had found another opponent to his proposal. A good part of the Senate has been firmly if not rabidly against it. President Coolidge had maintained a cool aloofness. Last week, before Mr. Dawes' speech was uttered, correspondents at Swampscott announced that the President did not look with favor upon the proposal, that he felt it would stir up dissention in the Senate, split the Republican ranks, endanger the Administration's programs of tax reduction and farm relief, if not jeopardize Republican success in the Congressional elections next year.

Some observers professed to see afar off in this utterance a desire on the President's part to squelch Mr. Dawes' program, thereby injuring the chances of Charles G. Dawes as a presidential candidate in 1928, and making Calvin Coolidge a more outstanding candidate. Most observers were inclined to say of Mr. Dawes' proposal: "Now there is no hope."