The Senate Week

Work Done. Last week, the U. S. Senators:

Debated, debated and debated a resolution to revise the tariff, passed it.

Passed a bill allotting $500,000 for emergency farm aid in the Mississippi flood district.

Blease v. Diplomats. Last week when Senator Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina, Grand Patriarch of I. O. O. F. of S. C., Past Great Sachem of the Improved Order of Red Men, etc., etc., heard that 14-year-old Henry A. Howard, son of British Ambassador to the U. S. Sir Esme Howard, had injured a little girl in an automobile accident in Washington, D. C., he interrupted the business of the Senate with the following cry:

"I think that when a country sends a man to this country as an Ambassador, or in any other capacity, it certainly should not send a murderer, or a rapist, or a man who would commit arson; at least it should send one who would not be guilty of any one of those three classes of crimes. When they have no regard for this country, but send that class of people here, I think that when they kill children on the street, when they take American girls to places for debauchery and debauch them and brag on it, and openly violate the Constitution otherwise, it is time to lay aside courtesy, and instead of having troops in Nicaragua, where we have no business to defend money interests, we should bring them here and put them on the streets of the District of Columbia to protect the lives and the property and the virtue of the women of our country and the lives of our little boys and girls."

Had these words come from a less burlesque Senator than Blease, Ambassador Howard might have considered himself insulted.

Tariff Talk. William H. McMaster, the South Dakota Senator who was so conspicuously not present during President Coolidge's visit to South Dakota last summer, started something last week. He may become a "hero" of the session.

Senator McMaster is a farmer's friend. He sits among the Republicans in the Senate but he warned the Republicans before Christmas that he would ask them to talk tariff reduction. He carried out his threat last week, demanding tariff benefits for farmer, denouncing as "sophistry." "sham," "fraud" all arguments to the effect that farmers are adequately benefited by current tariff schedules.

So far, so bad. The tariff has always been a political megaphone in senatorial hands and Senator McMaster's outcry started a bedlam of home-papers-please-copy oratory which lasted all week. Chairman Smoot of the Senate Finance Committee droned along for four hours.*

Baiting such Democrats as stayed to hear him, Senator Walsh of well-protected Massachusetts said he was for a "scientific" tariff. Senators Dill and Jones begged protection for the Washington shingle industry. Senator Bruce bumbled about the Baltimore straw hat trade. Small-eyed Senator Watson of Indiana and nasal Senator Harrison of Mississippi, wrangled interminably over Republican and Democratic tariff statements and records.

It seemed certain that nothing would come of it, because, as every one knows, the Senate cannot originate revenue bills. It can only talk, talk, talk about them, or amend them; and there was no tariff bill before the Senate for it to amend.

But there was a tax bill before the Senate. It developed that the Democratic and farmers' friend strategy was to get the Senate on record generally in favor of some sort of tariff reduction, and then to hitch tariff riders to the tax bill. The riders were to lower the tariff on aluminum and steel, to raise it on farm products such as corn and perhaps mollasses (corn's competitor as a source of industrial alcohol).

When 12 midwestern Republicans joined with Democrats to pass, 54 to 34, Senator McMaster's resolution, it seemed that the administration's tax program, already disjointed by the House and delayed by the Senate, would be disjointed further, longer delayed.

* During Senator Smoot's speech, a young man in the gallery became hysterical and screamed: "Stop this cold-blooded murder!" He was hustled out, sent to a hospital for observation.