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ance, and in his outcry of indignant remon
stance The Jeffersonian hereby whoops in
unison. There are circumstances of aggra
vation about the affair which will cause to
curl with ire the beard of any Georgian who
wears hair on his face. For Mitchell was not
only snubbed at the grandstand of the James
town Exposition, but also in the auditorium.
Listen:
“Mr. Mitchell was so excited that he called
the exposition management a lot of hoodlums.
‘I was treated shamefully,’ said he.
‘When I went to the grand stand they paid
no attention to me, and I had to find a seat
as best I could. The worst of it all was when
I attempted to get into the auditorium to at
tend the president’s reception. I told the man
at the door who I was, and he declined to al
low me in the building, lie said he did not
care who I was.’ ”
Nothing could be more provoking. “They
paid no attention to me!”
How familiar the sound. How natural the
complaint. The important personage is pres
ent, and nobody pays any attention to him.
The important personage has “to find a seat.”
As Mr. Mitchell well says, that was not the
worst of it. Far from it. The bitterest pill was
the conduct of the doorkeeper of the audito
rium. This benighted and irreclaimable bore
not only refused to recognize Mitchell as the
personified State of Georgia but, with a reck
lessness which it is difficult to comprehend,
told Mitchell “he did not care who I was.”
The indignation of Commissioner Mitchell
finds its echo in the hearts of all true Geor
gians. We have been vicariously insulted.
In the person of Mitchell, who was snubbed,
we have been snubbed. Each and every one
of us has not only been snubbed in the grand
stand, but also at the auditorium. Tn the per
son of Mitchell, we have been treated, to use
his own forcible expression, “shamefully.”
To the full extent that he is enraged, we are
incensed. When he shall have decided what
to do about it, we should be glad to have him
call us up on the Long Distance Telephone.
The Long Distance telephone rates are some
what excruciating, we know, but when we have
been publicly snubbed, and snubbed twice—-
once in the grand stand and once at the audi
torium —we feel that even Long Distance Tel
ephone charges must be endured (because
they can’t be cured), and that we must line
up with Mitchell, 'promptly and loyally, to
help him do whatever he proposes to do.
(Don’t forget the. place, Mitchell. It is
Thomson. Not anything else under the sun.
Just Thomson. Seems incredible, but it’s
so.)
HUM
Trusts in Great Britain.
It is now claimed that the Trust is secur
ing a domicile in Free-Trade England. For
example, it is said that J. and P. Coats, the
spool-thread men, have combined the various
textile plants, and that enormous profits
have been realized by the Trust. It
is predicted that other manufacturers will fol
low the lead of the thread men, and that Free
Trade England will soon be as greatly Trust
ridden as are the United States.
But the Trust, in Great Britain', can never
be oppressive, as it is in this country. The
Jeffersonian can even believe that the Trust
may be a blessing, over there. Why? Be
cause the Free Trade policy of the Empire
renders it impossible for a combination to
maintain unreasonable prices, whereas the
merging of the various plants into one man
agement unquestionably tends to economy of
production, uniformity of quality, and regular
ity of price.
Suppose the spool-thread Trust, for in
stance, should attempt to wring an unreason
able price nut of the British people, what
would be the consequence?
The textile men of France, Holland. Ger
many and at once invade the
WATSON’S WEEKLY JEFFERSONIAN.
English market and beat down the price.
This' can be done because of Free Trade.
No Tariff wall shuts out the foreigner. No
ring of Custom Houses imprisons the British
buyer. The moment the English manufac
turer demanded an unfair price, the English
consumer can order what he wants from
abroad.
Tn this country, we have no such open line
of retreat, no such door of escape. The Tar
iff wall shuts us in. and the Trusts can do to
us whatever they like.
H R
Lalvless Liberality.
An official statement given out bv Secretary
Taft shows that the sum total of the charita
ble aid Uncle Sam extended to Jamaica dur
ing the first two months of this year-amounted
to upwards of $17,000.
.To this extent, the United States made a
gift to the British Empire.
Jamaica being a colonial dependency of
Great Britain the duty of taking care of i’ts
sufferers in times of distress, rests upon the
broad, strong shoulders of J. Bull.
M hat The Jeffersonian would thank Secre
tary Taft for is, a reference to his legal au
thority for doing things of that kind.
Please tell us where to the law for it.
The Jeffersonian has an idea—an old fash
ioned one, maybe—that the money paid into
the national treasury by the taxpayers is a
Trust fund. It seems to us that we have
heard somebody sav that public funds cannot
be lawfully spent for any other purpose than
those specified in statutes which conform to
the Constitution.
Will anybodv pretend that the Constitu
tion of the United States authorizes appro
priations for earthquake sufferers of the Brit
ish Empire, or volcano victims of the French
Republic?
Surely not.
Yet that is what our Government is doing,
right along.
Whenever we hear the cry of distress from
places like Jamaica and Martinique, our
bumptious, world-mission Government butts
in with such precipitation that neither Eng
land nor France gets the chance to furnish a
single slice of bread.
T T ncle Sam relieved Martinique.
France did not. Uncle Sam relieved Jamai
ca: England did not.
Yet when Savannah was destroyed bv fire.
Congress decided, rightly, that national re
lief could not be legallv granted. When flood
swept Texas begged for free planting seed tn
enable her to make a crop which all the world
needed, Mr. Cleveland vetoed the bill—rightlv.
What recent change has been made in the
Constitution which justifies the Government
in extending to foreign countries that chari
table relief which cannot be legally given to
our homefolks?
W
Editorial Notes.
Tfy Sam W. Small
There is an old proverb that “Whom the
gods would destrov they first make de
mented,” and the railroad managers of Amer
ica seem to be suffering that experience.
Nearly every one of them has been forced to
plead guilty to unfair, if not actually dishonor
able, practices in the conduct of railway busi
ness with the people. They have been shown,
bevond power of denial, to have bankrupted
railroads in order to get them out of the pos
session of their original owners bv bankrupt
cy and reorganization schemes. It has been
proven that thev have violated defiantly the
constitutions and laws of states. Thev have
been convicted of criminally discriminating
between shippers. Thev have watered their
capitalization outrageously and enormonslv
taxed the public for unearned dividends.
Now. when the people' have awakened to the
robberies thus practiced and are
to prevent their repetition, the railway man
agers fly into passions and conspire afresh to
defeat all reasonable regulation of their public
relations.
I he day for argument with these railway
highwaymen is about passed. They must be
brought to book and made to obey the laws
of the land. The imposition of fines upon
them is only another mode of taxing the traf
fic and therefore the public. The same laws
that are applied to the burglar and the bunco
man must be applied to the lawless depreda
tor who sits at’ the head ©f the Board of Di
rectors of a defiant railroad company.
Ihe people of Georgia within the next
three months will have the opportunity to
show what a sovereign state can do to pro
tect its common people from the wholesale
lawlessness and lootings practised by its own
and foreign railway corporations.
And we mistake very much the verdict of
last August at the polls and the honesty of
Governor-elect Hoke Smith, if such measures
are not enacted in Georgia this year as will
put the railway business of the state on a legal
and honest basis.
*
There arc several of our most important
railway corporations in this state that operate
under charters obtained from the state. The
question of the power of the state over such
charters and the authority of the state to re
voke them was thoroughly debated in the Con
stitutional Convention in 1877. The argu
ments then made arc vet available and are in
the writer’s hands. They were not written
out and published in the printed proceedings
of the convention, because of their great
length, but the splendid and convincing argu
ments by General Toombs, Gen. A. R. Wright,
Gen. Lucius J. Gartrell. Col. P. L. Mynatt
and others, who denounced the then arrogance
of the Wadley-Central and. the Georgia Rail
way managements, and predicted the evils
that the people have since experienced from
them, will throw a flood of light upon the is
sues now at bar in Georgia.
It can be shown that the power of the peo
ple. expressed in the taxing authority of the
general assembly. is complete and indefeasi
ble in dealing with corporations holding char
ters from the state. General Toombs declared
that “there never has been and never can be
a vested right in a franchise.” and he proved
it to an irreducible demonstration by quota
tions from the earliest English decisions down
to the hour in which he spoke.
“When an American state ceases to be re
publican in its form of government, the state
ceases to be a commonwealth. Sovereignty
inheres in the people and cannot be delegated
to their artificial creatures.” And bv such
declarations he and his colleagues established
the article of the present constitution of Geor
gia commanding the general assembly to reg
ulate freight and passenger rates in this state.
'They did not intend that anv “commission”
should exercise that power. Their whole in
tent was that the general assembly should al
wavs do that woik itself!
The Jeffersonian stands ready to prove from
the records of the Constitutional Convention
that it is the duty of the general assembly it
self, without reference to the questionable de
cision that a statute-erected commission may
exercise the power, to go ahead, over the
heads of that commission, and make just and
reasonable rates, two cents a mile passenger
fares included, and command the commission
to nut them in force.
The Georgia Railroad Commission is not a
sovereign bodv. Its decrees, at least, are not
irrevocable. It is subject, even for its life,
to the legislative will. It is not a bodv now
that is in svmpathy with the people. It leans
to the railways in every case that it can. And
that is why the general assembly must act
itself upon these railway issues.
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