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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. PAGE NINE