Mr. Roosevelt and Congress The Congressional elections in the United
States fall due this year,. and a significant monitor of their approach is the adoption by the House of Representatives, by the decisive majority of 295 to 125, of a Bill providing for the immediate payment of 2,400 million dollars as War Veterans' bonus. This, of course, is a constantly recurring proposal. It recurs, for obvious reasons, when members begin thinking about re-election, and though if the measure passes the Senate, which it may not, Mr. Roosevelt will veto it as Mr. Hoover always did, his action will mean a drop in the prestige of the White House. The President's prestige is threatened in other directions besides that. He wanted to get the ratification of the St. Lawrence Waterway Treaty (with Canada) through the Senate, and- failed in that on WediieSday. He wants to get full powers to conduct tariff negotiations with other States, and if he gets them at all will have to accept as price all kinds of irksome limita- tions of his authority. Mr. Roosevelt has sailed triumphantly through too many crises to encourage any belief that power is passing from the White House to the Capitol, but, at any rate, the power looks like being more equally shared in the future than in the past, and the swiftness of action on which a dictator, even a democratic dictator, depends will become increasingly difficult to achieve.
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