AFFAIRS IN THE UNITED STATES.
AFTER seven months of office President Wilson can look back on an achievement which his immediate predecessors talked and dreamed of without avail. He has induced both the House of Representatives and the Senate to accept a Tariff Bill setting free the importation of wool, wheat, flour, meat, cattle, and (prospectively) sugar. It had almost come to be accepted as an axiom by onlookers that the " interests " in the United States were too strong for the reformers. Free Traders excusably fell into despondency, and feared that a country once prisoned in the terribly complicated system of protective duties would never be able to strike off any of its fetters. But by a remarkably quiet method of persuasion Mr. Wilson has got his way. Precisely how he has done it—it is largely a question of his personality, we suspect—we do not pretend to know. His secret is his own. If nothing else is accomplished during his term of office, his Presidency will still be memorable for the quick acceptance of the Underwood Tariff Bill. We take pleasure in saying that few persons are more surprised than we are. When we read Mr. Wilson's election addresses we found in them style and great charm, and the power of a man who sees ennobling visions, but what we did not see was signs of a practical spirit. If Mr. Wilson has not got a practical spirit we can only conclude that he is able to get on very well without it. His treatment of the Mexican difficulty has seemed to us unpractical, for it may be summarized as a policy of exacting the results of compulsion without the will to apply com- pulsion. But it may be that here again good luck, if not some mysterious influence which flows through his acts, -.vill justify Mr. Wilson. A fact which is particularly gratifying to us, who have always thought that a good deal of nonsense has been talked about the powers of " business men " in politics, is that the present record of speedily redeeming promises in the United States stands to the credit of a University professor. Mr. Wilson's practice of himself reading his Messages to Congress is characteristic of the unusual relation he has established between the Legislature and the Presidency. Messages are the only formal or official method by which a President can com- municate with Congress, but Mr. Wilson has somehow contrived to make himself a comrade of the Democratic leaders. He visits the lobbies of Congress frequently. He has an air of being very much in the movement. All this, as is pointed out in an account of Mr. Wilson's progress in the Times, is as different from Mr. Roosevelt's tremendous appeals to popular feeling over the heads of Congress as it is from Mr. McKinley's habit of dissociating himself from the deliberations of Congress and conducting himself rather in the manner of a scrupulously constitu- tional Sovereign in a limited Monarchy.
Englishmen should not jump to the conclusion, how- ever, that Mr. Wilson is embarked upon a Free Trade campaign. He has emphatically disavowed such an inten- tion. No politician of authority in the United States, he says, desires the introduction of Free Trade. At the same time a step towards Free Trade, such as the Underwood Tariff unquestionably is, whatever the explanations of it may be, is not a step that is likely to be retraced. On the contrary, one step forward will probably cause another and another to be taken. A partial or local easing in the cost of living through a stimulated importation of cheap meat , from the Argentine, Canada Australia, and elsewhere is 0. not a blessing that the ordinary human being can overlook. Having experienced a new plenty and cheapness, he will want both in a greater degree and in fresh directions.
We have yet to see whether Mr. Wilson will have the same speedy success with his Currency Bill as with his Tariff. We say " his," because by all accounts he has taken a closer personal interest than any previous President in the drafting of Bills. Regulation of the currency is one of the chief needs of the American financial world.
Everybody admits the desirability of some regulation, but there has been acute disagreement as to how it should be accomplished. For reasons mostly peculiar to the United States the plan of establishing a central bank as the controlling authority has always been mistrusted. Prob- ably business men feared that Wall Street would control the money market with a new lever, all the more powerful for having an official disguise. Yet all the financial panics in America are fairly traceable to the absence of a central controlling authority. The Bank of England is matched in every great commercial country, except the United States, by some similar authority that holds Government money, issues bank notes, settles the Bank rate, and controls the movement of gold.
In the United States every banking company may do virtually as it pleases. Mr. Wilson has consulted the jealousy and prejudices of the banks in abandoning the original proposal that the United States should have a central bank. Instead of this twelve Federal Reserve Banks are to be formed each having authority in its own district, but subject to the approval of a Federal Board.
During the discussion of the Bill in the House of Repre- sentatives amendments have been accepted to the effect that the Federal Board shall be answerable in its turn to an Advisory Council, and that better arrangements shall be made for avoiding financial disturbance while the various bank notes now in circulation are being superseded by the authorized bank notes of the future. The Bill is still criticized hotly by the experts, but as everyone wants a remedy for the intermittent panics which are fed by the chaos of the banking system, the Bill will certainly have a patient and indulgent examination before there is any thought of discarding it.
The third point which we select for mention in recent American affairs is perhaps even more significant than the others. The treaty with Nicaragua, which Mr. Bryan hopes to get ratified, means that the Democrats have adopted bodily the foreign policy of the Republicans. It seemed unlikely that such a thing could ever happen, but the character of the Nicaraguan Treaty leaves us in no doubt. It was Mr. Roosevelt who extended the Monroe Doctrine in such a way as to establish protectorates. In San Domingo the United States assumed control of the customs and administered the Treasury. Much the same thing was done in Honduras. Now that yet another pro- tectorate of this nature is proposed for Nicaragua, it is evident that Mr. Bryan has taken over Mr. Roosevelt's policy — an event comparable with the adoption of Lord Lansdowne's foreign policy by Sir Edward Grey. There is now a national foreign policy in the United States, which may be called " Imperialistic " or not as one chooses. The Nicaraguan Treaty deprives Nicaragua of the right to declare war without the consent of the United States and of the right to sign away her independence. Moreover, she must not cede any territory, and she must keep her public debt within certain limits. The immediate motive of this national foreign policy is, of course, to be found in the Panama Canal. It is convenient for the United States, which has to protect the Canal, that the Caribbean Sea should be so far as possible an American sea.
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