The Producers News

THE CUMMINS BILL

Probably not since the days of the long fight of Stewart of Nevada against the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Bland silver coinage act, has the senate witnessed so remarkable a one-man opposition to a bill as Senator La Follette has put up this week against the Cummins railroad measure. Day after day he has held the floor for three, four or five hours, speaking with all the force and fire of his earlier years in congress, and hammering home his indictment of each section and paragraph of this special-privilege plan with alternate invective, statistics, moral appeal, flaming scorn, bitter irony and belligerent challenge to face the truth.

During most of this long and dramatic recital of the falsehoods and robberies embodied in the bill, Cummins has sat placidly listening to the Wisconsin leader, without serious attempt to stem the current of his scorn. At intervals Cummins rises to suggest that La Follette is mistaken in a statement, whereupon La Follette reaches into his mass of documents, pulls one out, and reads to the half dozen senators and to the eagerly listening hundreds in the galleries the evidence which proves his point. Cummins then holds his peace for another while.

Of all the outrages committed by the Cummins measure, the one which causes the loudest buzz among the people crowding the galleries is the fact that it will make the people pay dividends upon $8,000,000,000 of water-the total of the fraudulent stocks held as "book value," along with actual value, by the companies.

He shows them that they will pay five-fold in the cost of living when this huge burden is chained upon their shoulders by the Cummins bill.

They all get that point; many curse, under their breath, at the ominous array of 85 to 90 vacant red chairs on the floor of the senate chamber.