The Mccook Tribune

CONGRESS
WILL ACT
DISAPPOINTMENT IN STORE FOR
THE DEMOCRATS.
Their Claim That President Roosevelt's Monopoly Issue Is a Bluff Is Absurd—Voice of the People Will Be Heeded by Congress.
The Democrats who content themselves with the stand regarding President Roosevelt's monopoly issue that such legislation as he asks for will not and cannot be enacted in the next (short) session of Congress are staking their all on one throw. They scoff at the President's call to the country, deriding him for making a "bluff" for fall campaign purposes. They accuse him of presenting an issue which cannot, they declare, be acted on by Congress in December, but with which he and his party hope to carry the congressional elections of next November. The elections carried they assert, the trust issue will be forgotten or neglected.
Let them recall that this issue is going before the voters of the United States next November. It will be passed on then by the popular electorate. And there never yet has been an issue passed on by the American people that an American Congress, following that decision, ignored or dared to ignore. The Democrats pooh-pooh the President's issue and the Administration's desire. How little Congress cares for the President's plans or the Administration's programmes, they declare, is shown by the way in which Congress treated the President's Cuban "Reciprocity" measure. They pretend to believe that Congress would treat the President's monopoly measure in the same fashion.
But, the Reciprocity measure was not passed on by the country at the polls. If it had been there would have been no shadow of doubt as to its enactment; there would have been no pause in the work of speeding it to the estate of law. It was because it had not been passed on, because there were some Representatives and Senators who did not know what their constituents wanted, that no power, the Administration's, the Dowagers or that of any one else, could force it through Congress.
But it will be known what the voters want done with the question of monopolistic combinations. They will declare themselves in the campaign—the President, wise in his experience, has made provision for that—and confirm their declaration with their official decision at the ballot box. And whatever they decide, that thing will Congress do just as sure as there is such a thing as a Congress of the United States. No sane man, Republican or Democrat, and no thoughtful citizen, interested in the trusts or disinterested, who have studied the course of events in the industrial world for the last two years can have the faintest, most lingering doubt what it is that the voters of the United States will decide that they wish done—with the industrial combinations—that their power to suppress competition, control markets and raise prices at their own sweet will shall be so governed by statutes and regulated by the enforcement of those statutes that the public shall be protected in all its rights, along with the legal and rightful protection that shall be extended to every interest and withheld from none. And since that will be the decision of the voters in the November election, Congress will not fail to write their verdict into the laws of the United States!