The Waco Daily Examiner

An Extra Session of Congress.

Several newspapers, the Galveston News among the number, think there should be a called session, at an early day, of the forty-eighth congress. As might have been expected the alleged insufficiency of the tariff bill, according to the News, furnishes the strongest argument for further and early legislation on the tariff. The News will be unhappy as long as a single American industry remains protected, or customs duties yield a dollar of surplus revenue. Then, as the News remarks, there are some needed appropriations notably for rivers and harbors that the late congress failed to pass. An extra session might grant these. It certainly is a matter for regret that rivers and harbors were treated so stingily, but it would seem that the country might try the revised tariff for a few months or a year before instituting further tinkering. Texas has been enduring the radish constitution for seven years as long as Jacob served for a wife and the insufficiency of the new tariff is as naught compared with the crudities and defects of this constitution. We have authority for this statement about the constitution, in the annual message of every governor since its adoption, commencing with Governor Coke in 1876. There is one piece of public work that an extra session might be invited to undertake, in the interest of the people, and that is the recovery of the hundred million acres of public lands forfeited by the Pacific railroads. A congress that would recover those lands for the people would do as great a work as revising the tariff, even if brought down to the free-trade ideas of the News. The lands have been legally forfeited; they are worth, at the least $100,000,000, and the country ought to recover them. It will never retake them, though, until it gets a congress with more nerve than the late one, or, indeed, any one of late years. But according to all accounts of him, Mr. Arthur is not a man who is going to trouble himself, to any great extent, about these matters. He is thinking of a trip to Florida next month; and Long Branch and somewhere else in the summer, and an extra session of congress is among the improbabilities.