the bureau full power of investigation and requiring reports to it from companies doing an interstate business, together with the proposals made by Mr. Knox for strengthening the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman AntiTrust Act, it would seem to us that a great deal rather than a very little had been accomplished as a result of the effort of the administration to secure federal oversight and regulation of the great capitalistic combinations. We are frank to add, indeed, that quite as much would have been thus accomplished as existing conditions could well justify. In the main, the business world must work out its own problems.

President Roosevelt has made about A Southern eighty appointments of federal officeAppointment. holders in the State of South Carolina, of whom only one has been a negro. This one exception is a certain Dr. Crum, named for the post of collector of the port at Charleston. The State Legislature, last month, adopted resolutions calling upon South Carolina's two Senators to attempt to prevent confirmation when Dr. Crum's appointment should come up for action in the Senate. In our opinion, President Roosevelt would have done better not to appoint Dr. Crum. He has so nearly ignored the colored race in the making of Southern appointments that he might as well have adhered without variance to his main policy of selecting for office in the Southern States only such persons as are entirely agreeable to the people most concerned. In the North, there might well be a good many negro appointments; but not now in the South. It is true enough that only two-fifths of the population of South Carolina is of pure white blood. On the other hand, however, nearly all the people who have business with the collector of the port at Charleston are white people who would prefer a white man in the office. President Roosevelt's motives are of the purest and highest; his attitude toward the South is chivalrous and considerate; no explanation or apologies are due from him ; and, indeed, the behavior of some people in the South toward Dr. Crum's appointment seems perverse to the verge of lunaThat is why the appointment is regrettable.

that if any negro were to be appointed, they would commend that most excellent fellow-citizen of theirs, Dr. Crum, to whose worth they themselves had paid tribute by making him the head of the negro department in their exposition, subject to the general direction of Mr. Booker T. Washington. The President unquestionably acted in perfect good faith, therefore, in naming Crum. President McKinley could have appointed forty Crums and nothing would have been said. Mr. Roosevelt is the one President since the Civil War who has been willing to ignore the mere political aspects of the Southern race question, and to consider the situation broadly and with deep sympathy for both races. has seen the difficulties of the problems which must find solution on the ground by the people who have to live, and work, and maintain civilization in those Southern States. It is a curious fatality, therefore, that the white Democrats of the South should be so unappreciative of Mr. Roosevelt's position; while, on the other hand, it is a great mark of the President's magnanimity that he is not much swerved from what he had originally conceived to be the broad, historic path of duty by the casual circumstance that his policy does not for the moment please either race in the South.

A Suspended

He

There has been another incidentSouthern and an extremely acute one—that Post-office. deserves a little comment. At the town of Indianola, in the State of Mississippi, a certain Mrs. Cox, a negro woman, served for several years as postmaster in President Harrison's time, and she was again appointed several years ago by President McKinley. Her commission will expire in the latter part of the present year. She did not expect or desire reappointment, but would have been glad to serve out the term. All the testimony-and there is an enormous quantity of it agrees that Mrs. Cox has been an excellent postmistress. Her bondsmen are the leading white Democrats of the neighborhood. A few weeks ago, there arose in the town of Indianola a wave of antinegro feeling, and two or three colored men were warned to leave the town. Then followed the suggestion that Indianola ought no longer to have a colored person for postmaster; and Mrs. Cox was called upon to resign. It is in dispute whether or not the request to resign was accompanied by serious threats. A formal resignation was sent by Mrs. Cox; but reports from post-office inspectors and others convinced Postmaster-General Payne that Mrs. Cox had acted under duress, and that she did not in fact wish the department to accept her resignation. Mrs.

Cox, meanwhile, left the town, and the Post Office Department at Washington suspended the post-office, so arranging matters that the people of Indianola had to get their mail at a town some thirty miles distant.

Not Primarily

Whereupon, there arose a considera Race Inci- able clamor in the Southern press dent. against President Roosevelt, not merely for the temporary closing of the post-office at Indianola, but for the alleged forcing of colored postmasters upon long-suffering white communities. The fact seems to be that President Roosevelt, out of thousands of appointments made since he came to office, has not named a single new colored postmaster in any Southern State. A few already in office may have been continued, as a matter of routine, by the renewal of their commissions. The papers on file in the Post Office Department show a large number of eager applications from white people (none whatever from negroes) for appointment to the Indianola post-office; and there is some justification for the theory that a part, at least, of the agitation against Mrs. Cox was due to the zeal of the supporters of the various rival aspirants for the job. It was not really a question, at Indianola, of white and black, but primarily a question of the dignity of the United States Government as represented there by a branch of its postal service.

The Real

We cannot say too emphatically that, Interests of in our opinion, as matters stand at the Negro. present, federal offices are of no use at all to the negro race in the South. President Roosevelt has in the main acted upon this view. An exceptional appointment, like that of Dr. Crum, although absolutely justified by the Presi dent's logic and to be commended on several theoretical grounds, does not work well in practice, because it creates a local irritation that imperils things that are of real importance to the negro. Just now, in several Southern States, there is a strong disposition on the part of many white men to divide the State school funds, allowing to the negro schools only the amount of school taxes actually paid by the negroes themselves. Against propositions of this kind, the best conscience of the white Democracy of the South is arraying itself and it will win the fight ; for free and universal education of all the children of all the people, black and white. This question alone is of a thousand times more vital importance to the negroes of the South than an occasional federal office. If Dr. Crum, of Charleston, had been as broad-minded and disinterested a representative of his race as might have

HON. HENRY C. PAYNE, POSTMASTER-GENERAL.
(Who stands for a great political reform.)

to be truly quixotic. He could with perfect ease have made his renomination safe and sure by the simple expedient of placating the professional negro politicians. Owing to the fact that more than a third of the voting strength of Republican national conventions comes from the Democratic "solid South," the President took his political life in his hands, so to speak, when he entered upon the policy of appointing white Democrats to a great many of the leading Southern offices. As for Postmaster-General Payne, who is said by the newspapers to be seeking to control the Southern negro delegates to the next national convention in President Roosevelt's interest, it is strange that the one idea with which he has long been most conspicuously identified should so often be overlooked. For many years past, Mr. Payne, as a prominent member of the Republican National Committee, has tried to secure the virtual exclusion of the South from national Republican conventions by a total change in the

method of apportioning delegates to the States. At present, the representation of each State is in accordance with its membership in Congress. Mr. Payne would base representation upon the actual Republican vote. Now, it happens that South Carolina at the last election gave McKinley only 3,579 votes, while Pennsylvania gave him. 712,665, and New York about 822,000. On the strict basis of the popular vote at the last election, in a Republican national convention of a thousand members, Florida would be entitled to 1; Mississippi and South Carolina combined to 1; Louisiana to 2; Georgia to 4 or 5; Arkansas to 6; Alabama to 7, and the other Southern States to considerably more. It would not only be an excellent thing for the Republican party, but also a very good thing indeed for both races in the South, if a sweeping reform could be brought about in the make-up of the Republican national conventions. The Hon. Henry C. Payne, Postmaster-General, deserves the highest credit for his persistent work to bring about such a reform. He hopes to see it accomplished in the convention of 1904;—it would have been ac complished at Philadelphia in 1900 but for a lingering memory of services rendered in certain quarters in 1896.

Concerns.

With many legislatures in session New England and various State issues pending, local matters claimed their full share of attention last month. There is manifest everywhere a growth of healthy and vigorous State and municipal life. It seems to us a total mistake to assume that the balance is so shifting as to indicate a harmful tendency to national centralization and a weakening of local institutions. From Maine to Cailifornia, every State and every considerable town, last month, had its own affairs of throbbing and vital interest. In Maine, they were concerned more than ever with their forests, their fisheries, their manufactures, and their morals as affected by the prohibitory system. In New Hampshire, they were concerned with many questions raised by the work of the recent constitutional convention. Their new governor, Mr. Bachelder, declares prohibition a failure, and the Legislature is expected to make some modification of the present law. In Vermont, also, the liquor question is at the front, and the voters are, on February 3, to pass upon a proposed high-license and local-option law as a substitute for the present prohibition system. In Massachusetts, where Governor Bates has succeeded Governor Crane, the Legislature is undertaking to make a general revision of the corporation laws. In Rhode Island, Dr. Garvin, the new Democratic governor, has passed trench

ant criticisms upon existing conditions in the State, and the Republican Senate, in its turn, has been blocking the governor's course by failing to confirm his nominations. Connecticut has honored itself by reëlecting the Hon. Orville H. Platt to another term in the United States Senate. The perennial question of reform in representation has been brought to the front again by the new governor, Mr. Chamberlain.

Affairs in New York.

In New York, there are always ques

tions of such lively local interest pending that the people, especially those of the metropolis as distinguished from those of the rest of the State, are relatively ignorant of what is going on in the country at large, their newspapers being mainly devoted to local news and discussion. The Legislature at Albany readily agreed, last month, to give Senator Platt another term at Washington, in spite of the objection of two or three Republican members of the State Senate. It was expected that important consideration would be given in the course of the present session to the question what to do with the Erie Canal. Governor Odell, in his message, had declared in favor of a repeal of the famous Ford franchise tax on street railways and kindred corporations, and recommended as a substitute some plan for the taxation of gross earnings. This advice was promptly foll wed by a decision of the Court of Appeals declaring the Ford act unconstitutional.

General Greene as Police Head.

Meanwhile, the second year of Mr. Seth Low's term as mayor of New York had begun most auspiciously by the appointment of Gen. Francis V. Greene as commissioner of police. General Greene has had so brilliant and distinguished a career that it is hard to believe-what is nevertheless true -that he is quite as young and vigorous a man as his pictures make him appear to be. He is not much more than fifty years old, but he graduated more than thirty years ago at West Point first in his class, serving six or seven years as a member of the Army Engineering Corps in varied but active and skillful public duty, and then going to St. Petersburg as military attaché just in time to be with the Russian army in its great campaigns against Turkey, out of which came several important books on the Russian army and on military history. After his return, he was in engineering charge of public works at Washington for a year or two, and for a time was a professor of military engineering at West Point. He then resigned from the army, and spent ten or eleven years in active business life,

until, on the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he entered the volunteer army as a New York colonel, subsequently commanding the troops as a brigadier-general at Manila, where he was promoted to be a major-general. He resigned from the army early in 1899, and during the great campaign of 1900 served as chairman of the local Republican committee for New York City. It is too soon to say much about General Greene's work as police commissioner. He simply took up his duties at the beginning of last month as one accustomed to command;—yet, without the slightest air of doing anything spectacular or sensational, his performances gave the community thrills of delight which were fresh. every morning and new every evening.

rian on Deck.

He found the police force of New A Disciplina- York City fat, sodden, and in a vi cious state of demoralization, largely through a lack of mental, moral, and physical discipline. The force had been overpaid and overpampered, although in some ways unfairly treated. General Greene promptly took the nonuniformed men who had been on special duty for years, and who were responsible for much of the blackmail and mischief, bade them get patrolmen's uniforms at once, and assigned them to scattered beats. He rearranged the hours of service in such a way as to give married policemen much more time at home with their families. On the other hand, he exacted far more vigilant and efficient service from men while actually on duty. He saw no reason for being tolerant in the slightest degree toward disobedience, negligence, or any shortcomings whatsoever in the rendering of those plain and obvious duties for which policemen are paid. All this, and a hundred other things not here to be enumerated. What the New York police department has needed has been a steady-going régime of vigorous and alert discipline,-not merely the formal discipline that one finds in a European army, but also the effective kind that is required in the carrying on of a well-conducted American railroad. When it comes to the work of the detective department, and to the enforcement of a certain class of laws having to do with the suppression of offenses against order and good morals, there are problems of a kind that external discipline alone will not solve. Yet the lifting of the department out of those vicious phases of its life that have been associated with its stagnant character will do much to help solve all the other problems. An important innovation inaugurated by Mayor Low has to do with the method of assessing property for purposes of taxation; and an account of this will be found

in a valuable article, printed elsewhere in this number, by Dr. John R. Commons.

An Active American Season.

A hundred pages of this running comment would not suffice to record the really significant political and social affairs that have claimed the midwinter attention of the American people from New York westward and southward. Reference to many of these will be found on later pages, in our "Record of Current Events," and some of them will be noted at greater length in our next number. Among these topics reserved for such discussion, one will be the great profit-sharing project of the United States Steel Corporation, and another will be the shaping of the municipal issues in view of pending city campaigns in Philadelphia, Chicago, and elsewhere. Others I will be the election of a number of members of the United States Senate, the action upon important subjects of numerous legislatures, and the developments in the coal-strike arbitration.

Indian Durbar.

The illustrated press of England, The Great while finding the Venezuelan incident productive of some material, naturally turned toward the great spectacular celebration in India as the topic most entitled to pictorial prominence. The so-called "durbar" at Delhi, as arranged by Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy, in honor of the coronation of the present King and Queen, who are also Emperor and Empress of India, was in its external aspects perhaps the most gorgeous and striking affair in all modern history. It has earned for Lord Curzon the title of "stage manager for the empire." Mr. W. T. Stead writes for us on that topic as follows:

The durbar is no doubt a great scenic advertisement of the empire. But it is doubtful whether in the long run this kind of sentimental réclame is worth the money and the attention it costs. Behind these bejeweled maharajahs, though invisible at Delhi, are millions of starving ryots who never have enough to eat. If, as many observers declare, we are bleeding India to death -and the diminution in the natural increase of the population seems to confirm this-all this imperial revelry will not look well in the pages of history. The fireworks, we are told, were of unprecedented magnifiWhere are they now? They are a memory of the past. And that is what our Indian Empire will be if the present drift toward destitution is not checked by more drastic remedies than the most imperial of Imre Kiralfys can supply.

cence.