judicial establishments within the District of Columbia into this building, or whether it should make it a building for the "exclusive " use of the Supreme Court of the United States, its officers, its bar, and its library; and, as we have said, the almost unanimous consensus of opinion was in favor of making it "exclusive." The bill of Mr. Mercer ought not to pass. It will have the effect of preventing, for generations to come, what is most desirable, the housing of the Supreme Court of the United States in a building of its own. THE LATE JOHN W. HENRY.-Hon. John W. Henry died at Kansas City, Missouri, in December last. At the time of his death he was a Judge of the Circuit Court of Missouri, but prior to becoming Circuit Judge he had for ten years held the position of Judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri and had been Chief Justice of the court in rotation. In fact, he had served as a Circuit Judge for several succeeding terms prior to being nominated for and elected to the office of Judge of the Supreme Court. When he was on the bench of that court it was exceptionally strong. His associates were: W. B. Napton, who had previously served on the court; Warwick Hough, who is now serving as a circuit judge in St. Louis; Elijah H. Norton, and T. A. Sherwood, the latter having just completed his third term and thirtieth year of service upon that bench. After retiring from the Supreme Bench of Missouri and practicing for two years at the Bar of Kansas City, Judge Henry was appointed by the Governor to fill a vacancy in the office of Circuit Judge for Jackson County, of which county Kansas City is the county seat, and he was several times re-elected to the office by the people. The story of his life reaches from his birth in Kentucky in the year 1825 to his death in Missouri near the close of the year 1902, a period of nearly seventy-eight years. When he first came to Missouri he settled at Boonville, where he was thrown in contact with some of the most distinguished lawyers which Missouri has ever produced, with such men as Abiel Leonard, Payton R. Hayden and John C. Richardson. His acquaintance with those great men at a formative period of his career as a lawyer assisted in shaping his mental characteristics, so that he developed into one of the ablest members of a bar which had been fertile in great men. The outbreak of the civil war found him a prosperous - It may be recalled that lawyer at Independence in Jackson County. Independence was situated on the high ground a few miles from the Missouri river and was the point from which the great overland wagon trains, destined for Santa Fé and other places in the interior mountain or desert regions of our country, loaded for their long journey. It was therefore a place of very considerable wealth and importance; but, during the civil war, its inhabitants felt all the sufferings of a border community. Judge Henry moved from place to place in Missouri, and finally, unable to endure suspicion and persecution any longer, removed to Jacksonville, Illinois, where he remained until the close of the civil war, when he returned to Missouri and enjoyed for more than forty years and until his death, a successful and honorable career as a practitioner at the bar and a judge on the Circuit Bench and the Supreme Bench. He forms a distinguished landmark in the judicial history of Missouri. His opinions as a judge of the Supreme Court were of a high order. His character was lofty and untainted; he had the faculty, without exertion, of attaching friends to him; he died in the full enjoyment of an affectionate veneration on the part of his neighbors and fellow-citizens. ARBITRATION AND LABOR DISPUTES. According to the report of the State Board of Conciliation and Arbitration of Massachusetts for the year 1901, this mode of settling struggles between capital and labor exhibits a gratifying progress in that State. During that year the board took part in settling no less than 108 controversies, in which it rendered 8 decisions and effected 39 conciliations. Twenty-six cases were found to be in process of mutual settlement, and 18 were abandoned. The principle of State Arbitration in such cases has also achieved a gratifying success in Illinois. A notable illustration of this was found in the settlement of the recent strike in Chicago. It seems, that, when brought before a fair board of arbitrators, there is a greater disposition on each side to listen to reason and to make concessions. One discouraging feature of the subject, however, is, that State Arbitration cannot cope with strikes that extend beyond State boundaries, On this point the Boston Transcript truthfully says: As a rule, it is only minor disputes that are submitted to arbitration tribunals as at present constituted. The much advertised committee of the National Civic Federation can accomplish nothing toward staying hostilities in the coal industry in the face of the refusal of the operators to accept arbitration. Notwithstanding the above statement, the opposing interests in the anthracite coal mining strike were finally brought face to face before the President of the United States, and, after some disappointment and difficulty, did voluntarily accept the principle of arbitration, and did agree to abide by the award of arbitrators appointed by the President of the United States; and, at the time of this writing, anthracite coal mining has been resumed, pending the decision of the arbitrators, and the arbitration is in progress. If the Federal government possessed more ample powers to deal with such troubles as the anthracite coal strike than it has under the Federal Constitution, the subject could be handled in a much better and more efficient manner. Perhaps if we were to imitate our neighbors on the immediate south of us, who began their Republic by adopting a constitution modeled upon the basis of ours, we should do better. The Mexican Constitution was amended by conferring upon the Federal government the general control over comcommerce, and not confining its control to interstate and foreign commerce. - We THE TERRITORIAL EXPANSION OF JEFFERSON AND OF POLK. again disclaim entering into the domain of party politics when we venture a criticism upon the following sentiments in the platform of the New York State Democracy, put forth at their convention at Saratoga on October first: We believe in territorial expansion the expansion of Jefferson and of Polk-and in the honorable acquisition of desirable territory which can be erected into States in the Union, and whose people are willing and fit or capable of becoming fit for American citizenship. The above language sounds well; but the less that is said of the territorial expansion of Polk the better it will be for the truth of history. Polk and his party made a most unjust war against our sister Republic of Mexico, for the purpose of adding to our domain territory that could be admitted into the American Union as slave States. Through that war and the subsequent Gadsden treaty we acquired vast marches of mountain and of desert, capable of agriculture by the aid of irrigation only, containing some gold and silver, but for the most part destitute of those two sinews of empire, iron and coal. On the other hand, to prevent the expansion of free territory on our northwest, James K. Polk, with the aid of enough Whig senators to accomplish the ratification of the treaty, surrendered our contention of "Fifty-Four-Forty or Fight," and relinquished to Great Britain the territory now known as British Columbia, to which we had an indefeasible title, a vast country containing the only good coal mines on the Pacific coast of North America, abounding in iron, copper and the precious metals, and loaded with great forests teaming with great game. We have heard it said by well-informed persons that there exists in the secret archives of our State Department a letter from Emperor Nicholas, offering us Alaska as a free gift if we would maintain that contention and shut England off from the Pacific ocean. Instead of that, we have as a legacy, the unhealed wound of a contention with Great Britain, about a strip of territory in Alaska as large as the State o Rhode Island. If President Polk had not surrendered our just contention, it would have been all ours. His style and policy of acquiring territory furnish an indifferent model to be held up for the admiration of our sons. NEED OF A SPECIAL COMMERCE COURT TO CONTROL RAILROADS: A STRIKING DEBATE ON THIS QUESTION, PRO AND CON. The second session of the fifteenth annual meeting of the American Economic Association was held at Philadelphia on the 27th of December last. The session was devoted to a discussion of the topic, "The Public Regulation of Railroads." The principal speakers were Hon. CHARLES A. PROUTY, a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission, who read a paper entitled "National Regulation;" and Hon. WALKEr D, HINES, vice-president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, who spoke on "Legislative Regulation of Railroad Rates." The paper of Mr. PROUTY was in part as follows: "Five years ago the crying evil in railway operations was discrimination, mainly discrimination between indviduals. To-day this is not true. The vast consolidations of the last few years, the use of injunction to prevent departures from the published rates, the lesson which railroad operators themselves have learned that competition in rates is always suicide, since it does not increase business and does reduce revenues, have largely eliminated such competition. The discrimination disappears, but in its place comes the danger attending every monopoly, extortion in charge imposed. "As these combinations have proceeded the public has been repeatedly assured that there was no danger of any advance in freight rates. Rates have been advanced and are still advancing. In the winter of 1899 the rate on grain from the Mississippi river to New York fell to 12 cents per 100 pounds; to-day it is 224 cents. The cost of transporting grain and grain products from Chicago to the Atlantic seaboard by rail this past summer has been from two to five cents per 100 pounds, from ten to twenty-five per cent greater than it was the summer preceding. Within the month all grain rates in every direction from the fields to the seaboard have been advanced another two cents per 100 pounds. Within the last three years the combination of anthracite coal roads has increased the cost of domestic sizes to the consumer from $1 to $2 per ton. In sympathy, the common stock or the Reading Road alone advanced in market value from July, 1898, to July, 1902, $15,000,000, about 300 per cent. "The practical significance of those apparently slight advances is not appreciated. The Interstate Commerce Commission has recently concluded an investigation into a general advance in rates on hay, and decided that such advance was unjustifiable. No attention has been or will be paid to that decision, since there is no way in which it can be enforced, but the testimony in that case shows that this advance in rates costs the consumer and producer of hay, in the territory to which it applies, $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 annually. There are now pending before the commission for investigation complaints which demand reductions probably amounting in the aggregate to $15,000,000 annually, equivalent upon a 4 per cent basis, to almost $100,000,000 in capitalization. The railroad is the greatest and the most dangerous of all monopolies. If the anthracite coal combine advances the price of that commodity to the consumer $1 per ton, it levies upon the property of this country, which uses that coal, a tax of $50,000,000 annually in favor of the wealth that engineered and profits by that combine. "How shall the public be protected against this kind of extortion? Publicity in the completest form has been tried in vain. To this the Sherman antitrust law has been applied in its strongest form in vain. It has been suggested that the injured party might sue in court and recover the unreasonable charge from the railway; but the coal dealer, who pays the freight, will not sue, for he recoups himself by increasing the price to his customer, and it would be no remedy to permit that consumer to bring suit and recover from $1 to $10. Manifestly, no right to get back any portion of an unjust rate already paid can be of the slightest value; the imposition of that rate must in some way be prohibited. "And the way is perfectly plain. It has been determined by courts without number that the railway is a public servant subject to public control, and that |