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Show Congress, Not Only Negligent of Public Interest, but Contemptuous of It By NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, President Columbia University. fT IS more platitude to repeat that the three departments of our government are independent of each other, and that each in its field is representative of the people. As matters have developed, it is the legislative branch of the government, the congress, which has chiefly broken down, not only in efficiency and in public service, but in representative character and capacity. The President, and the President alone, directly represents the whole people of the United States, for he is the single public officer in whose choosing the entire electorate may take part. The Supreme court represents the people in respect of their fundamental principles and their controlling ideals, and in its political capacity it exists to interpret passing moods, changing opinions, and attempted acts in the light of these principles and ideals. The congress, with here and there a few notable and outstanding exceptions in its memberships, has become not only negligent of the public interest, but contemptuous of it. When the roll is called in the senate and the house of representatives the voices that answer again with a few notable and outstanding exceptions are not the voices of public servants fearless to do their duty and impatient to serve the interest of the whole people, but rather the voices of partisan bitterness, of malice, of selfish and disordered ambition, of blocs and groups and sections. The still small voice of any respresentative of the whole people is drowned among the strident clamor of such. If the record of the present house of representatives is bad, and if chat of the Sixty-eighth congress as a whole is one that gTavely disappoints dis-appoints every patriotic American, what is to be said of the exhibition of shameless contempt for the public interest and of ill-mannered scandal-mongering that is presented by the senate? It is probably within the truth to say that American- political history will be searched in vain for any similar degrading exhibition. |