Part 14

In the Fall of 1910 New Jersey's bosses overreached themselves. Ex-Senator James Smith and his nephew "Jim" Nugent, chairman of the Democratic State Committee, saw an opportunity to defeat the Republicans, who were in power, by the nomination of Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton University. The New Jersey Democracy adopted a platform which bore the impress of Mr. Wilson's style and principles, and it gave to a great citizen a great opportunity for service. He at once proclaimed his independence of his political creators. He said that if elected Governor he would act as leader of his party. He became, in fact, a leader among many able Governors in a series of harmonious reforms for which the inspiration came from within the States. But ex-Governor Pennypacker of Pennsylvania, who was a creature of the boss system, accused Mr. Wilson of becoming the "most arrogant boss of them all when he got to be Governor." James Smith, shorn of his power, remarked:

New Jersey is unlike any other State in the Union. It elects very few of its officials. Nearly all of them are named by the Governor. He has about two hundred appointees, whose salaries range from $2,000 to $15,000 a year. Among these appointees are Judges, and other places that carry a great deal of influence with them. The method gives the Governor a chance to build up a system--which is something which I believe I was charged with having, and of which I have recently been deprived.

No more significant utterance had been made in a century of American politics. Governor Wilson rose immediately to the full stature of his powers. He carried out his platform pledges, appealing to public opinion in the passage through a hostile legislature of laws reforming the conduct of elections, making employers liable for the injuries of workmen, restricting campaign expenses and requiring that they be published before elections, creating a public utilities commission, regulating the cold storage of foods, permitting cities to adopt governments by the short ballot, and preventing the grant of charters to monopolistic companies. He drove through a body of reform legislation such as had never been seen on New Jersey's statute books, eclipsing the record of a generation. He defeated Boss Smith's candidacy for re-election to the United States Senate, both because he was a boss and because as one of the "Senators from Havemeyer" in 1894, Smith had betrayed the principles of the Wilson tariff bill and President Cleveland's program for tariff reduction. Wilson became a "veto Governor," disposing of 150 bills invading home rule, or reckless of debts, which were dumped on him in the closing days of his first legislative session, and which were carelessly drawn. And he fulfilled his pledge to comply with the Civil Service rules in making all appointments. His acceptance of the National Democratic nomination to the Presidency in 1912 resulted in his becoming the head of a "short ballot" nation.

President Wilson, like many of his predecessors at the National capital, is vindicating the principle of the short ballot. The state bosses have often invaded the Federal legislature and government, but in comparison with their control of state machines they have never got very far. The national party machines are made up of local fragments. But their nominating machinery, which has such an inevitable and disastrous influence on local elections, is concentrated upon the three offices of President, Senator, and Representative, all of which are of primary concern to the voters. The national candidates must conform to higher standards than local candidates, because they are few, conspicuous, and known of all their constituencies. In this fact may be seen the controlling reason why, while the local governments have everywhere been taken by the bosses from the hands of the people, the Federal system is still theirs.

Despite the brilliant and recent example of New Jersey, handicapped as she is by a long-ballot legislature organized on the bi-cameral principle, and despite the continuing example of successive administrations at Washington, it is nevertheless hard for the alarmed electorates of the states to give up their old direct-election, town-meeting ideals. The representative system has failed, they say. They should see that it has failed because of its weight of machinery, necessitated by the number of elective offices. But the tendency is marked toward discarding the representative principle at the primaries, and making it the duty of the people to nominate as well as elect directly to the many offices. That adds to the work of each voter, which is already, and confessedly, too great. Tear down representative government; away with the system of electing delegates at the primaries; let us nominate as well as vote for each candidate ourselves--that is the principle of the direct primary bills which have acquired the force of statutes in the western states, and are being agitated in the east. It is but natural that the people should be enraged at the manipulation of primaries by the politicians. To do away with delegates and conventions is their first impulse. Certainly the delegates elected, and the conventions held, are injurious to good government. But the principle of representation by the best qualified men of the electorate is not impaired. The establishment of the direct primary makes necessary two campaigns instead of one, necessitates a new equipment of political machinery, and doubles the distraction of the people by the many offices they must fill. They do not yet see that fewer and more responsible offices would bring abler candidates into the field, that public opinion might be concentrated upon their choosing by delegates in conventions, and on their intelligent election at the polls.

The constitutional amendment submitted last Fall to the voters of Ohio, providing fewer elective offices and centering in the Executive the power of appointment to all lesser posts, was opposed on the ground that it would take authority from the people. Governor Cox was accused of trying to be king. He might well have pointed to Washington, which has had its "kingship" since the foundation of the republic. Governor Glynn of New York, who needed advice and counsel after the impeached Sulzer left the capitol, held cabinet meetings with the Secretary of State, the Attorney-General, Comptroller, State Treasurer, and State Engineer and Surveyor. Unlike President Wilson's cabinet, these men had been appointed, not by the Chief Executive, but by the party machines, whose leaders foresaw that they would be voted blindly into office. Officials whom the public did not know had the spending of millions in party patronage. To them the new Governor was constrained to look for support. In theory the Chief Executive, he had to work through agents who might be hostile to his purposes. Through such officers Mr. Murphy had extended his power throughout the state, and his contractors were beneficiaries of the millions wasted upon ill-constructed highways and canals.

How to dispense with the cumbersome political machinery that has oppressed the local elections as the needs of the increasing population became more complex, is a chief problem of these times. The bosses have, indeed, prepared the way for its solution. It is necessary for the people to recognize that the bosses' unofficial work should be placed in the hands of responsible executive officials, and thus changed from its private ends to public uses. The unskilled committees of citizens formed during times of public agitation and revolt may occasionally defeat the machines of more skilled politicians, but their triumphs are short-lived, and the reform administrations are often unsatisfactory. Public spirit abounds, it grapples with enormous difficulties. The chief difficulty now is in a lack of apprehension of the chief source of the public's troubles.

The smaller cities are leading in the fundamental reform. Nearly three hundred of them have adopted the short ballot in charters that confer government by commission. Each of the commissioners, usually five in number, focuses public attention on his headship of a municipal department, and the five make most or all of the appointments. The states, likewise, are beginning to follow the lead of New Jersey. Ohio has granted its cities the option of government by commissioners, and has started to prune the list of state elective offices. California is heading in the same direction, for it has made appointive its state printer, three railroad commissioners, and clerk of the supreme court. In New York it is sought to make the Governor's "cabinet" appointive, as well as the state judiciary, which compares ill with the judiciary of other states, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts, where the judges are appointed by the Governor. The Supreme Court of the United States, whose judges are appointed by the President for life, has won the respect of high juridical authorities for its ability, probity, and learning, in which it endures comparison with the greatest European courts of last resort. A reduction of the legislatures into single bodies has been advocated, notably by Governor Hodges of Kansas. The legislatures with two chambers have not worked to the ends of deliberation, but the contrary. The progress of measures has been obscured in them until the closing days of their sessions, when there are "jammed through" questionable acts that have never met the public gaze until their enactment. New York has its legislative members apportioned by districts, which, if reduced to fifty for a single chamber, would be approved by advocates of the short ballot. Deliberation might then be had by requiring a certain interval of time between introduction of bills and their final passage, after revision by skilled drafters. The county governments, also, need overhauling, relegating the sheriffs, county clerks, registers, surrogates, and district attorneys to the appointive lists. As for the cities, the tendency is to fix responsibility in the Mayor or a commission.

The multiplied elective offices have come by evolution. As the needs of the body politic increased more of them were created, with developed and specialized functions. They were made elective because the people were jealous of their own control, anxious to select their representatives, and to make them responsive to their will. The people are now more eager and persistent in their purpose of having a really representative government than at any previous time in the national history. They occasionally seize control of their complex machinery, and for a time succeed in running it. But they are beginning to see that the levers they throw must be fewer, though more powerful. Gradually, by the reluctant assent of legislatures submitting to the force of public opinion well led, or more rapidly and comprehensively in constitutional conventions guided by the enlightened and patriotic wills of public-spirited revisers, the change to a government of a few elected executives with large appointive powers will be wrought. The unchartered freedom of the private oligarchies will yield to the restraints imposed by the people through their instructed heads.

OUR TOBACCO: ITS COST

A TENTATIVE BALANCE SHEET

The erudite Dr. Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ refers to the plant nicotiana as "divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones." It is the purpose of this article to study the social cost and the social advantage of this divine commodity in the United States, for the purpose of framing a rough and necessarily incomplete balance sheet, which will bring into juxtaposition the credit and the debit items. Such a balance sheet can obviously not aspire to accuracy in every detail. Many items cannot be expressed in figures at all. For those which can be translated into dollars and cents we cannot always get perfectly reliable statistics. In many cases we must resort to estimates. Fortunately the most important data are those for which the figures are most trustworthy, and, as regards the others, it will not be altogether fruitless to enumerate them, even though we may not be able to give their value in legal tender.

_Dr._

1. The importance of tobacco in our national budget is shown by the latest census figures, according to which it ranks eleventh among the industries of the country, with respect to the value of the product. Our manufactured tobacco was worth at the factory in 1909, $416,695,000. It thus outranked bread and other bakery products, women's clothing, copper, malt liquors, automobiles, petroleum, and distilled liquors. It was but about a third less important than manufactures of cotton. Its value was more than twice as great as that of distilled liquors.[3] These figures do not, of course, tell us how much the people now spend on tobacco. They represent the value of the product at the factory four years ago. They do not include such items as transportation, middlemen's profit, advertising, etc., which enter into the retail price. Nor do they include the large amount spent upon imported tobacco.

[Footnote 3: Abstract of 13th Census, p. 442.]

A careful statistician, Professor William B. Bailey, of Yale, published, nearly two years ago, some figures showing that the people of the United States spent at that time in a single year about $1,100,000,000 on tobacco. As the receipts from the internal revenue tax on tobacco have increased by about fourteen per cent. in the last two years, it seems fair to assume that the general consumption has increased by this amount. Fourteen per cent. of $1,100,000,000 would be $154,000,000. It seems, therefore, conservative to state that at the present time the people are spending at least $1,200,000,000 for the pleasure of smoking and chewing. As a check upon these figures, the author has made two independent estimates each by a different process, and their results confirm the figures given above. It should be noted, moreover, that this estimate applies only to the direct purchase of tobacco. It does not include the accessories of smoking, such as matches, pipes, receptacles for holding tobacco, cuspidors, etc. In the fiscal year 1911-12, we imported pipes and smokers' articles valued at $1,478,000, in addition to what we produced at home. The difficulty of securing estimates on these accessories is so great that no attempt has been made to include them. If they could be included, the amount which tobacco users spend for their particular pleasure would undoubtedly foot up a great deal more than $1,200,000,000 a year at the present time.

The significance of these figures can best be appreciated, if we compare them with other items in our national budget. To put the matter concretely, "tobacco takers" spend in a single year twice the amount spent by the entire country on railroad travel[4] and about three times the amount which it spends on its common school system; they pay out annually about three times the entire cost of the Panama Canal; they destroy directly about three times as much property as was destroyed in the San Francisco earthquake. Their smokes and chews cost them just about twice what it costs to maintain the government of the United States, including the interest on the public debt. Our smokers could in a year and a half pay off the entire bonded debt of our states, cities, and counties, as it was in 1902, and in an additional nine months the entire interest-bearing debt of the United States, if they were willing to exercise the self-denial which was exercised a few years ago by the Persian people.[5]

[Footnote 4: The gross passenger receipts with payments for excess baggage, etc., in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1913, were $666,554,927, omitting railroads whose operating expenses were below $100,000. Provisional report of Interstate Commerce Commission "For the Press."]

[Footnote 5: According to W. Morgan Shuster, the people of Persia practically gave up smoking as a protest against the concession of a tobacco monopoly to an English Company. See _The Strangling of Persia_, p. xvii.]

Here are also a few comparisons with foreign countries. A well-known international jurist not long ago put together, as an argument against war, the figures showing the expenditure of the leading nations of the world on their army and navy. The list included Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain, and Japan. The figures for 1910 footed up $1,217,000,000 or approximately the amount devoted to tobacco by the people of the United States in a single year.[6] Our smokers impose upon the resources of the country a burden larger than the war indemnity which Germany exacted of France after a humiliating defeat in 1871; they spend about six times what it costs the German Empire to maintain its elaborate and comprehensive system of workingmen's insurance.[7]

[Footnote 6: T. S. Woolsey, _Yale Review_, March, 1913.]

[Footnote 7: The total amount spent for all purposes under insurance for sickness, accidents, invalidity and old age in Germany was 804,000,000 Marks or less than $200,000,000 in 1910. _Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich_, 1912, p. 372.]

2. The cost of smoking to the country is by no means limited to its costs to the smoker. Chief among its indirect burdens is the incineration of property other than tobacco leaves, and the destruction of innocent lives which it exacts as its annual toll from non-smokers. We have had some tragic illustrations of this in recent years. The Triangle shirtwaist fire in New York City in 1910 not only burned up valuable property but caused a cruel loss of life. Over one hundred and forty workers were sacrificed in this case to a cigarette.

In the winter of 1912 occurred the destruction of the Equitable Building, "caused by the careless tossing of a match into a waste paper basket in the Savarin restaurant which occupied quarters in the basement. This match had doubtless been used to light a cigar or cigarette."[8] The waste of time caused by this fire in addition to the actual destruction of the structure must have been enormous, if one thinks of the loss of the records of the great corporations which occupied the building, and of the inconvenience and delays suffered by stockholders and policy holders and other persons who had business relations with them. The fire which destroyed a part of the state capitol at Albany, including a vast number of books and manuscripts, was in all probability caused by a smoker, though the evidence is not quite as conclusive as in the case of the Triangle shirtwaist factory and the Equitable Building. Powell Evans says regarding this fire: "The financial loss is $6,000,000. The loss of documents and records is priceless." And yet to estimate the total social loss we should add to the pecuniary value of the building and its contents, the waste of time and labor inflicted upon a large number of innocent students who desired to use the library, but were unable to do so. All of the readers of the summary of legislation, e. g., were seriously embarrassed, since this fire delayed the issue of this publication by a couple of years.

[Footnote 8: Report of Fire Department of the City of New York for 1912, p. 13.]

These cases are referred to, because they were peculiarly dramatic and are still fresh in the memory of newspaper readers. But it would be a mistake to assume that they represent anything exceptional or phenomenal, like an earthquake or a tornado. Smoking is a chronic and regular cause of fires, perfectly familiar to those whose profession requires them to risk their lives in fighting them, a cause as susceptible of statistical treatment as the mortality from tuberculosis or typhoid. Unfortunately our statistics on this subject are very meagre, and efforts to secure figures from insurance men, who would be expected to have a direct interest in ascertaining the facts, have been surprisingly discouraging. Through the prompt courtesy of the officials concerned, however, the reports of several state fire marshals and of the fire commissioners of several large cities have been secured, and are summarized below.

These statistics make no claim to completeness. In the nature of things, the causes of many fires cannot be ascertained, and, even where they are stated in a printed report, they are not always easy to interpret. For the particular subject under discussion it is especially hard to know what percentage of the fires caused by carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. The common use of electric lights in cities, as well as of permanent fires for cooking and heating, makes it altogether reasonable to suppose that a very large percentage of the matches used serve the purposes of smokers. Observation of the habits of smokers indicates that a still larger percentage of fires caused by the careless use of matches is attributable to them. To avoid exaggeration, however, it has been thought best not to assume that all of the fires caused by carelessness with matches should be charged to smokers. Hence two columns are printed, one showing the fires due to matches (exclusive of matches in the hands of children and matches supposed to be ignited by rats or mice), the other showing the fires which are caused directly by cigars, cigarette stumps, smoking in bed, etc. The column giving the total number of fires for which causes are assigned is made by deducting from the total number of fire alarms the cases of false alarms, double alarms, etc., and the cases in which the cause was either not ascertained, or so vaguely stated as to be meaningless.

CAUSES OF FIRES AS GIVEN IN LATEST REPORTS

_Percentage _Percentage _Total Fires due to due to _City or State_ accounted for_ tobacco_ matches_ _Total_

New York City 10,330 12.3 15.7 28 New York State (Outside of Greater New York) 5,599 5.2 8.8 14.0 Philadelphia 2,784 5.0 25.5 30.5 Boston 3,443 15.6[9] Newark 1,108 9.8 20.8 30.6 New Haven 681 7.9 5.6 13.5

[Footnote 9: Includes careless use of matches and pipe, cigar, cigarette. In addition the report enumerates 5% as caused by matches, careless use of, and set by rats.]

It would be futile with our present knowledge to try to construct any general average showing what percentage of fires in the country at large can fairly be charged to smokers. In some of the western states and cities in particular, the records are obviously incomplete as in the report of the state fire marshal of Illinois, which gives less than half as many fires for the city of Chicago during the year 1912 as were reported by the city fire marshal for the same period. And it is only fair to say that in some of these western sections of the country the percentage is much smaller than in the cities given above. One fact is, however, incontestable, and that is that smokers are recognized in all of the reports received as at least one of the important causes of fires and are sometimes, as in New York City, the most important single cause. This is clearly shown in the following extract from the report of the fire department for the year 1912:

PRINCIPAL CAUSES OF FIRE