Ohio History Journal

Ohio Valley Hist. Ass'n, Fifth Annual Meeting.          37

 

Steel Queen, Lee H. Brooks, Slackwater, Frank Tyler, Margaret,

Return, Frank Fowler, Troubador, Sunshine and Emily Jung.

The fleet was in command of Capt. James A. Henderson.

The New Orleans was in command of Melville O. Irwin, mate;

Thomas Walker, engineer, and T. Orville Noel, steward.

 

Fortunately for those in attendance at the Fifth Annual

Meeting, the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce took the oppor-

tunity of President Taft's presence to hold Tuesday evening its

annual banquet. The Historical Society of Western Pennsyl-

vania generously provided tickets to all members of the Ohio

Valley Association present in the city. The banquet was held

in the Memorial Hall and the banquet room presented a scene

of unusual beauty. The event of the evening was the long-to-be-

remembered reply of President Taft to the address of Congress-

man Littleton who advocated the repeal of the Sherman Anti-

Trust law. These addresses have become historic, but as they

are foreign to the subject of Western history and the occasion

of the "New Orleans" centennial, they are omitted from this

report.

Hon. Job E. Hedges followed President Taft; speaking on

"The Third Party to the Contract" as follows:

Much of the present day discussion is wide from the mark, so

far as helping the solution of problems is concerned, and especially so

if the endeavor is made to square it with governmental tradition. I

do not believe that the foundation stones of the Republic are crumbling.

I do not believe that the life of this great Nation hangs in the balance.

I do not believe that vice has a strangle hold on virtue, and that there

are only one or two men who can pull vice off. When the adviser

on political and social problems becomes so didactic that he is mentally

lonely, his diagnosis may be logical and learned, but is useless in ad-

ministering his own remedy. The impediment, if any, the danger, if

any there be, to a republican form of government is its size and the

fact that by virtue of its very numbers fewer people have the oppor-

tunity to make themselves felt by virtue of the fact that they are limited

in their opportunities for discussing the same topic at the same time

with others of the same belief, or those whose belief they propose to

affect.

So great has governmental influence become, so far-reaching, that

the law may be either a scourge or a remedy. It seems to have escaped

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38         Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

popular contemplation that a man has a duty to Government outside

of statute law, and outside of the strict phrasing of the Constitution.

Under a Government with an unrestricted male franchise such as ours,

it is impossible to think of a contract which comes under the provisions

of law where the parties thereto do not bear a political relationship to

all the rest. In other words, there is always a third party to the con-

tract, and that third party represents the rest of the Nation. In part

or in its entirety that contract must be determined if there is anything

whatever in the duty of man to government, according to whether after

the competitions between the contracting parties have been phrased, the

result of that contract would be to the detriment of the people at large.

We are getting away from the moorings of simple things. We

are confused by the element of size and numbers. We are disturbed

by the terrific power of personal influence, and what can be done with

it and money. If we will but admit that men like power, that men like

to accumulate, that men like influence, that competitions may be so in-

tense that a man may think the Golden Rule, but be so out of breath

he cannot utter it, we have gone far toward solution. We are deceived

by proposed self-immolations on the altar of government, by panegyric

on behalf of the common people, which is supposed to bring about an

uprising. Men devote themselves rhetorically to the interests of others,

and shed tears over the sadness of the misfortune when they would

not contribute a dollar to the person who is suffering.

There is a day far beyond the Constitution and statutes in this

country, and it is a duty which if recognized politically means nothing

more nor less than the practical adoption of the Golden Rule. It is

well to practice virtue because it is virtue. If we cannot get on as

high a plane as that it is better to practice virtue from selfish reasons

and reasons of utility rather than not to practice it at all.

Present conditions are the direct results of the failure to observe

these two simple platitudes. Until every election results in an expression

of opinion which means the actual expression of actual people actually

living the part of citizens, law is a guess and its enforcement a gamble,

and discussions as to its wisdom more or less academical. Many men

before the public today are acting as if they thought they were a

special providential dispensation. Others appear to think and to act as

if our national existence was to close with the closing of their eyes.

The human problem here is not the problem of the poor and the suf-

fering, cost of high living, or the cost of any living. It is the attitude

of mind and the conduct of people of intelligence, refinement, wealth

and social position in their relationship to the Government and the obli-

gations they will admit as a matter of ordinary selfishness in working

out the life of this great nation.

Financiers tell us that capital is timid and business predicated on

confidence. Yes, that is true. Business depends, however, more upon

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Ohio Valley Hist. Ass'n, Fifth Annual Meeting.          39

 

the confidence of the general public in the man who controls the capital,

and its belief in his integrity individually than it does in the contribu-

tion of a few dollars per capita, which when lost makes up the added

capital of the leader of finance. I read the other day that business was

at a standstill because of some decision that had been rendered in con-

nection with a law called the Sherman law, and the article went on to

say that no business could be done until there was a law passed which

stated specifically what could not be done in business, and that nothing

should be left to the so-called rule of reason.

It seems to me that nothing is so safe for the people at large

as a general proposition. If the highest court says what may not be,

and leaves to the lower court the function of determining how the

"may not" be avoided, that is about all that law can do. The hazard

of business can never be reduced to an absolute certainty for one side

of the problem, when the advantages are with it, and have the other

side take all the chances. The functions of government are too much

relied on by the people and the people rely too much on the penal code

to determine what they shall not do, and too little on a sense of obliga-

tion of each man toward the public to determine what they should do.

The third party to the contract is never absent from its interpretation

and never should be.

With increasing numbers of population this duty is to become

more and more apparent, and if the final contest is to place upon the

statute books a law to give rights to one class or that makes a distinc-

tion of rights, the inference is that there is no equality of right; although

we know that there is no equality of opportunity, the result will be

confusion, and, from that, confusion worse confounded.

The only permanency in public opinion and the only virtue that can

come from it, and which is a final and lasting benefit is that kind of an

opinion which is formed regardless of publicity, but by virtue of which

men of prominence and potential force will refrain from doing what

they would not do if they were certain that the entire public understood

the entire problem before they attempted to work it out.

The prosperity of the country as such, its uplift and moral growth

depend at this moment more upon the people who are decrying the force

of law; who have all the advantages of social, financial and intellec-

tual position, and who seem to be afraid to enter into the competitions

of life without having every chance in their favor, than they do upon

any other class of the community. The man whose earning power is

limited to his hands, or who is forced to walk in some of the plain

paths of life, however much he may yearn to influence public opinion,

and therefore governmental functions, is practically limited to casting

a "no" vote on something submitted for his approval or disapproval.

The affirmative part of our national life is passing away, and is passing

away because men will not stop to think that most every human, bar-

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40         Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

ring a man's relationship to the God who made him and the home over

which he presides, has a political significance.

You might as well talk of removing politics from business as to

talk of asking the sun to stop shining, as long as a human being votes

upon the election of a man who will vote for a law there is always

politics, and there always should be politics. Instead of there being

too much politics in this country there is too little politics in this country.

It is not a question of the volume of political activity so much as it

is a question of the quality of it. If we could amend the Constitution

and disfranchise the man who did not vote, strike dumb the man who

criticises another for doing what he does, and split the tongue of the

man who agitates the people for the purpose of selling that agitation

at so much per year, some problems would now disappear as the mist

before the sun.

Wednesday morning the chairman Harry Brent Mackoy

called the meeting to order and introduced Professor Callahan

of West Virginia University:

 

 

 

THE PITTSBURGH-WHEELING RIVALRY FOR COMMERCIAL

HEADSHIP ON THE OHIO.

 

BY JAMES MORTON CALLAHAN,

Professor of History and Politics, W. Va. University.

 

The Wheeling Bridge Case in the Supreme Court in 1849-52 and

1854-56 is as interesting through its relations to the industrial history

of the period as it is from the standpoint of constitutional questions

involved. Its study introduces us to the earlier rivalries of coast cities

to secure the trade of the West, the systems of internal improvements

planned to reach the Ohio, the development of trade and navigation

and the extension of improvements and regulations by Congress on

the Ohio, and the rivalries of Pittsburgh and Wheeling to obtain the

hegemony by lines of trade and travel converging and concentrating at

their gates.

Pennsylvania was early interested in plans of internal improvements

to connect Philadelphia with Pittsburg and the free navigation of the

Ohio. Occupying a central position, resting eastward on the Atlantic,

north on the Lakes, and flanking on the Ohio which connected her with

the Gulf and the vast region of West and South, she had advantages

over other states for both foreign and domestic commerce. These ad-

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