legislative bodies goes on, occupational control of governments is being achieved. In Russia the manual workers are in control. In the United States the farmers are in the saddle at the moment; to-morrow it may be organized labor or finance or industry. Everywhere legislation is the incidence of conflicting occupational interests. Sectional interests, on which territorial representation in legislative bodies is based, are giving place within most established nations to economic group interests.

In the United States it is no longer the North against the South or the East against the West, but each breadearning pursuit for itself, regardless of region. Legislatures, it is true, are not yet composed of duly chosen group representatives, but they are the battle-ground of those interests. The latter are the real power, and legislators their creatures. Now one group, and to-morrow another, intimidates Congress, and legislation is a crazyquilt expression of class conflicts. There is no balanced program of legislation, but merely the record in statutory enactments of the rise and fall of the political influences of occupational interests. We have a sort of government by occupational tyranny, which may yet give place to occupational democracy, wherein the group interests will govern in conference and by

bles to wrest a sectionally elected Congress from one another, as at present. The constitutional form of government may be changed to effect this representation, or Congress may become such a rubber-stamp as the College of Electors, and we may get balanced occupational rule and representation without recording it in the organic law. Just as parties, and not the electors, choose Presidents, so an extra-legal parliament of business may make the law that Congress perfunctorily enacts.

In recent years the general and particular organization of the people of the country according to occupation or group interests has proceeded at such a pace as to cross-section the whole structure of the nation with intimate personal-interest affiliations that tend to subvert regional affiliations and interests of a traditional or sentimental nature. There are more than 5500 such groups in the United States. They, instead of political subdivisions, have become the real structural units of the nation. The resources of many of these organizations are sufficient to provide for annual expenditures mounting into the millions. Even the farmers have organizations with total incomes in excess of five million dollars, of which one association alone has about half a million annually for national promotional

work. Instead of level dues, the revenues of some are a fixed percentage of the amount of business done by the members. The latter regard their associational contributions as important and necessary as advertising. Each concern fights its own battles for patronage, but the central organization directs the contest of group against group and for a larger place in the national sun. Concrete wars against clay, shingles against composite roofings, butter against oleomargarin, coal against oil.

So far has this new grouping progressed that the altruistically inclined deplore it as one of the chief obstacles to the attainment of the common good. It has had the effect, they complain, of making the people provincial and insular in an economic sense. Each small or large occupational group lives its life within the walls of its business interest, views every public problem from the point of view of that particular interest, and rarely seeks particular benefit from the promotion of the general good. Behind each trade grouping and the endless self-intensification of its promotional work are one or more trade journals, which constantly emphasize the group view of every industrial or political project that comes to the surface. These journals are the trade Bibles, and their readers find in them perennial encouragement of their selfish and narrow views. To-day a large portion of the population considers every public question from the point of view of the multitudinous group interests and without yielding in the least to sectional or general considerations. The steel manufacturer is for steel whether you find him in Colorado or in Pennsylvania, the stove man is first of all

for stoves; and so it goes throughout the country, cutting across representation in Congress, which is considered by all the groups as nothing more than a national directorate of business.

But Congress continues to be elected by States and districts, and the occupational interests, often large in the aggregate, but weak by geographical sections, find themselves, according to their ideas, improperly represented in the national directorate.

§ 2

To overcome this situation of an industrial nation not wholly directed in the industrial interest, the group business interests have tended more and more to concern themselves with affecting congressmen after election than by means of elections. The perfection and number of their organizations, which have grown up without conscious thought of direct political action, have placed an effective instrumentality for this purpose in their hands. Not being able in any large way to send their own group representatives to Congress, they nevertheless send them to Washington. There have always been courtiers where there are courts and lobbyists where there are legislative lobbies. In former times the lobbyist at Washington was either a migratory bird, coming and going to work for or against measures affecting his special group interests; or, if resident, his attachments, like those of a lawyer, were transitory, his services as a professional manipulater of congressmen being at the disposal of the largest purse.

The old-time lobbyist was likely to be frankly the delegate of a single corporation, and his appearance was often as much in the open as his argu

ments were confidential and mercenary. The independent or professional lobbyist has not entirely disappeared even in these days, though he is apt to disguise himself as a lawyer (frequently a "lame-duck" congressman), with permanent offices in Washington, or as a publicity agent; and he experienced a lively recrudescence during the war, when billions were flowing where thousands had formerly trickled. The individual business ambassador in Washington nowadays is apt to be more concerned with the administrative than with the legislative side of government, with claims, with contracts, with income-tax negotiations, etc.

The real lobbyists of the time are the officers of the great national organizations, some industrial, some commercial, some professional, some scientific, some reformative, some religious, and some merely faddist, all of which have come to find that in some fundamental ways Washington is even more of a center of the non-political cohesions than New York or Chicago. Unconsciously responding to the workings of group interest in seeking their legislative or administrative ends, occupational associations are more and more making Washington the occupational as well as the political capital of the nation. About one hundred and fifty powerful national associations of one sort or another now have Washington offices, and in the case of perhaps fifty the office in the capital is also the national headquarters.

It is impossible to ascertain how many other associations are represented in Washington as clients of publicity and information agents, and by attorneys whose practice consists largely of representation of great cor

poration or group interests in their contacts with the National Government, but it is a very large number. Lynx-eyed watch is kept on every committee of Congress; every line of the Congressional Record is minutely scanned. At the slightest sign of danger or benefit there is a swift and silent mobilization of the legislative guards of business. Hopeless are the distant and unrepresented.

Business interests that are not regularly represented in Washington subscribe to informational services, which keep them minutely informed of everything that takes place in Washington that may in any way affect their affairs. Some of these services even undertake a sort of card system of government officials, after the manner of the system the German general staff had of French officers, in order that the business man who comes to Washington on some "deal" may be fully informed of the personal equation of the men with whom he has to transact his business.

Each Washington representation of a group, even though it be little more than self-elected, always speaks with an assumption of full authority for the whole group. The congressman is perpetually bombarded with petitions, solemn warnings, arguments, and menaces from these groups, which in the aggregate have at least a pretense of right to represent every commercial and industrial interest of the nation. As America exists for business above all things else, it is no wonder that the congressman believes that the voice of the delegates to Washington is the voice of the people. The people is a vague conception. There is none politically in the voteless district of Columbia, and the masses are far away

from Washington; and as a national aggregate, as distinguished from a group, a people is inarticulate. The groups are articulate, vociferously so. Take the Chamber of Commerce of the United States for example. It is the federation of the local chambers of commerce throughout the country. It undertakes to speak for the business community of the nation, and avowedly seeks nothing less than the national "integration of business." It issues frequent composites of national business opinion, obtained by questionnaires sent to its member bodies, which are put forth as the solemn and deliberate voice of that portentous thing, American business. It has its headquarters in Washington, and is about to erect a marble palace that will be a sort of federal capital of integrated business. It publishes a bright and readable magazine, "The Nation's Business," which is widely read. This powerful organization has only to push the button that closes the circuit of its ramifications, and forthwith American business, or something that sounds convincingly like American business, emits a terrifying roar of dissent or an unctuous purr of approval. Several thousand newspapers print the record of its expression, business men gravely consider it, and forthwith the telegraphs and the mails and the telephones bring back the approving echo to a congressman who is striving to represent his people if he can only find out what they want. Likewise the American Federation of Labor has its own capitol building in Washington, housing ceaseless activities that ever tend to concentrate the power-the favor and the menace of organized labor in Congress. The farmers also are about to build one.

These three executive domiciles will be more truly capitols to the three dominant groups of business, labor, and agriculture than the domed capitol that has long symbolized national unity and power.

§ 3

As Congress, in both chambers, really acts in committee and merely talks or approves in body, the group and special interest organizations have a tremendous advantage in active participation in legislation. Their trained secretaries or managers, their economists, their statisticians, their press agents, their lawyers, are masters of all things relating to their affairs. Each group knows everything about its own business, whereas the tired, hurried, and distracted congressmen usually know little of any one subject. When hearings preparatory to legislation are held by congressional committees, the ignorant members are confronted by experts in knowledge and experience, adepts by lifelong exercise in special pleading. Humbled by their manifest ignorance, the committeemen are too often inclined to consider the voice of the specialist as the voice of truth, if not of the people. Any citizen has a right to discuss his affairs as related to legislation with any congressman, and in these dialogues the trained representative of special interests shows to even greater advantage than before committees. Personal canvasses of the entire membership of Congress by these organizations are not uncommon, and there is many a member of the unchambered occupational third house of Congress who knows better than members of the recognized houses or newspaper correspondents what is the attitude

of a majority of Congress on many of the important questions before it.

To manipulate legislation at Washington nowadays one does not waste time on personal appeals to members of Congress or in interviewing the nominal leaders of the House and the Senate. Rather he seeks out the legislative agents of a few powerful occupational groups, and if he can interest them, his work is accomplished. There is a distinct tendency for the representatives of apparently conflicting interests to adjust their differences and shape their programs among themselves instead of in Congress. The more this tendency develops, the more Congress becomes a rubberstamp.

Rather curiously, it has remained for the long-unorganized and nebulous farming interest to be the first of the group interests to come into the open and round up and brand its representatives in Congress. The agricultural bloc, which now unquestionably dictates national legislation, is not the result of a spontaneous movement of congressmen, but is the direct creation of the farm organizations, particularly the American Farm Bureau Federation. These organizations rather bluntly told the representatives and senators from agricultural districts that they must work and vote for certain class legislation: The result is to-day that we have about one hundred representatives and twentyfive senators who are solidly for the agrarian legislative program, and frankly so. This bloc is large enough to get what it wants or create an impasse. Congress obeys or is held up. As there is no other large, coherent class group in Congress, the farmers are getting what they want with as

tonishing celerity from an indolent Congress. The tax and tariff bills may lag, but the farmers get through laws that restrict the packers and the grain exchanges, place the War Finance Corporation at their disposal, divert $25,000,000 more from the treasury to the land-loan banks, increase the rate of interest on government debentures for these banks, and at the same time shape taxation and tariff to their liking.

The farmers are now unblushingly demanding that Congress shall give them the unrestricted right to unite and combine in the sale of their products, the anti-trust laws to the contrary notwithstanding. This is a hard dose for the legislatively unorganized interests to swallow, and they are putting up a fight. But they want legislation of various sorts, which the farmers oppose; therefore there will presently be some sort of log-rolling trade.

So the farmers control, and for the time the real Capitol and the real White House are not at each end of Pennsylvania Avenue, but on the second floor of the Munsey office building, where Mr. Gray Silver, the legislative agent of the Farm Bureaus, has his offices. Little is done on Capitol Hill that is not first approved there, and it is the weekly conference of the bloc members with the farmers' agents that determines legislation, and not party caucuses, party leaders, or even the administration itself. There are forty million persons in the United States who are engaged in gainful occupations. Through the surreptitious entrance of occupational interests into legislative counsels the six-million group of farmers now dictates. The rest are relatively incon