A "plain Duty" Done At Last

A "PLAIN DUTY" DONE AT LAST.

It is no fault of the administration, either of President McKinley or of President Roosevelt, that the act of justice and good policy now tardily and imperfectly accomplished has not been done more fully and sooner. Cuba was entitled to the first and the most generous of those exemptions from the exclusion of our tariff wall which were commended in the last and perhaps the most memorable of the speeches made by the sponsor of the McKinley tariff. That it was our national policy to make it to the interest of Cuba to do the bulk of her trading with her nearest neighbor was manifest from the establishment of the Cuban Republic, and before. It was equally to the individual interest of the great mass of American producers and American consumers. Yet between the interested clamor of an industry scarcely infant, but only "struggling to be born," on the one hand and the timidity of those politicians who considered, not without reason, that the tariff wall was no stronger than its weakest part, and that any breach in it was an opening for "the entering wedge," the doing of justice to the Cuban and the American people has been delayed until this day.

We have yielded a measure of justice at last. But it has not been a full measure and it has not been yielded graciously. That "courtesy of the Senate" which is never permitted to extend beyond the walls of its own chamber has been converted into positive churlishness toward Cuba and toward the president. It was to make an undignified manifestation of spitefulness, when the president had convened congress in extra session precisely because of the urgency of the question of Cuban reciprocity, for the senate to sit and sulk in its chamber until the extra session had expired. The urgency was so undeniable that the first work of the senate at the regular session had to be the enactment of the measure for which the body had been especially called together. Having acknowledged this by making the bill the first order of the regular session, it seems that the august body might have passed it at the session called for that purpose, what time it sat twiddling its thumbs, even if it had deprived itself of the gratification of showing the president that it would do things in its own way and not in his way.

But all is well that ends well. If this reduction of 20 per cent from the maximum of our duties brings us the bulk of the Cuban trade, this business in spite of the Oxnards and other incidental scandals, may be said to have ended well. If not, it will not have ended until we have made such concessions as will secure that great object.--New York Times.