Mr. Chairman, there are two gentlemen here from Pennsylvania, representing farm organizations and wool growers, whom I would like the committee to hear.

The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Rainey is here and would like to present his bill to the committee, and he desires to take a short time now to do so; after that we will be very glad to hear the gentlemen to whom you refer.

The committee thanks you, Mr. French, for your very elaborate presentation of your bill and for the information that you have given to it.

STATEMENT OF HON. HENRY T. RAINEY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF ILLINOIS.

The CHAIRMAN. You have two bills, have you not, Mr. Rainey? Mr. RAINEY. Yes, sir; but I want the last one that I introduced. to be considered. They are identical, except that in the last one I have corrected some typographical errors.

Mr. MONTAGUE. What is the number of the bill?

The CHAIRMAN. H. R. 13111.

(The bill referred to is as follors:)

[H. R. 13111, Sixty-sixth Congress, second session.]

A BILL To prevent deceit in the manufacture and sale of woven fabrics or of yarn.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this act may be cited as the "Stamped fabric law.

SEC. 2. That when used in this act the term "interstate commerce" shall include transportation from one State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, to another State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, or within the District of Columbia or any Territory, or through any State, from a point in one State to another point in the same State, or to any foreign country, or from any foreign country to any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia.

SEC. 3. That no manufacturer of woven fabrics, or of yarn, or articles of apparel made from either, shall sell, trade, or exchange the same in interstate commerce unless he shall cause the same to be stamped or tagged in such manner as the Secretary of Commerce may designate so that the stamp or tag shall correctly state the percentage by weight of virgin wool, reworked wool, shoddy, cotton, or silk contained in said fabric, or yarn, or articles of apparel made therefrom; the name and address of said manufacturers shall also be included in said stamp or tag.

SEC. 4. That every manufacturer of garments and articles of apparel for sale, trade, or exchange in interstate commerce shall be deemed to have complied with the provisions of this act, provided he shall stamp or tag in such manner as the Secretary of Commerce shall direct said garment or articles of apparel so as to indicate thereon the contents thereof, as the said contents have been indicated on the stamp or tag affixed by the manufacturer of the materials out of which said garment and articles of apparel have been manufactured.

SEC. 5. That any person who shall violate any provision of this act shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof, for each offense, shall be fined not to exceed $500, or shall be sentenced not to exceed one year's imprisonment, or both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court.

SEC. 6. That this act shall be in force and effect sixty days after its passage.

Mr. RAINEY. I have made one or two minor changes in this bill. My bill is the shortest of all of the bills; it is not much longer than the preamble of the bill that you have just been considering.

There are no sheepmen in my district. In my district the production of wool is a by-product of the general farming industry. There are no factories in my district manufacturing silks, and no factories manufacturing cotton goods, and only one factory that manufactures woolen goods.

So that I am not looking at this question from the standpoint of the sheepmen or from the standpoint of the manufacturers, but simply from the standpoint of the consumer.

From the standpoint of the consumer, I am in favor of the principle involved here. I think the consumer, when he pays his money for a piece of goods or a manufactured garment, is entitled to know what he is buying, and if it is an imitation of wool, and the dealer tells him it is woolen, he is defrauded; he ought to know what he is buying and he ought to know what he is paying for.

I have not much sympathy with this theory that you can increase the number of sheep by law; you are not going to be able to do that. And I do not think you can increase the amount of wool by law. We are in a transition stage from the old system of sheep ranches, and wild grasses, upon which the sheep can feed, to the modern systems of farming and animal husbandry in the United States.

And the sheep are diminishing, of course. In this country we do not produce the wool sheep and we do not produce the mutton sheep; we do not produce either. If we produced one or the other, we would probably have more sheep and more wool; but we produce a kind of crossbreed sheep. And even in the State of Ohio, where they approach the nearest to the merino sheep, they do not have any fullblooded merino sheep. There never will be any impetus given to the business of the production of wool and sheep in this country until, as has been intimated, we do something about dogs.

Every farm ought to have on it-every inclosed farm, in a high state of cultivation-ought to have on it 25 sheep for each 100 acres. And they do not have that. I am a farmer, and have no other business; and I have raised sheep on that kind of a farm in the corn belt of Illinois. I know that there is almost no limit to the profits. They double themselves every year-you will have one, or possibly two lambs from every ewe each year, and they develop in a year, or less than a year, until they are ready for the market; and the wool also now yields a considerable profit. It is safe to say that if you can keep the dogs away, on an ordinary farm, such as we have in the States of the West, which produce bread grains and forage crops that if you can keep the dogs away, you can have a production of sheep on those farms that would yield 50 per cent per annum on the amount that you have invested in them. On that kind of a farm as many sheep as I have indicated will almost keep themselves, except in the winter months-by eating the weeds and other nonproductive growths about the farm. They are in reality made scavengers, and cost but little to keep.

Mr. PARKER. Do you have any dog law in Illinois?

Mr. RAINEY. No; we do not have any effective dog law in Illinois; and if the legislature should pass a dog law, many of them would be beaten at the next election.

Mr. PARKER. You could not enforce it?

Mr. RAINEY. We could not enforce it.

Mr. MONTAGUE. We enforce the dog law in our State.

Mr. RAINEY. I am delighted to hear that; you have a progressive State. But the farmers are organizing everywhere; the farmers want to raise sheep; but they can not do it. I had to quit raising sheep; when the farmers unite in demanding a dog law they will get it.

Mr. MONTAGUE. Do you tax dogs in Illinois?

Mr. RAINEY. Yes; they have a tax of $1 on a male dog and $2 on a female dog; and then the various townships can also add to that a township tax, if they want to impose that kind of a tax; but they do not want to do that, as a rule; and the assessors and collectors of taxes who are anxious to be reelected do not find many dogs when they go around.

But when the farmers are organized and demand dog legislation, you will find that there will be an increase in sheep production. Of course, out on the great ranges of the West, where we have these great herds, it is different; but even there the number of sheep is decreasing right along. In those sections they can look out for the dog nuisance, and it does not trouble them to any extent. But the plow has been driving out the sheep, and will continue to drive out the sheep, until we adopt a method of animal husbandry which permits them to be produced on farms free from the molestation of devouring dogs.

Mr. COOPER. Are they the farmers' own dogs that kill the sheep? Mr. RAINEY. No; the farmer's own dogs do not kill his sheep. Mr. COOPER. Is it the dogs in the farming communities that kill the sheep?

Mr. RAINEY. No; it is the dogs from the towns that kill the sheep. Mr. PARKER. Yes; it is the dogs from the towns and villages.

Mr. RAINEY. I have seen those dogs come out of the towns and villages. They are perfectly tractable and well-behaved dogs when they are in their own homes and surroundings; many of them are even house dogs. But when they get away from their homes, their nature changes as completely as that of the wild animals in the Yellowstone National Park when they get outside.

Mr. COOPER. I want to say that, about the time of the election last fall, I spent a great many days going around over the farms in my district hunting; and I did not see one single case of stray dogs in that section of the country. I do not know where they come from if they do not come from the farms themselves.

Mr. RAINEY. Well, you can not find them. When they start out on these expeditions, they go in little groups of three or four, and they become wild animals, at once; and they will see you half a mile away, and will run away from you, and you can not get near them; you can not get near enough to shoot them. It is a singular thing.

Mr. PARKER. They go back to their natural condition.

Mr. RAINEY. They go back to their natural condition; they become wolves.

Mr. JONES. It is not necessary for a dog to kill the sheep by biting them; the sheep die from fright.

Mr. RAINEY. Many sheep die from fright when chased by dogs. And the dog does not generally eat the sheep; he cuts their throats. Mr. JONES. I have seen dead sheep, where the dog just snipped at their hind legs, and the sheep would die from fright.

Mr. RAINEY. I have seen cases of that kind.

Mr. MONTAGUE. My information is, that after the dogs get into the sheep herds, even if they do not touch the sheep, the sheep become demoralized and they do not develop.

Mr. RAINEY. That is true.

But that does affect the merits of this proposition, except that I do not think you are going to increase the number of sheep by passing this kind of legislation. If you can, it will be a most desirable thing to do. At any rate, it will not decrease the number; and it is a step in the direction of honest business and honest trade.

Now, I am going to support on the floor any bill that this committee reports out. The time has come to report out some kind of bill. Before turning to my very brief bill, which I think will accomplish everything that the more elaborate bills will accomplish, I want to call your attention to the bill that has just been discussed.

That bill provides for a system of espionage without a parallel in in the history of legislation in recent years. My observation during the long period of years-the 18 years-that I have been in Washington, is that a new bureau of this Government, or a new section or division, tries to accumulate and develop business: these Government employees become enthusiastic about their work, and they carry these things to a very great extreme-just as those who are charged with the enforcement of the prohibition laws are now doing; they are making prohibition enforcement unpopular in certain sections of this country.

This bill contemplates and makes possible a Government agent in every factory in this country manufacturing silk, cotton, or woolen goods, or manufacturing yarns: it throws open to his inspection the books of that company. We have at the present time Government agents running around enforcing the prohibition law-that is the most recent thing we have tried to do-who are dishonest. You can not get all of them honest men to save your life. And they are in collusion with the distillers-some of them-dishonest distillers all over this country, and at the present time are even stealing whisky out of the warehouses; and the distillers, some of them, after the whisky is stolen, get back a draft from some unknown source. You can not keep petty Government agents from doing things that are dishonest if you have got a lot of them.

And to throw open the books of a firm to the inspection of a Government agent means that that Government agent will give away that information to rival firms, if they get the chance to do it, and if they can get something for it. Some of them will; most of them will not, of course.

This bill that you have just been discussing contemplates the coordination of three great departments of this Government in order to carry it out, the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Agriculture.

Mr. MONTAGUE. And also the Department of Justice.

Mr. RAINEY. Yes; the Department of Justice also; there are four of them. And the Department of Justice ought to be the only department directly and actively interested in the enforcement of law.

This bill contemplates the utilization of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Standards also. It contemplates the careful investigation by one or the other or both of these bureaus of every bolt of goods, whether it is shoddy, or silk, or cotton, or wool, that is manufactured in the United States. I will undertake to say, that in order to carry that out you would have to double the personnel of the Bureau of Standards and of the Bureau

of Chemistry; and if you want to know what it will cost to carry out this proposition, find out what it costs now to conduct those two bureaus, and take the aggregate cost of conducting those two bureaus, and then add to that total the salaries of hundreds of Government officials who, as the enforcement of this bill develops will be installed in almost every factory of any size in this country--or at any rate, at every factory center in this country-and you will approximate the cost of enforcing this bill under the provisions it contains.

And the bill also usurps the business of the Department of Justice. The real trial that a man would get if he violated this law would not be in the open courts; it would be in a tribunal which is to be set up, under some sort of arrangement to be perfected by three members of the Cabinet; they would try the man, and find out whether he was violating this law with reference to marking or tagging, and then they would send the evidence down to the Department of Justice; and then the man would be prosecuted there, upon the evidence that they had assembled.

In one of these bills--I do not remember whether it is the one that has just been discussed or not-nobody could initiate a prosecution against a man who improperly tagged his goods, except these three secretaries, under some arrangement that they may establish.

The bill provides for an expensive and elaborate proceeding, in the nature of an admiralty proceeding, which reaches goods that come here from outside our own boundaries.

What we want to do, it seems to me, as conscientious legislators, is to decrease, if we can, the complexity of this Government, and the tremendous expense of carrying it on, which is continually increasing. When we go back to our constituents, we find they want us to decrease the cost of running the National Government, and we can not do it when we come back here, for the reason that we are continually adding to the machinery of government. Candidates for the Presidency are running around over the country now, upon a platform that they are going to decrease national expenditures, and not one of them ventures far enough out into the stream to suggest a method of decreasing the expenditures of the Government.

They do not know what they are talking about. You can not decrease the expenditures of an organization that is constantly increasing its personnel; you can not do it to save your life. But you can do something to keep from further increasing the ponderous machinery of this Government, and you can try to return to the sane and simple methods of the past in enforcing laws.

I have prepared a bill which I really think accomplishes everything that the sheep growers want to accomplish. It accomplishes everything that the manufacturers want to accomplish; and I think it will give to the public the kind of goods they think they are buying with their money. There are only a few sections in it.

The first section provides that the act may be cited as the "Stamped fabric law."

The second section defines the term "Interstate commerce" in the usual way, and provides that goods which come here from any foreign country, to any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia, shall be considered as goods in interstate commerce-or goods which go to any foreign country.