at other governments may act as they please without fear
that this Government can do anything at all. We cannot explain. The
explanation is incredible. The Senate of the United States is the only
legislative body in the world which cannot act when its majority is
ready for action. A little group of willful men, representing no
opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the
United States helpless and contemptible.

"The remedy? There is but one remedy. The only remedy is that the
rules of the Senate shall be so altered that it can act. The country
can be relied upon to draw the moral. I believe that the Senate can be
relied on to supply the means of action and save the country from
disaster."

The new Senate of the Sixty-fifth Congress met in extraordinary
session at noon on March 6, 1917, when both parties took steps to
frame a revision of the rules for preventing filibustering. Both
caucuses agreed upon a cloture rule empowering the Senate to bring the
debate on any measure to an end by a two-thirds vote, limiting
speeches to one hour each, but sixteen senators must first make the
request in the form of a signed motion presented two days previously.
After several hours' discussion this rule passed the Senate on March
8, 1917. Thus the right to unlimited debate, which had been regarded
as the most characteristic prerogative of senators, was at last
restrained after enjoying a freedom of nearly one hundred and ten
years.

The recalcitrant senators who prevented the passage of the Armed-Ship
Bill were the subject of bitter criticism from the press and public
throughout the country, which echoed, but in much stronger terms, the
President's denunciation of them. There was none to do them reverence
in the United States. The only meed of praise they received came from
Germany. The essence of editorial opinion in that country regarding
their action, according to a Berlin message, was that "so long as
there are men in the American Congress who boldly refuse to have their
country involved in the European slaughter merely for the sake of
gratifying Wilson's vainglorious ambition, there is hope that the
common sense of the American people will assert itself and that they
will not permit the appalling insanity to spread to the new world that
holds the old world in a merciless grip."

The German press, like the senators whom it eulogized, was mistaken in
supposing that the President had been thwarted by the fa