Mr. COLLADAY. At this point I ask permission to insert in the record a copy of an editorial which appeared in the Evening Star, Friday, July 27, 1951, headed, "Voting is not the issue." This editorial clearly and eloquently reviews the basic issue about which the proponents of the so-called home-rule bills and the Washington Board of Trade completely disagree. This basic issue is so admirably expressed by the Star editorial.

(The editorial referred to follows:)

[From the Washington, D. C., Evening Star of July 27, 1951]

VOTING IS NOT THE ISSUE

Senator Neely and some of his colleagues are not being quite honest with themselves or with anybody else when they identify the right to vote as the cardinal issue at stake in the current debate over home rule for the District of Columbia.

Their reasons for attempting to do so, however, are quite obvious. If they can establish the theory, by reiteration, that opposition to home rule is based on opposition to the right to vote, they accomplish two things: They adorn themselves as flaming angels, come to set the people free; they consign those who disagree with them to that opprobrium reserved for the Tories of 1776, detractors of George Washington, and traitors to the traditions of a free people.

But this does not mean that they are right. The vote they are talking about is a vote for the members of a city council and the members of a board of education.

The vote they are not talking about is the vote for the President of the United States, who would appoint a mayor to run the city council; and the vote for representatives of our own choosing in the Congress of the United States, which exercises supreme legislative authority, under the Constittion, over the District of Columbia-in other words, the vote enjoyed by other American citizens in the Government of their country.

There are a good many people in Washington who want the sort of vote that Senator Neely is talking about, and Congress may give it to them—or, more accurately, give it back. For we have had that. But if Senator Neely or anybody else believes that this would for one moment satisfy the aspirations of Washingtonians to the only vote that counts-a vote in one's Governmentthey have forgotten the lessons of history in Washington and everywhere else. We have had various forms of home rule in Washington, two of them not unlike the version most recently cooked up for the Senate District Committee. The Federal Government has been here a little over 150 years. For about half that time there was home rule in the District of Columbia. During these years of home rule the city went into virtual bankruptcy at least twice. After more than 70 years under home rule the development of Washington as a Capital was so retarded that it became the laughing stock of the civilized world. It was only when Congress returned to the original concept of Washington as the Federal City that its real development as the American Capital took place.

Why should anybody familiar with the history of Washington want to embrace, with all the enthusiasm of a convert to something new, a scheme that has been tried and which ended in failure? Why are we being urged to turn back the pages of history and begin another demonstration of the futility of home rule?

The right to vote-even the play-acting sort of voting promised under home rule is not the issue in this debate.

The real issue involves a concept of Washington as the Capital of the United States, a concept which has made Washington a symbol, not yet complete or perfected, but a symbol of America in which all citizens can take pride. This was the concept which guided the founders in the design of an American Capital that was called, in that day, visionary and impossible of realization. For many years after the national Government came to Washington that concept was abandoned as a pipedream, and the citizens of Washington were left pretty much to their own devices by an uninterested Congress, willing enough to let them plug under various patterns of "home rule."

By 1835 the city of Washington was head over heels in debt. The Senate District Committee made an investigation which found "the city is involved in recurring obligations, from which it is utterly impossible that it can be relieved