Title: The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People
Author: Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924
Language: English
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THE NEW FREEDOM

A CALL FOR THE EMANCIPATION
OF THE GENEROUS ENERGIES
OF A PEOPLE

BY
WOODROW WILSON

NEW YORK AND GARDEN CITY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1913


THIS BOOK
I DEDICATE, WITH ALL MY HEART, TO EVERY MAN OR
WOMAN WHO MAY DERIVE FROM IT, IN HOWEVER
SMALL A DEGREE, THE IMPULSE OF
UNSELFISH PUBLIC SERVICE



PREFACE


I have not written a book since the campaign. I did not write this book at
all. It is the result of the editorial literary skill of Mr. William
Bayard Hale, who has put together here in their right sequences the more
suggestive portions of my campaign speeches.

And yet it is not a book of campaign speeches. It is a discussion of a
number of very vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken
words. I have left the sentences in the form in which they were
stenographically reported. I have not tried to alter the easy-going and
often colloquial phraseology in which they were uttered from the platform,
in the hope that they would seem the more fresh and spontaneous because of
their very lack of pruning and recasting. They have been suffered to run
their unpremeditated course even at the cost of such repetition and
redundancy as the extemporaneous speaker apparently inevitably falls
into.

The book is not a discussion of measures or of programs. It is an attempt
to express the new spirit of our politics and to set forth, in large terms
which may stick in the imagination, what it is that must be done if we are
to restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor again, and our
national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in what concerns us only
as families and individuals, to its purity, its self-respect, and its
pristine strength and freedom. The New Freedom is only the old revived and
clothed in the unconquerable strength of modern America.

WOODROW WILSON.



CONTENTS

      Preface                                             vii

CHAPTER                                                  PAGE

   I. The Old Order Changeth                                3
  II. What is Progress?                                    33
 III. Freemen Need No Guardians                            55
  IV. Life Comes from the Soil                             79
   V. The Parliament of the People                         90
  VI. Let There Be Light                                  111
 VII. The Tariff-"Protection," or Special Privilege?      136
VIII. Monopoly, or Opportunity?                           163
  IX. Benevolence, or Justice?                            192
   X. The Way to Resume is to Resume                      223
  XI. The Emancipation of Business                        257
 XII. The Liberation of a People's Vital Energies         277



THE NEW FREEDOM



I

THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH


There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are
discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular
fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years
ago.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has
broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was
twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have
changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with
our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political
formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents
taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to
a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things which used to be put
into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated if put
into a platform now. We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social
organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness
and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that
the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the
convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has
grown infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon questions of
governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It
centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of society
itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development has
run so fast and so far along the lines sketched in the earlier day of
constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has
piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has
elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which
transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the
world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulas
do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.

We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We have
come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we used to
do business,--when we do not carry on any of the operations of
manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to carry
them on. There is a sense in which in our day the individual has been
submerged. In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not
as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as
employees,--in a higher or lower grade,--of great corporations. There was
a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs,
but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of
corporations.

You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have
in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of
the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not
to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders,
and you have oftentimes with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing
of things which you know are against the public interest. Your
individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of a great
organization.

It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation, a
few, a very few, are exalted to a power which as individuals they could
never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are the
heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything in
history in the control of the business operations of the country and in
the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.

Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another
as individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church, and the
State, institutions which associated men in certain wide circles of
relationship. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work,
in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another.
To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great
impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men.

Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated
and impossible. They were framed for another age, which nobody now living
remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be
difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us. The
employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind;
the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by
individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal
relations, but by agents of one sort or another. Workingmen are marshaled
in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks
under a common discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful
machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control. New rules
must be devised with regard to their obligations and their rights, their
obligations to their employers and their responsibilities to one another.
Rules must be devised for their protection, for their compensation when
injured, for their support when disabled.

There is something very new and very big and very complex about these new
relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung up, and
we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power against
weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have said, not an
individual, but a powerful group; and yet the workingman when dealing with
his employer is still, under our existing law, an individual.

Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple and
very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are not
intimate associates now as they used to be in time past. Most of our laws
were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each other, knew
each other's characters, were associates with each other, dealt with each
other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You not only do not
come into personal contact with the men who have the supreme command in
those corporations, but it would be out of the question for you to do it.
Our modern corporations employ thousands, and in some instances hundreds
of thousands, of men. The only persons whom you see or deal with are local
superintendents or local representatives of a vast organization, which is
not like anything that the workingmen of the time in which our laws were
framed knew anything about. A little group of workingmen, seeing their
employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and
the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that
spread all over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no
personal conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never
saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a
workingman to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the
industry in which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know
about him is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the
correspondence of the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is
a long way off from them.

So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals intentionally
do,--I do not believe there are a great many of those,--but the wrongs of
a system. I want to record my protest against any discussion of this
matter which would seem to indicate that there are bodies of our
fellow-citizens who are trying to grind us down and do us injustice. There
are some men of that sort. I don't know how they sleep o' nights, but
there are men of that kind. Thank God, they are not numerous. The truth
is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless. The
modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual. When we
deal with it, we deal with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece of
society. A modern corporation is a means of co-operation in the conduct of
an enterprise which is so big that no one man can conduct it, and which
the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance. A company is
formed; that company puts out a prospectus; the promoters expect to raise
a certain fund as capital stock. Well, how are they going to raise it?
They are going to raise it from the public in general, some of whom will
buy their stock. The moment that begins, there is formed--what? A joint
stock corporation. Men begin to pool their earnings, little piles, big
piles. A certain number of men are elected by the stockholders to be
directors, and these directors elect a president. This president is the
head of the undertaking, and the directors are its managers.

Now, do the workingmen employed by that stock corporation deal with that
president and those directors? Not at all. Does the public deal with that
president and that board of directors? It does not. Can anybody bring them
to account? It is next to impossible to do so. If you undertake it you
will find it a game of hide and seek, with the objects of your search
taking refuge now behind the tree of their individual personality, now
behind that of their corporate irresponsibility.

And do our laws take note of this curious state of things? Do they even
attempt to distinguish between a man's act as a corporation director and
as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the basis of
the old system. The law is still living in the dead past which we have
left behind. This is evident, for instance, with regard to the matter of
employers' liability for workingmen's injuries. Suppose that a
superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery which
it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by that
piece of machinery. Some of our courts have held that the superintendent
is a fellow-servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, and
that, therefore, the man cannot recover damages for his injury. The
superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer. Who is
his employer? And whose negligence could conceivably come in there? The
board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of
machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use
that piece of machinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory that a
man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the employer? When
I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the relationships that used to
exist between workmen and their employers a generation ago, I wonder if
they have not opened their eyes to the modern world. You know, we have a
right to expect that judges will have their eyes open, even though the law
which they administer hasn't awakened.

Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties we
are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new order.

       *       *       *       *       *

Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of
commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so
watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better
not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.

They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used
to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as
his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters
certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him
that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to
have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut
from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell
to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse
to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new
man's wares.

And this is the country which has lifted to the admiration of the world
its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be
under any limitation except the limitations of his character and of his
mind; where there is supposed to be no distinction of class, no
distinction of blood, no distinction of social status, but where men win
or lose on their merits.

I lay it very close to my own conscience as a public man whether we can
any longer stand at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon those terms.
American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is
not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get
into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow.
Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from
crushing the weak. That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed
the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this
country. No man can deny that the lines of endeavor have more and more
narrowed and stiffened; no man who knows anything about the development of
industry in this country can have failed to observe that the larger kinds
of credit are more and more difficult to obtain, unless you obtain them
upon the terms of uniting your efforts with those who already control the
industries of the country; and nobody can fail to observe that any man
who tries to set himself up in competition with any process of manufacture
which has been taken under the control of large combinations of capital
will presently find himself either squeezed out or obliged to sell and
allow himself to be absorbed.

There is a great deal that needs reconstruction in the United States. I
should like to take a census of the business men,--I mean the rank and
file of the business men,--as to whether they think that business
conditions in this country, or rather whether the organization of business
in this country, is satisfactory or not. I know what they would say if
they dared. If they could vote secretly they would vote overwhelmingly
that the present organization of business was meant for the big fellows
and was not meant for the little fellows; that it was meant for those who
are at the top and was meant to exclude those who are at the bottom; that
it was meant to shut out beginners, to prevent new entries in the race, to
prevent the building up of competitive enterprises that would interfere
with the monopolies which the great trusts have built up.

What this country needs above everything else is a body of laws which will
look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already
made. Because the men who are already made are not going to live
indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to leave sons as able
and as honest as they are.

The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new
enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted workingman makes
his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes, that
presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope and
character,--that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the
processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity. Its
members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms me is that they
are not _originating_ prosperity. No country can afford to have its
prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of
America does not lie in the brains of the small body of men now in
control of the great enterprises that have been concentrated under the
direction of a very small number of persons. The treasury of America lies
in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special
favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the
originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every
country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks
of those already famous and powerful and in control.

There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which
enables a small number of men who control the government to get favors
from the government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from equal
business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of control that
will presently dominate every industry in the country, and so make men
forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when America was
to be seen in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces
on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the
mountain-sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were
everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a distant
city to find out what they might do, but looking about among their
neighbors, finding credit according to their character, not according to
their connections, finding credit in proportion to what was known to be in
them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held that
were approved where they were not known. In order to start an enterprise
now, you have to be authenticated, in a perfectly impersonal way, not
according to yourself, but according to what you own that somebody else
approves of your owning. You cannot begin such an enterprise as those that
have made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded
in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that freedom?
That is dependence, not freedom.

We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that
all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform, and
say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal
of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with,
except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government
was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the
idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. But we are coming now to realize
that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old
conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions
under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for
us to live.

Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that every
family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family had its own
little premises, that every family was separated in its life from every
other family. That is no longer the case in our great cities. Families
live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors; they are piled
layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of our crowded districts,
and not only are they piled layer upon layer, but they are associated room
by room, so that there is in every room, sometimes, in our congested
districts, a separate family. In some foreign countries they have made
much more progress than we in handling these things. In the city of
Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of the world),
they have made up their minds that the entries and the hallways of great
tenements are public streets. Therefore, the policeman goes up the
stairway, and patrols the corridors; the lighting department of the city
sees to it that the halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not
deceive itself into supposing that that great building is a unit from
which the police are to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded,
but it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in them, and
control by the authority of the city."

I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation is
very like a large tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single
commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement house
is a network of public highways.

When you offer the securities of a great corporation to anybody who wishes
to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the inspection of
everybody who wants to purchase. There must, to follow out the figure of
the tenement house, be lights along the corridors, there must be police
patrolling the openings, there must be inspection wherever it is known
that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises. If
we believe that fraud lies in wait for us, we must have the means of
determining whether our suspicions are well founded or not. Similarly, the
treatment of labor by the great corporations is not what it was in
Jefferson's time. Whenever bodies of men employ bodies of men, it ceases
to be a private relationship. So that when courts hold that workingmen
cannot peaceably dissuade other workingmen from taking employment, as was
held in a notable case in New Jersey, they simply show that their minds
and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.

Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to come
into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along dark
corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the bowels of
the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole nation, and when
it came about that no individual owned these mines, that they were owned
by great stock companies, then all the old analogies absolutely collapsed
and it became the right of the government to go down into these mines to
see whether human beings were properly treated in them or not; to see
whether accidents were properly safeguarded against; to see whether modern
economical methods of using these inestimable riches of the earth were
followed or were not followed. If somebody puts a derrick improperly
secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the
government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so
secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the
heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise, in these great beehives where
in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the
government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may
be, to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something
to breathe.

These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find
many more things out of joint.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the most alarming phenomena of the time,--or rather it would be
alarming if the nation had not awakened to it and shown its determination
to control it,--one of the most significant signs of the new social era is
the degree to which government has become associated with business. I
speak, for the moment, of the control over the government exercised by Big
Business. Behind the whole subject, of course, is the truth that, in the
new order, government and business must be associated closely. But that
association is at present of a nature absolutely intolerable; the
precedence is wrong, the association is upside down. Our government has
been for the past few years under the control of heads of great allied
corporations with special interests. It has not controlled these interests
and assigned them a proper place in the whole system of business; it has
submitted itself to their control. As a result, there have grown up
vicious systems and schemes of governmental favoritism (the most obvious
being the extravagant tariff), far-reaching in effect upon the whole
fabric of life, touching to his injury every inhabitant of the land,
laying unfair and impossible handicaps upon competitors, imposing taxes in
every direction, stifling everywhere the free spirit of American
enterprise.

Now this has come about naturally; as we go on we shall see how very
naturally. It is no use denouncing anybody, or anything, except human
nature. Nevertheless, it is an intolerable thing that the government of
the republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should
have been captured by interests which are special and not general. In the
train of this capture follow the troops of scandals, wrongs, indecencies,
with which our politics swarm.

There are cities in America of whose government we are ashamed. There are
cities everywhere, in every part of the land, in which we feel that, not
the interests of the public, but the interests of special privileges, of
selfish men, are served; where contracts take precedence over public
interest. Not only in big cities is this the case. Have you not noticed
the growth of socialistic sentiment in the smaller towns? Not many months
ago I stopped at a little town in Nebraska, and while my train lingered I
met on the platform a very engaging young fellow dressed in overalls who
introduced himself to me as the mayor of the town, and added that he was
a Socialist. I said, "What does that mean? Does that mean that this town
is socialistic?" "No, sir," he said; "I have not deceived myself; the vote
by which I was elected was about 20 per cent. socialistic and 80 per cent.
protest." It was protest against the treachery to the people of those who
led both the other parties of that town.

All over the Union people are coming to feel that they have no control
over the course of affairs. I live in one of the greatest States in the
union, which was at one time in slavery. Until two years ago we had
witnessed with increasing concern the growth in New Jersey of a spirit of
almost cynical despair. Men said: "We vote; we are offered the platform we
want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely
nothing." So they began to ask: "What is the use of voting? We know that
the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and
therefore it is useless to turn in either direction."

This is not confined to some of the state governments and those of some of
the towns and cities. We know that something intervenes between the
people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at
Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.

Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?
Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see
reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.
There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence. She boasted
that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular government; but now
she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are at work forces which
she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.

Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who
did not care for the nation, could put this whole country into a flame?
Don't you know that this country from one end to the other believes that
something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without
conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way. Follow me!"--and lead
in paths of destruction!

The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.

I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little
of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to say, as
if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every
age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change
than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for
change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as
in this in which we are taking part.

The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over,
in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of
its very elements; is questioning its oldest practices as freely as its
newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it
stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which
only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous co-operation can
hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct
economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political
society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification
in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or
more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic
and political practice.

We stand in the presence of a revolution,--not a bloody revolution;
America is not given to the spilling of blood,--but a silent revolution,
whereby America will insist upon recovering in practice those ideals which
she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to the
general interest and not to special interests.

We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative
statesmanship as no age has done since that great age in which we set up
the government under which we live, that government which was the
admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it
which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our
institutions and preach revolution against them. I do not fear revolution.
I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its self-possession.
Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came when we put aside the
crude government of the Confederation and created the great Federal Union
which governs individuals, not States, and which has been these hundred
and thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some radical changes we must
make in our law and practice. Some reconstructions we must push forward,
which a new age and new circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all
in calm and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots.

I do not speak of these things in apprehension, because all is open and
above-board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret. The
whole stupendous program must be publicly planned and canvassed. Good
temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful
and unselfish men, the habit of co-operation and of compromise which has
been bred in us by long years of free government, in which reason rather
than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and
universal debate, will enable us to win through to still another great age
without violence.



II

WHAT IS PROGRESS?


In that sage and veracious chronicle, "Alice Through the Looking-Glass,"
it is recounted how, on a noteworthy occasion, the little heroine is
seized by the Red Chess Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They
run until both of them are out of breath; then they stop, and Alice looks
around her and says, "Why, we are just where we were when we started!"
"Oh, yes," says the Red Queen; "you have to run twice as fast as that to
get anywhere else."

That is a parable of progress. The laws of this country have not kept up
with the change of economic circumstances in this country; they have not
kept up with the change of political circumstances; and therefore we are
not even where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we
are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions,
before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this
great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And
we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in
order to get anywhere else.

I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason,
because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the
economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as
other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts
of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will
always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your
laws to the facts, so much the worse for the laws, not for the facts,
because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which
runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the
will-o'-the-wisps of imaginative projects.

Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is
in a situation to which we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are still
meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily
adjusted to business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust
them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we must; there is no choice.
If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is
damaged; because the law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the
expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered
the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted
interests as they have arisen and have changed toward one another.

Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The
system set up by our law and our usage doesn't work,--or at least it can't
be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure
of labor and pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has
got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests.
An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

There are serious things to do. Does any man doubt the great discontent
in this country? Does any man doubt that there are grounds and
justifications for discontent? Do we dare stand still? Within the past few
months we have witnessed (along with other strange political phenomena,
eloquently significant of popular uneasiness) on one side a doubling of
the Socialist vote and on the other the posting on dead walls and
hoardings all over the country of certain very attractive and diverting
bills warning citizens that it was "better to be safe than sorry" and
advising them to "let well enough alone." Apparently a good many citizens
doubted whether the situation they were advised to let alone was really
well enough, and concluded that they would take a chance of being sorry.
To me, these counsels of do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still
for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the hopeful,
energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise
enough to touch their own affairs without marring them, constitute the
most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans
are not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of
submission to the doctrine that prosperity is something that benevolent
magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their
self-reliance has been weakened, but not so utterly destroyed that you can
twit them about it. The American people are not naturally stand-patters.
Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.

There are, of course, Americans who have not yet heard that anything is
going on. The circus might come to town, have the big parade and go,
without their catching a sight of the camels or a note of the calliope.
There are people, even Americans, who never move themselves or know that
anything else is moving.

A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida "cracker," as they call a
certain ne'er-do-weel portion of the population down there, when passing
through the State in a train, asked some one to point out a "cracker" to
him. The man asked replied, "Well, if you see something off in the woods
that looks brown, like a stump, you will know it is either a stump or a
cracker; if it moves, it is a stump."

Now, movement has no virtue in itself. Change is not worth while for its
own sake. I am not one of those who love variety for its own sake. If a
thing is good to-day, I should like to have it stay that way to-morrow.
Most of our calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way
they are. For example, if, when you got up this morning, you had forgotten
how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which
you do almost automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would
have to find out what you did yesterday. I am told by the psychologists
that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am
to-day, and that, therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able
to tally to-day with yesterday. If they do not tally, then I am confused;
I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell
me my name and where I came from.

I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am
not one of those who wish to change for the mere sake of variety. The only
men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who
filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect to-day,
and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that
will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which
will blot out all recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is
improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not like it,
then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to
justify the change.

It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient
distinction,--between mere change and improvement. Yet there is a class of
mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose
conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something,--it
mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the
energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life
does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in
going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The
direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going,
and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how
fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that
we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those
things that in my boyhood days we called "treadmills,"--a treadmill being
a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule
was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even
other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of
noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out
some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.
Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends
tried dynamite. It moved,--in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.

A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was
a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of
business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the
point about such men is that they have been bribed--not in the ordinary
meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have
achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and
therefore they have been put under bonds to see that that existing order
of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the _status quo_.

It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the
administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make
the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as
possible. Not because their fathers lacked character or intelligence or
knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their
advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch
with the processes of life; they had forgotten what it was to begin; they
had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be
dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the
bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the
creative, formative and progressive forces of society.

Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word
comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the
thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men
through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They
thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were
tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the
larger spear. "There were giants in those days." Now all that has altered.
We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in
comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress,
development,--those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past
and press onward to something new.

But what is progress going to do with the past, and with the present? How
is it going to treat them? With ignominy, or respect? Should it break with
them altogether, or rise out of them, with its roots still deep in the
older time? What attitude shall progressives take toward the existing
order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the
laws, and the courts?

Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the
ancient foundations of our institutions justified in their fear? If they
are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is
indeed true that we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so
carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very slowly and
very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. We ought,
therefore, to ask ourselves, first of all, whether thought in this country
is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which
we shall change the whole direction of our development?

I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely
plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe
that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a
_tabula rasa_ upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a
new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You
must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old
garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven
into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture
and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve
the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.

       *       *       *       *       *

One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a
university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from
all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary
by their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by
which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was
my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been
devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century.
His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of
anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his
thought the thing I had been waiting for. He called my attention to the
fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend
to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example,
after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all
thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian
Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody
is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development
and accommodation to environment.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution
of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian
Theory. You have only to read the papers of _The Federalist_ to see that
fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of
the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the
organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,--how
by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their
orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and
the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.

They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its
modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had
any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a
Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had
copied Newton's description of the mechanism of the heavens.

The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true
scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,--the best way of
their age,--those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of
Nature,"--and then by way of afterthought,--"and of Nature's God." And
they constructed a government as they would have constructed an
orrery,--to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a
variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of
gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the
efficacy of "checks and balances."

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a
living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under
the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It
is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its
functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its
organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary,
its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response
to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of
purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men,
with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of
specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is
indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government
without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact,
whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political
constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a
living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must
develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when
"development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is
recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of
Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell
against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom
that is going on to-day.

The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.
It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms
into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for
the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the
circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an
eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a
thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of
government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it into the
questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of
the sires who acted in response to its challenge.

What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take to-day? What
is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the
rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our
contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new
declaration of independence?

By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation
and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by
means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of
our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special
bodies of capital and those who organize their use. We mean the alliance,
for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the
exploitation of the people by legal and political means. We have seen many
of our governments under these influences cease to be representative
governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and
become governments representative of special interests, controlled by
machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.

Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to
me as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern
inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended
the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new
set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put
out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no
character whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house
and yet change it.

Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also
engineers. We don't have to stop using a railroad terminal because a new
station is being built. We don't have to stop any of the processes of our
lives because we are rearranging the structures in which we conduct those
processes. What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of
the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the
steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all
the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then
slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through
new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two
from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family
in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed,
where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected,
co-ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid of
any artificial storm, any imitation of thunder and lightning, knowing that
the foundations go down to the bedrock of principle, and knowing that
whenever they please they can change that plan again and accommodate it as
they please to the altering necessities of their lives.

But there are a great many men who don't like the idea. Some wit recently
said, in view of the fact that most of our American architects are trained
in a certain _École_ in Paris, that all American architecture in recent
years was either bizarre or "Beaux Arts." I think that our economic
architecture is decidedly bizarre; and I am afraid that there is a good
deal to learn about matters other than architecture from the same source
from which our architects have learned a great many things. I don't mean
the School of Fine Arts at Paris, but the experience of France; for from
the other side of the water men can now hold up against us the reproach
that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same
extent that they have adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in some
of the reasons given by our friends across the Canadian border for being
very shy about the reciprocity arrangements. They said: "We are not sure
whither these arrangements will lead, and we don't care to associate too
closely with the economic conditions of the United States until those
conditions are as modern as ours." And when I resented it, and asked for
particulars, I had, in regard to many matters, to retire from the debate.
Because I found that they had adjusted their regulations of economic
development to conditions we had not yet found a way to meet in the United
States.

Well, we have started now at all events. The procession is under way. The
stand-patter doesn't know there is a procession. He is asleep in the back
part of his house. He doesn't know that the road is resounding with the
tramp of men going to the front. And when he wakes up, the country will be
empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing
has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going
on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won't go with it.
The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the
stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is
going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we
are good company; why doesn't he come along? We are not going to do him
any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the
slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the
whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each
other's faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have
to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about
with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at
last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind. We had said to all the
world, "America was created to break every kind of monopoly, and to set
men free, upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity, to
match their brains and their energies," and now we have proved that we
meant it.



III

FREEMEN NEED NO GUARDIANS


There are two theories of government that have been contending with each
other ever since government began. One of them is the theory which in
America is associated with the name of a very great man, Alexander
Hamilton. A great man, but, in my judgment, not a great American. He did
not think in terms of American life. Hamilton believed that the only
people who could understand government, and therefore the only people who
were qualified to conduct it, were the men who had the biggest financial
stake in the commercial and industrial enterprises of the country.

That theory, though few have now the hardihood to profess it openly, has
been the working theory upon which our government has lately been
conducted. It is astonishing how persistent it is. It is amazing how
quickly the political party which had Lincoln for its first
leader,--Lincoln, who not only denied, but in his own person so completely
disproved the aristocratic theory,--it is amazing how quickly that party,
founded on faith in the people, forgot the precepts of Lincoln and fell
under the delusion that the "masses" needed the guardianship of "men of
affairs."

For indeed, if you stop to think about it, nothing could be a greater
departure from original Americanism, from faith in the ability of a
confident, resourceful, and independent people, than the discouraging
doctrine that somebody has got to provide prosperity for the rest of us.
And yet that is exactly the doctrine on which the government of the United
States has been conducted lately. Who have been consulted when important
measures of government, like tariff acts, and currency acts, and railroad
acts, were under consideration? The people whom the tariff chiefly
affects, the people for whom the currency is supposed to exist, the people
who pay the duties and ride on the railroads? Oh, no! What do they know
about such matters! The gentlemen whose ideas have been sought are the
big manufacturers, the bankers, and the heads of the great railroad
combinations. The masters of the government of the United States are the
combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States. It is written
over every intimate page of the records of Congress, it is written all
through the history of conferences at the White House, that the
suggestions of economic policy in this country have come from one source,
not from many sources. The benevolent guardians, the kind-hearted trustees
who have taken the troubles of government off our hands, have become so
conspicuous that almost anybody can write out a list of them. They have
become so conspicuous that their names are mentioned upon almost every
political platform. The men who have undertaken the interesting job of
taking care of us do not force us to requite them with anonymously
directed gratitude. We know them by name.

Suppose you go to Washington and try to get at your government. You will
always find that while you are politely listened to, the men really
consulted are the men who have the biggest stake,--the big bankers, the
big manufacturers, the big masters of commerce, the heads of railroad
corporations and of steamship corporations. I have no objection to these
men being consulted, because they also, though they do not themselves seem
to admit it, are part of the people of the United States. But I do very
seriously object to these gentlemen being _chiefly_ consulted, and
particularly to their being exclusively consulted, for, if the government
of the United States is to do the right thing by the people of the United
States, it has got to do it directly and not through the intermediation of
these gentlemen. Every time it has come to a critical question these
gentlemen have been yielded to, and their demands have been treated as the
demands that should be followed as a matter of course.

The government of the United States at present is a foster-child of the
special interests. It is not allowed to have a will of its own. It is told
at every move: "Don't do that; you will interfere with our prosperity."
And when we ask, "Where is our prosperity lodged?" a certain group of
gentlemen say, "With us." The government of the United States in recent
years has not been administered by the common people of the United States.
You know just as well as I do,--it is not an indictment against anybody,
it is a mere statement of the facts,--that the people have stood outside
and looked on at their own government and that all they have had to
determine in past years has been which crowd they would look on at;
whether they would look on at this little group or that little group who
had managed to get the control of affairs in its hands. Have you ever
heard, for example, of any hearing before any great committee of the
Congress in which the people of the country as a whole were represented,
except it may be by the Congressmen themselves? The men who appear at
those meetings in order to argue for or against a schedule in the tariff,
for this measure or against that measure, are men who represent special
interests. They may represent them very honestly, they may intend no wrong
to their fellow-citizens, but they are speaking from the point of view
always of a small portion of the population. I have sometimes wondered why
men, particularly men of means, men who didn't have to work for their
living, shouldn't constitute themselves attorneys for the people, and
every time a hearing is held before a committee of Congress should not go
and ask: "Gentlemen, in considering these things suppose you consider the
whole country? Suppose you consider the citizens of the United States?"

I don't want a smug lot of experts to sit down behind closed doors in
Washington and play Providence to me. There is a Providence to which I am
perfectly willing to submit. But as for other men setting up as Providence
over myself, I seriously object. I have never met a political savior in
the flesh, and I never expect to meet one. I am reminded of Gillet
Burgess' verses:

    I never saw a purple cow,
      I never hope to see one,
    But this I'll tell you anyhow,
      I'd rather see than be one.

That is the way I feel about this saving of my fellow-countrymen. I'd
rather see a savior of the United States than set up to be one; because I
have found out, I have actually found out, that men I consult with know
more than I do,--especially if I consult with enough of them. I never came
out of a committee meeting or a conference without seeing more of the
question that was under discussion than I had seen when I went in. And
that to my mind is an image of government. I am not willing to be under
the patronage of the trusts, no matter how providential a government
presides over the process of their control of my life.

I am one of those who absolutely reject the trustee theory, the
guardianship theory. I have never found a man who knew how to take care of
me, and, reasoning from that point out, I conjecture that there isn't any
man who knows how to take care of all the people of the United States. I
suspect that the people of the United States understand their own
interests better than any group of men in the confines of the country
understand them. The men who are sweating blood to get their foothold in
the world of endeavor understand the conditions of business in the United
States very much better than the men who have arrived and are at the top.
They know what the thing is that they are struggling against. They know
how difficult it is to start a new enterprise. They know how far they have
to search for credit that will put them upon an even footing with the men
who have already built up industry in this country. They know that
somewhere, by somebody, the development of industry is being controlled.

I do not say this with the slightest desire to create any prejudice
against wealth; on the contrary, I should be ashamed of myself if I
excited class feeling of any kind. But I do mean to suggest this: That the
wealth of the country has, in recent years, come from particular sources;
it has come from those sources which have built up monopoly. Its point of
view is a special point of view. It is the point of view of those men who
do not wish that the people should determine their own affairs, because
they do not believe that the people's judgment is sound. They want to be
commissioned to take care of the United States and of the people of the
United States, because they believe that they, better than anybody else,
understand the interests of the United States. I do not challenge their
character; I challenge their point of view. We cannot afford to be
governed as we have been governed in the last generation, by men who
occupy so narrow, so prejudiced, so limited a point of view.

The government of our country cannot be lodged in any special class. The
policy of a great nation cannot be tied up with any particular set of
interests. I want to say, again and again, that my arguments do not touch
the character of the men to whom I am opposed. I believe that the very
wealthy men who have got their money by certain kinds of corporate
enterprise have closed in their horizon, and that they do not see and do
not understand the rank and file of the people. It is for that reason that
I want to break up the little coterie that has determined what the
government of the nation should do. The list of the men who used to
determine what New Jersey should and should not do did not exceed half a
dozen, and they were always the same men. These very men now are, some of
them, frank enough to admit that New Jersey has finer energy in her
because more men are consulted and the whole field of action is widened
and liberalized. We have got to relieve our government from the domination
of special classes, not because these special classes are bad,
necessarily, but because no special class can understand the interests of
a great community.

I believe, as I believe in nothing else, in the average integrity and the
average intelligence of the American people, and I do not believe that the
intelligence of America can be put into commission anywhere. I do not
believe that there is any group of men of any kind to whom we can afford
to give that kind of trusteeship.

I will not live under trustees if I can help it. No group of men less than
the majority has a right to tell me how I have got to live in America. I
will submit to the majority, because I have been trained to do
it,--though I may sometimes have my private opinion even of the majority.
I do not care how wise, how patriotic, the trustees may be, I have never
heard of any group of men in whose hands I am willing to lodge the
liberties of America in trust.

If any part of our people want to be wards, if they want to have guardians
put over them, if they want to be taken care of, if they want to be
children, patronized by the government, why, I am sorry, because it will
sap the manhood of America. But I don't believe they do. I believe they
want to stand on the firm foundation of law and right and take care of
themselves. I, for my part, don't want to belong to a nation, I believe
that I do not belong to a nation, that needs to be taken care of by
guardians. I want to belong to a nation, and I am proud that I do belong
to a nation, that knows how to take care of itself. If I thought that the
American people were reckless, were ignorant, were vindictive, I might
shrink from putting the government into their hands. But the beauty of
democracy is that when you are reckless you destroy your own established
conditions of life; when you are vindictive, you wreak vengeance upon
yourself; the whole stability of a democratic polity rests upon the fact
that every interest is every man's interest.

The theory that the men of biggest affairs, whose field of operation is
the widest, are the proper men to advise the government is, I am willing
to admit, rather a plausible theory. If my business covers the United
States not only, but covers the world, it is to be presumed that I have a
pretty wide scope in my vision of business. But the flaw is that it is my
own business that I have a vision of, and not the business of the men who
lie outside of the scope of the plans I have made for a profit out of the
particular transactions I am connected with. And you can't, by putting
together a large number of men who understand their own business, no
matter how large it is, make up a body of men who will understand the
business of the nation as contrasted with their own interest.

In a former generation, half a century ago, there were a great many men
associated with the government whose patriotism we are not privileged to
deny nor to question, who intended to serve the people, but had become so
saturated with the point of view of a governing class that it was
impossible for them to see America as the people of America themselves saw
it. Then there arose that interesting figure, the immortal figure of the
great Lincoln, who stood up declaring that the politicians, the men who
had governed this country, did not see from the point of view of the
people. When I think of that tall, gaunt figure rising in Illinois, I have
a picture of a man free, unentangled, unassociated with the governing
influences of the country, ready to see things with an open eye, to see
them steadily, to see them whole, to see them as the men he rubbed
shoulders with and associated with saw them. What the country needed in
1860 was a leader who understood and represented the thought of the whole
people, as contrasted with that of a class which imagined itself the
guardian of the country's welfare.

Now, likewise, the trouble with our present political condition is that we
need some man who has not been associated with the governing classes and
the governing influences of this country to stand up and speak for us; we
need to hear a voice from the outside calling upon the American people to
assert again their rights and prerogatives in the possession of their own
government.

My thought about both Mr. Taft and Mr. Roosevelt is that of entire
respect, but these gentlemen have been so intimately associated with the
powers that have been determining the policy of this government for almost
a generation, that they cannot look at the affairs of the country with the
view of a new age and of a changed set of circumstances. They sympathize
with the people; their hearts no doubt go out to the great masses of
unknown men in this country; but their thought is in close, habitual
association with those who have framed the policies of the country during
all our lifetime. Those men have framed the protective tariff, have
developed the trusts, have co-ordinated and ordered all the great economic
forces of this country in such fashion that nothing but an outside force
breaking in can disturb their domination and control. It is with this in
mind, I believe, that the country can say to these gentlemen: "We do not
deny your integrity; we do not deny your purity of purpose; but the
thought of the people of the United States has not yet penetrated to your
consciousness. You are willing to act for the people, but you are not
willing to act _through_ the people. Now we propose to act for ourselves."

       *       *       *       *       *

I sometimes think that the men who are now governing us are unconscious of
the chains in which they are held. I do not believe that men such as we
know, among our public men at least--most of them--have deliberately put
us into leading strings to the special interests. The special interests
have grown up. They have grown up by processes which at last, happily, we
are beginning to understand. And, having grown up, having occupied the
seats of greatest advantage nearest the ear of those who are conducting
government, having contributed the money which was necessary to the
elections, and therefore having been kindly thought of after elections,
there has closed around the government of the United States a very
interesting, a very able, a very aggressive coterie of gentlemen who are
most definite and explicit in their ideas as to what they want.

They don't have to consult us as to what they want. They don't have to
resort to anybody. They know their plans, and therefore they know what
will be convenient for them. It may be that they have really thought what
they have said they thought; it may be that they know so little of the
history of economic development and of the interests of the United States
as to believe that their leadership is indispensable for our prosperity
and development. I don't have to prove that they believe that, because
they themselves admit it. I have heard them admit it on many occasions.

I want to say to you very frankly that I do not feel vindictive about it.
Some of the men who have exercised this control are excellent fellows;
they really believe that the prosperity of the country depends upon them.
They really believe that if the leadership of economic development in
this country dropped from their hands, the rest of us are too
muddle-headed to undertake the task. They not only comprehend the power of
the United States within their grasp, but they comprehend it within their
imagination. They are honest men, they have just as much right to express
their views as I have to express mine or you to express yours, but it is
just about time that we examined their views for ourselves and determined
their validity.

As a matter of fact, their thought does not cover the processes of their
own undertakings. As a university president, I learned that the men who
dominate our manufacturing processes could not conduct their business for
twenty-four hours without the assistance of the experts with whom the
universities were supplying them. Modern industry depends upon technical
knowledge; and all that these gentlemen did was to manage the external
features of great combinations and their financial operation, which had
very little to do with the intimate skill with which the enterprises were
conducted. I know men not catalogued in the public prints, men not spoken
of in public discussion, who are the very bone and sinew of the industry
of the United States.

Do our masters of industry speak in the spirit and interest even of those
whom they employ? When men ask me what I think about the labor question
and laboring men, I feel that I am being asked what I know about the vast
majority of the people, and I feel as if I were being asked to separate
myself, as belonging to a particular class, from that great body of my
fellow-citizens who sustain and conduct the enterprises of the country.
Until we get away from that point of view it will be impossible to have a
free government.

I have listened to some very honest and eloquent orators whose sentiments
were noteworthy for this: that when they spoke of the people, they were
not thinking of themselves; they were thinking of somebody whom they were
commissioned to take care of. They were always planning to do things _for_
the American people, and I have seen them visibly shiver when it was
suggested that they arrange to have something done by the people for
themselves. They said, "What do they know about it?" I always feel like
replying, "What do _you_ know about it? You know your own interest, but
who has told you our interests, and what do you know about them?" For the
business of every leader of government is to hear what the nation is
saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to
judge _for_ the nation, but to judge _through_ the nation as its spokesman
and voice. I do not believe that this country could have safely allowed a
continuation of the policy of the men who have viewed affairs in any other
light.

The hypothesis under which we have been ruled is that of government
through a board of trustees, through a selected number of the big business
men of the country who know a lot that the rest of us do not know, and who
take it for granted that our ignorance would wreck the prosperity of the
country. The idea of the Presidents we have recently had has been that
they were Presidents of a National Board of Trustees. That is not my
idea. I have been president of one board of trustees, and I do not care to
have another on my hands. I want to be President of the people of the
United States. There was many a time when I was president of the board of
trustees of a university when the undergraduates knew more than the
trustees did; and it has been in my thought ever since that if I could
have dealt directly with the people who constituted Princeton University I
could have carried it forward much faster than I could dealing with a
board of trustees.

Mark you, I am not saying that these leaders knew that they were doing us
an evil, or that they intended to do us an evil. For my part, I am very
much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is
bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I
think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery,
because harder to fight and dislodge. If a man does not know enough to
know what the consequences are going to be to the country, then he cannot
govern the country in a way that is for its benefit. These gentlemen,
whatever may have been their intentions, linked the government up with the
men who control the finances. They may have done it innocently, or they
may have done it corruptly, without affecting my argument at all. And they
themselves cannot escape from that alliance.

Here, for example, is the old question of campaign funds: If I take a
hundred thousand dollars from a group of men representing a particular
interest that has a big stake in a certain schedule of the tariff, I take
it with the knowledge that those gentlemen will expect me not to forget
their interest in that schedule, and that they will take it as a point of
implicit honor that I should see to it that they are not damaged by too
great a change in that schedule. Therefore, if I take their money, I am
bound to them by a tacit implication of honor. Perhaps there is no ground
for objection to this situation so long as the function of government is
conceived to be to look after the trustees of prosperity, who in turn will
look after the people; but on any other theory than that of trusteeship
no interested campaign contributions can be tolerated for a moment,--save
those of the millions of citizens who thus support the doctrines they
believe and the men whom they recognized as their spokesmen.

I tell you the men I am interested in are the men who, under the
conditions we have had, never had their voices heard, who never got a line
in the newspapers, who never got a moment on the platform, who never had
access to the ears of Governors or Presidents or of anybody who was
responsible for the conduct of public affairs, but who went silently and
patiently to their work every day carrying the burden of the world. How
are they to be understood by the masters of finance, if only the masters
of finance are consulted?

       *       *       *       *       *

That is what I mean when I say, "Bring the government back to the people."
I do not mean anything demagogic; I do not mean to talk as if we wanted a
great mass of men to rush in and destroy something. That is not the idea.
I want the people to come in and take possession of their own premises;
for I hold that the government belongs to the people, and that they have a
right to that intimate access to it which will determine every turn of its
policy.

America is never going to submit to guardianship. America is never going
to choose thralldom instead of freedom. Look what there is to decide!
There is the tariff question. Can the tariff question be decided in favor
of the people, so long as the monopolies are the chief counselors at
Washington? There is the currency question. Are we going to settle the
currency question so long as the government listens only to the counsel of
those who command the banking situation?

Then there is the question of conservation. What is our fear about
conservation? The hands that are being stretched out to monopolize our
forests, to prevent or pre-empt the use of our great power-producing
streams, the hands that are being stretched into the bowels of the earth
to take possession of the great riches that lie hidden in Alaska and
elsewhere in the incomparable domain of the United States, are the hands
of monopoly. Are these men to continue to stand at the elbow of government
and tell us how we are to save ourselves,--from themselves? You can not
settle the question of conservation while monopoly is close to the ears of
those who govern. And the question of conservation is a great deal bigger
than the question of saving our forests and our mineral resources and our
waters; it is as big as the life and happiness and strength and elasticity
and hope of our people.

There are tasks awaiting the government of the United States which it
cannot perform until every pulse of that government beats in unison with
the needs and the desires of the whole body of the American people. Shall
we not give the people access of sympathy, access of authority, to the
instrumentalities which are to be indispensable to their lives?



IV

LIFE COMES FROM THE SOIL


When I look back on the processes of history, when I survey the genesis of
America, I see this written over every page: that the nations are renewed
from the bottom, not from the top; that the genius which springs up from
the ranks of unknown men is the genius which renews the youth and energy
of the people. Everything I know about history, every bit of experience
and observation that has contributed to my thought, has confirmed me in
the conviction that the real wisdom of human life is compounded out of the
experiences of ordinary men. The utility, the vitality, the fruitage of
life does not come from the top to the bottom; it comes, like the natural
growth of a great tree, from the soil, up through the trunk into the
branches to the foliage and the fruit. The great struggling unknown masses
of the men who are at the base of everything are the dynamic force that
is lifting the levels of society. A nation is as great, and only as great,
as her rank and file.

So the first and chief need of this nation of ours to-day is to include in
the partnership of government all those great bodies of unnamed men who
are going to produce our future leaders and renew the future energies of
America. And as I confess that, as I confess my belief in the common man,
I know what I am saying. The man who is swimming against the stream knows
the strength of it. The man who is in the mêlée knows what blows are being
struck and what blood is being drawn. The man who is on the make is the
judge of what is happening in America, not the man who has made good; not
the man who has emerged from the flood; not the man who is standing on the
bank looking on, but the man who is struggling for his life and for the
lives of those who are dearer to him than himself. That is the man whose
judgment will tell you what is going on in America; that is the man by
whose judgment I, for one, wish to be guided.

We have had the wrong jury; we have had the wrong group,--no, I will not
say the wrong group, but too small a group,--in control of the policies of
the United States. The average man has not been consulted, and his heart
had begun to sink for fear he never would be consulted again. Therefore,
we have got to organize a government whose sympathies will be open to the
whole body of the people of the United States, a government which will
consult as large a proportion of the people of the United States as
possible before it acts. Because the great problem of government is to
know what the average man is experiencing and is thinking about. Most of
us are average men; very few of us rise, except by fortunate accident,
above the general level of the community about us; and therefore the man
who thinks common thoughts, the man who has had common experiences, is
almost always the man who interprets America aright. Isn't that the reason
that we are proud of such stories as the story of Abraham Lincoln,--a man
who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had
interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated
classes of America?

The hope of the United States in the present and in the future is the same
that it has always been: it is the hope and confidence that out of unknown
homes will come men who will constitute themselves the masters of industry
and of politics. The average hopefulness, the average welfare, the average
enterprise, the average initiative, of the United States are the only
things that make it rich. We are not rich because a few gentlemen direct
our industry; we are rich because of our own intelligence and our own
industry. America does not consist of men who get their names into the
newspapers; America does not consist politically of the men who set
themselves up to be political leaders; she does not consist of the men who
do most of her talking,--they are important only so far as they speak for
that great voiceless multitude of men who constitute the great body and
the saving force of the nation. Nobody who cannot speak the common
thought, who does not move by the common impulse, is the man to speak for
America, or for any of her future purposes. Only he is fit to speak who
knows the thoughts of the great body of citizens, the men who go about
their business every day, the men who toil from morning till night, the
men who go home tired in the evenings, the men who are carrying on the
things we are so proud of.

You know how it thrills our blood sometimes to think how all the nations
of the earth wait to see what America is going to do with her power, her
physical power, her enormous resources, her enormous wealth. The nations
hold their breath to see what this young country will do with her young
unspoiled strength; we cannot help but be proud that we are strong. But
what has made us strong? The toil of millions of men, the toil of men who
do not boast, who are inconspicuous, but who live their lives humbly from
day to day; it is the great body of toilers that constitutes the might of
America. It is one of the glories of our land that nobody is able to
predict from what family, from what region, from what race, even, the
leaders of the country are going to come. The great leaders of this
country have not come very often from the established, "successful"
families.

I remember speaking at a school not long ago where I understood that
almost all the young men were the sons of very rich people, and I told
them I looked upon them with a great deal of pity, because, I said: "Most
of you fellows are doomed to obscurity. You will not do anything. You will
never try to do anything, and with all the great tasks of the country
waiting to be done, probably you are the very men who will decline to do
them. Some man who has been 'up against it,' some man who has come out of
the crowd, somebody who has had the whip of necessity laid on his back,
will emerge out of the crowd, will show that he understands the crowd,
understands the interests of the nation, united and not separated, and
will stand up and lead us."

If I may speak of my own experience, I have found audiences made up of the
"common people" quicker to take a point, quicker to understand an
argument, quicker to discern a tendency and to comprehend a principle,
than many a college class that I have lectured to,--not because the
college class lacked the intelligence, but because college boys are not in
contact with the realities of life, while "common" citizens are in contact
with the actual life of day by day; you do not have to explain to them
what touches them to the quick.

There is one illustration of the value of the constant renewal of society
from the bottom that has always interested me profoundly. The only reason
why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the
aristocratic system which then prevailed was that so many of the men who
were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the church,--from
that great religious body which was then the only church, that body which
we now distinguish from other religious bodies as the Roman Catholic
Church. The Roman Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a great
democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a
priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of
Christendom; and every chancellery in Europe, every court in Europe, was
ruled by these learned, trained and accomplished men,--the priesthood of
that great and dominant body. What kept government alive in the Middle
Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the
priesthood. That, it seems to me, is one of the most interesting and
convincing illustrations that could possibly be adduced of the thing that
I am talking about.

The only way that government is kept pure is by keeping these channels
open, so that nobody may deem himself so humble as not to constitute a
part of the body politic, so that there will constantly be coming new
blood into the veins of the body politic; so that no man is so obscure
that he may not break the crust of any class he may belong to, may not
spring up to higher levels and be counted among the leaders of the state.
Anything that depresses, anything that makes the organization greater than
the man, anything that blocks, discourages, dismays the humble man, is
against all the principles of progress. When I see alliances formed, as
they are now being formed, by successful men of business with successful
organizers of politics, I know that something has been done that checks
the vitality and progress of society. Such an alliance, made at the top,
is an alliance made to depress the levels, to hold them where they are, if
not to sink them; and, therefore, it is the constant business of good
politics to break up such partnerships, to re-establish and reopen the
connections between the great body of the people and the offices of
government.

To-day, when our government has so far passed into the hands of special
interests; to-day, when the doctrine is implicitly avowed that only select
classes have the equipment necessary for carrying on government; to-day,
when so many conscientious citizens, smitten with the scene of social
wrong and suffering, have fallen victims to the fallacy that benevolent
government can be meted out to the people by kind-hearted trustees of
prosperity and guardians of the welfare of dutiful employees,--to-day,
supremely, does it behoove this nation to remember that a people shall be
saved by the power that sleeps in its own deep bosom, or by none; shall be
renewed in hope, in conscience, in strength, by waters welling up from its
own sweet, perennial springs. Not from above; not by patronage of its
aristocrats. The flower does not bear the root, but the root the flower.
Everything that blooms in beauty in the air of heaven draws its fairness,
its vigor, from its roots. Nothing living can blossom into fruitage unless
through nourishing stalks deep-planted in the common soil. The rose is
merely the evidence of the vitality of the root; and the real source of
its beauty, the very blush that it wears upon its tender cheek, comes from
those silent sources of life that lie hidden in the chemistry of the soil.
Up from that soil, up from the silent bosom of the earth, rise the
currents of life and energy. Up from the common soil, up from the quiet
heart of the people, rise joyously to-day streams of hope and
determination bound to renew the face of the earth in glory.

I tell you, the so-called radicalism of our times is simply the effort of
nature to release the generous energies of our people. This great American
people is at bottom just, virtuous, and hopeful; the roots of its being
are in the soil of what is lovely, pure, and of good report, and the need
of the hour is just that radicalism that will clear a way for the
realization of the aspirations of a sturdy race.



V

THE PARLIAMENT OF THE PEOPLE


For a long time this country of ours has lacked one of the institutions
which freemen have always and everywhere held fundamental. For a long time
there has been no sufficient opportunity of counsel among the people; no
place and method of talk, of exchange of opinion, of parley. Communities
have outgrown the folk-moot and the town-meeting. Congress, in accordance
with the genius of the land, which asks for action and is impatient of
words,--Congress has become an institution which does its work in the
privacy of committee rooms and not on the floor of the Chamber; a body
that makes laws,--a legislature; not a body that debates,--not a
parliament. Party conventions afford little or no opportunity for
discussion; platforms are privately manufactured and adopted with a whoop.
It is partly because citizens have foregone the taking of counsel
together that the unholy alliances of bosses and Big Business have been
able to assume to govern for us.

I conceive it to be one of the needs of the hour to restore the processes
of common counsel, and to substitute them for the processes of private
arrangement which now determine the policies of cities, states, and
nation. We must learn, we freemen, to meet, as our fathers did, somehow,
somewhere, for consultation. There must be discussion and debate, in which
all freely participate.

It must be candid debate, and it must have for its honest purpose the
clearing up of questions and the establishing of the truth. Too much
political discussion is not to honest purpose, but only for the
confounding of an opponent. I am often reminded, when political debate
gets warm and we begin to hope that the truth is making inroads on the
reason of those who have denied it, of the way a debate in Virginia once
seemed likely to end:

When I was a young man studying at Charlottesville, there were two
factions in the Democratic party in the State of Virginia which were
having a pretty hot contest with each other. In one of the counties one of
these factions had practically no following at all. A man named Massey,
one of its redoubtable debaters, though a little, slim,
insignificant-looking person, sent a messenger up into this county and
challenged the opposition to debate with him. They didn't quite like the
idea, but they were too proud to decline, so they put up their best
debater, a big, good-natured man whom everybody was familiar with as
"Tom," and it was arranged that Massey should have the first hour and that
Tom Whatever-his-name-was should succeed him the next hour. When the
occasion came, Massey, with his characteristic shrewdness, began to get
underneath the skins of the audience, and he hadn't made more than half
his speech before it was evident that he was getting that hostile crowd
with him; whereupon one of Tom's partisans in the back of the room, seeing
how things were going, cried out: "Tom, call him a liar and make it a
fight!"

Now, that kind of debate, that spirit in discussion, gets us nowhere. Our
national affairs are too serious, they lie too close to the well-being of
each one of us, to excuse our talking about them except in earnestness and
candor and a willingness to speak and listen with open minds. It is a
misfortune that attends the party system that in the heat of a campaign
partisan passions are so aroused that we cannot have frank discussion. Yet
I am sure that I observe, and that all citizens must observe, an almost
startling change in the temper of the people in this respect. The campaign
just closed was markedly different from others that had preceded it in the
degree to which party considerations were forgotten in the seriousness of
the things we had to discuss as common citizens of an endangered country.

There is astir in the air of America something that I for one never saw
before, never felt before. I have been going to political meetings all my
life, though not all my life playing an immodestly conspicuous part in
them; and there is a spirit in our political meetings now that I never
saw before. It hasn't been very many years, let me say for example, that
women attended political meetings. And women are attending political
meetings now not simply because there is a woman question in politics;
they are attending them because the modern political meeting is not like
the political meeting of five or ten years ago. That was a mere
ratification rally. That was a mere occasion for "whooping it up" for
somebody. That was merely an occasion upon which one party was denounced
unreasonably and the other was lauded unreasonably. No party has ever
deserved quite the abuse that each party has got in turn, and nobody has
ever deserved the praise that both parties have got in turn. The old
political meeting was a wholly irrational performance; it was got together
for the purpose of saying things that were chiefly not so and that were
known by those who heard them not to be so, and were simply to be taken as
a tonic in order to produce cheers.

But I am very much mistaken in the temper of my fellow-countrymen if the
meetings I have seen in the last two years bear any resemblance to those
older meetings. Men now get together in a political meeting in order to
hear things of the deepest consequence discussed. And you will find almost
as many Republicans in a Democratic meeting as you will find Democrats in
a Republican meeting; the spirit of frank discussion, of common counsel,
is abroad.

Good will it be for the country if the interest in public concerns
manifested so widely and so sincerely be not suffered to expire with the
election! Why should political debate go on only when somebody is to be
elected? Why should it be confined to campaign time?

       *       *       *       *       *

There is a movement on foot in which, in common with many men and women
who love their country, I am greatly interested,--the movement to open the
schoolhouse to the grown-up people in order that they may gather and talk
over the affairs of the neighborhood and the state. There are schoolhouses
all over the land which are not used by the teachers and children in the
summer months, which are not used in the winter time in the evening for
school purposes. These buildings belong to the public. Why not insist
everywhere that they be used as places of discussion, such as of old took
place in the town-meetings to which everybody went and where every public
officer was freely called to account? The schoolhouse, which belongs to
all of us, is a natural place in which to gather to consult over our
common affairs.

I was very much interested in the remark of a fellow-citizen of ours who
had been born on the other side of the water. He said that not long ago he
wandered into one of those neighborhood schoolhouse meetings, and there
found himself among people who were discussing matters in which they were
all interested; and when he came out he said to me: "I have been living in
America now ten years, and to-night for the first time I saw America as I
had imagined it to be. This gathering together of men of all sorts upon a
perfect footing of equality to discuss frankly with one another what
concerned them all,--that is what I dreamed America was."

That set me to thinking. He hadn't seen the America he had come to find
until that night. Had he not felt like a neighbor? Had men not consulted
him? He had felt like an outsider. Had there been no little circles in
which public affairs were discussed?

You know that the great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all
made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race and of
every origin and of every station in life send their children, or ought to
send their children, and where, being mixed together, the youngsters are
all infused with the American spirit and developed into American men and
American women. When, in addition to sending our children to school to
paid teachers, we go to school to one another in those same schoolhouses,
then we shall begin more fully to realize than we ever have realized
before what American life is. And let me tell you this, confidentially,
that wherever you find school boards that object to opening the
schoolhouses in the evening for public meetings of every proper sort, you
had better look around for some politician who is objecting to it; because
the thing that cures bad politics is talk by the neighbors. The thing that
brings to light the concealed circumstances of our political life is the
talk of the neighborhood; and if you can get the neighbors together, get
them frankly to tell everything they know, then your politics, your ward
politics, and your city politics, and your state politics, too, will be
turned inside out,--in the way they ought to be. Because the chief
difficulty our politics has suffered is that the inside didn't look like
the outside. Nothing clears the air like frank discussion.

One of the valuable lessons of my life was due to the fact that at a
comparatively early age in my experience as a public speaker I had the
privilege of speaking in Cooper Union in New York. The audience in Cooper
Union is made up of every kind of man and woman, from the poor devil who
simply comes in to keep warm up to the man who has come in to take a
serious part in the discussion of the evening. I want to tell you this,
that in the questions that are asked there after the speech is over, the
most penetrating questions that I have ever had addressed to me came from
some of the men who were the least well-dressed in the audience, came from
the plain fellows, came from the fellows whose muscle was daily up against
the whole struggle of life. They asked questions which went to the heart
of the business and put me to my mettle to answer them. I felt as if those
questions came as a voice out of life itself, not a voice out of any
school less severe than the severe school of experience. And what I like
about this social centre idea of the schoolhouse is that there is the
place where the ordinary fellow is going to get his innings, going to ask
his questions, going to express his opinions, going to convince those who
do not realize the vigor of America that the vigor of America pulses in
the blood of every true American, and that the only place he can find the
true American is in this clearing-house of absolutely democratic opinion.

No one man understands the United States. I have met some gentlemen who
professed they did. I have even met some business men who professed they
held in their own single comprehension the business of the United States;
but I am educated enough to know that they do not. Education has this
useful effect, that it narrows of necessity the circles of one's egotism.
No student knows his subject. The most he knows is where and how to find
out the things he does not know with regard to it. That is also the
position of a statesman. No statesman understands the whole country. He
should make it his business to find out where he will get the information
necessary to understand at least a part of it at a time when dealing with
complex affairs. What we need is a universal revival of common counsel.

I have sometimes reflected on the lack of a body of public opinion in our
cities, and once I contrasted the habits of the city man with those of the
countryman in a way which got me into trouble. I described what a man in a
city generally did when he got into a public vehicle or sat in a public
place. He doesn't talk to anybody, but he plunges his head into a
newspaper and presently experiences a reaction which he calls his opinion,
but which is not an opinion at all, being merely the impression that a
piece of news or an editorial has made upon him. He cannot be said to be
participating in public opinion at all until he has laid his mind
alongside the minds of his neighbors and discussed with them the incidents
of the day and the tendencies of the time.

Where I got into trouble was, that I ventured on a comparison. I said that
public opinion was not typified on the streets of a busy city, but was
typified around the stove in a country store where men sat and probably
chewed tobacco and spat into a sawdust box, and made up, before they got
through, what was the neighborhood opinion both about persons and events;
and then, inadvertently, I added this philosophical reflection, that,
whatever might be said against the chewing of tobacco, this at least could
be said for it: that it gave a man time to think between sentences. Ever
since then I have been represented, particularly in the advertisements of
tobacco firms, as in favor of the use of chewing tobacco!

The reason that some city men are not more catholic in their ideas is that
they do not share the opinion of the country, and the reason that some
countrymen are rustic is that they do not know the opinion of the city;
they are both hampered by their limitations. I heard the other day of a
woman who had lived all her life in a city and in an hotel. She made a
first visit to the country last summer, and spent a week in a farmhouse.
Asked afterward what had interested her most about her experience, she
replied that it was hearing the farmer "page his cows!"

A very urban point of view with regard to a common rustic occurrence, and
yet that language showed the sharp, the inelastic limits of her thought.
She was provincial in the extreme; she thought even more narrowly than in
the terms of a city; she thought in the terms of an hotel. In proportion
as we are confined within the walls of one hostelry or one city or one
state, we are provincial. We can do nothing more to advance our country's
welfare than to bring the various communities within the counsels of the
nation. The real difficulty of our nation has been that not enough of us
realized that the matters we discussed were matters of common concern. We
have talked as if we had to serve now this part of the country and again
that part, now this interest and again that interest; as if all interests
were not linked together, provided we understood them and knew how they
were related to one another.

If you would know what makes the great river as it nears the sea, you must
travel up the stream. You must go up into the hills and back into the
forests and see the little rivulets, the little streams, all gathering in
hidden places to swell the great body of water in the channel. And so with
the making of public opinion: Back in the country, on the farms, in the
shops, in the hamlets, in the homes of cities, in the schoolhouses, where
men get together and are frank and true with one another, there come
trickling down the streams which are to make the mighty force of the
river, the river which is to drive all the enterprises of human life as it
sweeps on into the great common sea of humanity.

I feel nothing so much as the intensity of the common man. I can pick out
in any audience the men who are at ease in their fortunes: they are seeing
a public man go through his stunts. But there are in every crowd other men
who are not doing that,--men who are listening as if they were waiting to
hear if there were somebody who could speak the thing that is stirring in
their own hearts and minds. It makes a man's heart ache to think that he
cannot be sure that he is doing it for them; to wonder whether they are
longing for something that he does not understand. He prays God that
something will bring into his consciousness what is in theirs, so that the
whole nation may feel at last released from its dumbness, feel at last
that there is no invisible force holding it back from its goal, feel at
last that there is hope and confidence and that the road may be trodden as
if we were brothers, shoulder to shoulder, not asking each other anything
about differences of class, not contesting for any selfish advance, but
united in the common enterprise.

The burden that is upon the heart of every conscientious public man is the
burden of the thought that perhaps he does not sufficiently comprehend the
national life. For, as a matter of fact, no single man does comprehend it.
The whole purpose of democracy is that we may hold counsel with one
another, so as not to depend upon the understanding of one man, but to
depend upon the counsel of all. For only as men are brought into counsel,
and state their own needs and interests, can the general interests of a
great people be compounded into a policy that will be suitable to all.

I have realized all my life, as a man connected with the tasks of
education, that the chief use of education is to open the understanding to
comprehend as many things as possible. That it is not what a man
knows,--for no man knows a great deal,--but what a man has upon his mind
to find out; it is his ability to understand things, it is his connection
with the great masses of men that makes him fit to speak for others,--and
only that. I have associated with some of the gentlemen who are connected
with the special interests of this country (and many of them are pretty
fine men, I can tell you), but, fortunately for me, I have associated with
a good many other persons besides; I have not confined my acquaintance to
these interesting groups, and I can actually tell those gentlemen some
things that they have not had time to find out. It has been my great good
fortune not to have had my head buried in special undertakings, and,
therefore, I have had an occasional look at the horizon. Moreover, I found
out, a long time ago, fortunately for me, when I was a boy, that the
United States did not consist of that part of it in which I lived. There
was a time when I was a very narrow provincial, but happily the
circumstances of my life made it necessary that I should go to a very
distant part of the country, and I early found out what a very limited
acquaintance I had with the United States, found out that the only thing
that would give me any sense at all in discussing the affairs of the
United States was to know as many parts of the United States as possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

The men who have been ruling America must consent to let the majority into
the game. We will no longer permit any system to go uncorrected which is
based upon private understandings and expert testimony; we will not allow
the few to continue to determine what the policy of the country is to be.
It is a question of access to our own government. There are very few of us
who have had any real access to the government. It ought to be a matter of
common counsel; a matter of united counsel; a matter of mutual
comprehension.

So, keep the air clear with constant discussion. Make every public servant
feel that he is acting in the open and under scrutiny; and, above all
things else, take these great fundamental questions of your lives with
which political platforms concern themselves and search them through and
through by every process of debate. Then we shall have a clear air in
which we shall see our way to each kind of social betterment. When we have
freed our government, when we have restored freedom of enterprise, when we
have broken up the partnerships between money and power which now block us
at every turn, then we shall see our way to accomplish all the handsome
things which platforms promise in vain if they do not start at the point
where stand the gates of liberty.

I am not afraid of the American people getting up and doing something. I
am only afraid they will not; and when I hear a popular vote spoken of as
mob government, I feel like telling the man who dares so to speak that he
has no right to call himself an American. You cannot make a reckless,
passionate force out of a body of sober people earning their living in a
free country. Just picture to yourselves the voting population of this
great land, from the sea to the far borders in the mountains, going
calmly, man by man, to the polls, expressing its judgment about public
affairs: is that your image of "a mob?"

What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in hot contact with one another,
moved by ungovernable passion to do a hasty thing that they will regret
the next day. Do you see anything resembling a mob in that voting
population of the countryside, men tramping over the mountains, men going
to the general store up in the village, men moving in little talking
groups to the corner grocery to cast their ballots,--is that your notion
of a mob? Or is that your picture of a free, self-governing people? I am
not afraid of the judgments so expressed, if you give men time to think,
if you give them a clear conception of the things they are to vote for;
because the deepest conviction and passion of my heart is that the common
people, by which I mean all of us, are to be absolutely trusted.

So, at this opening of a new age, in this its day of unrest and
discontent, it is our part to clear the air, to bring about common
counsel; to set up the parliament of the people; to demonstrate that we
are fighting no man, that we are trying to bring all men to understand
one another; that we are not the friends of any class against any other
class, but that our duty is to make classes understand one another. Our
part is to lift so high the incomparable standards of the common interest
and the common justice that all men with vision, all men with hope, all
men with the convictions of America in their hearts, will crowd to that
standard and a new day of achievement may come for the liberty which we
love.



VI

LET THERE BE LIGHT


The concern of patriotic men is to put our government again on its right
basis, by substituting the popular will for the rule of guardians, the
processes of common counsel for those of private arrangement. In order to
do this, a first necessity is to open the doors and let in the light on
all affairs which the people have a right to know about.

In the first place, it is necessary to open up all the processes of our
politics. They have been too secret, too complicated, too roundabout; they
have consisted too much of private conferences and secret understandings,
of the control of legislation by men who were not legislators, but who
stood outside and dictated, controlling oftentimes by very questionable
means, which they would not have dreamed of allowing to become public. The
whole process must be altered. We must take the selection of candidates
for office, for example, out of the hands of small groups of men, of
little coteries, out of the hands of machines working behind closed doors,
and put it into the hands of the people themselves again by means of
direct primaries and elections to which candidates of every sort and
degree may have free access. We must substitute public for private
machinery.

It is necessary, in the second place, to give society command of its own
economic life again by denying to those who conduct the great modern
operations of business the privacy that used to belong properly enough to
men who used only their own capital and their individual energy in
business. The processes of capital must be as open as the processes of
politics. Those who make use of the great modern accumulations of wealth,
gathered together by the dragnet process of the sale of stocks and bonds,
and piling up of reserves, must be treated as under a public obligation;
they must be made responsible for their business methods to the great
communities which are in fact their working partners, so that the hand
which makes correction shall easily reach them and a new principle of
responsibility be felt throughout their structure and operation.

What are the right methods of politics? Why, the right methods are those
of public discussion: the methods of leadership open and above board, not
closeted with "boards of guardians" or anybody else, but brought out under
the sky, where honest eyes can look upon them and honest eyes can judge of
them.

If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it? If it is a public
game, why play it in private? If it is a public game, then why not come
out into the open and play it in public? You have got to cure diseased
politics as we nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making all the people who
suffer from it live out of doors; not only spend their days out of doors
and walk around, but sleep out of doors; always remain in the open, where
they will be accessible to fresh, nourishing, and revivifying influences.

I, for one, have the conviction that government ought to be all outside
and no inside. I, for my part, believe that there ought to be no place
where anything can be done that everybody does not know about. It would be
very inconvenient for some gentlemen, probably, if government were all
outside, but we have consulted their susceptibilities too long already. It
is barely possible that some of these gentlemen are unjustly suspected; in
that case they owe it to themselves to come out and operate in the light.
The very fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, behind closed
doors, promotes suspicion. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in
secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair
presumption that secrecy means impropriety. So, our honest politicians and
our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their
activities out into the open.

At any rate, whether they like it or not, these affairs are going to be
dragged into the open. We are more anxious about their reputations than
they are themselves. We are too solicitous for their morals,--if they are
not,--to permit them longer to continue subject to the temptations of
secrecy. You know there is temptation in loneliness and secrecy. Haven't
you experienced it? I have. We are never so proper in our conduct as when
everybody can look and see exactly what we are doing. If you are off in
some distant part of the world and suppose that nobody who lives within a
mile of your home is anywhere around, there are times when you adjourn
your ordinary standards. You say to yourself: "Well, I'll have a fling
this time; nobody will know anything about it." If you were on the desert
of Sahara, you would feel that you might permit yourself,--well, say, some
slight latitude in conduct; but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors
coming the other way on a camel,--you would behave yourself until he got
out of sight. The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where
nobody knows you. I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and
then you may keep out of jail. That is the only way some of us can keep
out of jail.

Publicity is one of the purifying elements of politics. The best thing
that you can do with anything that is crooked is to lift it up where
people can see that it is crooked, and then it will either straighten
itself out or disappear. Nothing checks all the bad practices of politics
like public exposure. You can't be crooked in the light. I don't know
whether it has ever been tried or not; but I venture to say, purely from
observation, that it can't be done.

And so the people of the United States have made up their minds to do a
healthy thing for both politics and big business. Permit me to mix a few
metaphors: They are going to open doors; they are going to let up blinds;
they are going to drag sick things into the open air and into the light of
the sun. They are going to organize a great hunt, and smoke certain
animals out of their burrows. They are going to unearth the beast in the
jungle in which when they hunted they were caught by the beast instead of
catching him. They have determined, therefore, to take an axe and raze the
jungle, and then see where the beast will find cover. And I, for my part,
bid them God-speed. The jungle breeds nothing but infection and shelters
nothing but the enemies of mankind.

And nobody is going to get caught in our hunt except the beasts that
prey. Nothing is going to be cut down or injured that anybody ought to
wish preserved.

You know the story of the Irishman who, while digging a hole, was asked,
"Pat, what are you doing,--digging a hole?" And he replied, "No, sir; I am
digging the dirt, and laying the hole." It was probably the same Irishman
who, seen digging around the wall of a house, was asked, "Pat, what are
you doing?" And he answered, "Faith, I am letting the dark out of the
cellar." Now, that's exactly what we want to do,--let the dark out of the
cellar.

       *       *       *       *       *

Take, first, the relations existing between politics and business.

It is perfectly legitimate, of course, that the business interests of the
country should not only enjoy the protection of the law, but that they
should be in every way furthered and strengthened and facilitated by
legislation. The country has no jealousy of any connection between
business and politics which is a legitimate connection. It is not in the
least averse from open efforts to accommodate law to the material
development which has so strengthened the country in all that it has
undertaken by supplying its extraordinary life with its necessary physical
foundations.

But the illegitimate connections between business and legislation are
another matter. I would wish to speak on this subject with soberness and
circumspection. I have no desire to excite anger against anybody. That
would be easy, but it would do no particular good. I wish, rather, to
consider an unhappy situation in a spirit that may enable us to account
for it, to some extent, and so perhaps get at the causes and the remedy.
Mere denunciation doesn't help much to clear up a matter so involved as is
the complicity of business with evil politics in America.

Every community is vaguely aware that the political machine upon which it
looks askance has certain very definite connections with men who are
engaged in business on a large scale, and the suspicion which attaches to
the machine itself has begun to attach also to business enterprises, just
because these connections are known to exist. If these connections were
open and avowed, if everybody knew just what they involved and just what
use was being made of them, there would be no difficulty in keeping an eye
upon affairs and in controlling them by public opinion. But,
unfortunately, the whole process of law-making in America is a very
obscure one. There is no highway of legislation, but there are many
by-ways. Parties are not organized in such a way in our legislatures as to
make any one group of men avowedly responsible for the course of
legislation. The whole process of discussion, if any discussion at all
takes place, is private and shut away from public scrutiny and knowledge.
There are so many circles within circles, there are so many indirect and
private ways of getting at legislative action, that our communities are
constantly uneasy during legislative sessions. It is this confusion and
obscurity and privacy of our legislative method that gives the political
machine its opportunity. There is no publicly responsible man or group of
men who are known to formulate legislation and to take charge of it from
the time of its introduction until the time of its enactment. It has,
therefore, been possible for an outside force,--the political machine, the
body of men who nominated the legislators and who conducted the contest
for their election,--to assume the rôle of control. Business men who
desired something done in the way of changing the law under which they
were acting, or who wished to prevent legislation which seemed to them to
threaten their own interests, have known that there was this definite body
of persons to resort to, and they have made terms with them. They have
agreed to supply them with money for campaign expenses and to stand by
them in all other cases where money was necessary if in return they might
resort to them for protection or for assistance in matters of legislation.
Legislators looked to a certain man who was not even a member of their
body for instructions as to what they were to do with particular bills.
The machine, which was the centre of party organization, was the natural
instrument of control, and men who had business interests to promote
naturally resorted to the body which exercised the control.

There need have been nothing sinister about this. If the whole matter had
been open and candid and honest, public criticism would not have centred
upon it. But the use of money always results in demoralization, and goes
beyond demoralization to actual corruption. There are two kinds of
corruption,--the crude and obvious sort, which consists in direct bribery,
and the much subtler, more dangerous, sort, which consists in a corruption
of the will. Business men who have tried to set up a control in politics
through the machine have more and more deceived themselves, have allowed
themselves to think that the whole matter was a necessary means of
self-defence, have said that it was a necessary outcome of our political
system. Having reassured themselves in this way, they have drifted from
one thing to another until the questions of morals involved have become
hopelessly obscured and submerged. How far away from the ideals of their
youth have many of our men of business drifted, enmeshed in the vicious
system,--how far away from the days when their fine young manhood was
wrapped in "that chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound!"

It is one of the happy circumstances of our time that the most intelligent
of our business men have seen the mistake as well as the immorality of the
whole bad business. The alliance between business and politics has been a
burden to them,--an advantage, no doubt, upon occasion, but a very
questionable and burdensome advantage. It has given them great power, but
it has also subjected them to a sort of slavery and a bitter sort of
subserviency to politicians. They are as anxious to be freed from bondage
as the country is to be rid of the influences and methods which it
represents. Leading business men are now becoming great factors in the
emancipation of the country from a system which was leading from bad to
worse. There are those, of course, who are wedded to the old ways and who
will stand out for them to the last, but they will sink into a minority
and be overcome. The rest have found that their old excuse (namely, that
it was necessary to defend themselves against unfair legislation) is no
longer a good excuse; that there is a better way of defending themselves
than through the private use of money. That better way is to take the
public into their confidence, to make absolutely open all their dealings
with legislative bodies and legislative officers, and let the public judge
as between them and those with whom they are dealing.

       *       *       *       *       *

This discovery on their part of what ought to have been obvious all along
points out the way of reform; for undoubtedly publicity comes very near
being the cure-all for political and economic maladies of this sort. But
publicity will continue to be very difficult so long as our methods of
legislation are so obscure and devious and private. I think it will become
more and more obvious that the way to purify our politics is to simplify
them, and that the way to simplify them is to establish responsible
leadership. We now have no leadership at all inside our legislative
bodies,--at any rate, no leadership which is definite enough to attract
the attention and watchfulness of the country. Our only leadership being
that of irresponsible persons outside the legislatures who constitute the
political machines, it is extremely difficult for even the most watchful
public opinion to keep track of the circuitous methods pursued. This
undoubtedly lies at the root of the growing demand on the part of American
communities everywhere for responsible leadership, for putting in
authority and keeping in authority those whom they know and whom they can
watch and whom they can constantly hold to account. The business of the
country ought to be served by thoughtful and progressive legislation, but
it ought to be served openly, candidly, advantageously, with a careful
regard to letting everybody be heard and every interest be considered, the
interest which is not backed by money as well as the interest which is;
and this can be accomplished only by some simplification of our methods
which will centre the public trust in small groups of men who will lead,
not by reason of legal authority, but by reason of their contact with and
amenability to public opinion.

I am striving to indicate my belief that our legislative methods may well
be reformed in the direction of giving more open publicity to every act,
in the direction of setting up some form of responsible leadership on the
floor of our legislative halls so that the people may know who is back of
every bill and back of the opposition to it, and so that it may be dealt
with in the open chamber rather than in the committee room. The light must
be let in on all processes of law-making.

Legislation, as we nowadays conduct it, is not conducted in the open. It
is not threshed out in open debate upon the floors of our assemblies. It
is, on the contrary, framed, digested, and concluded in committee rooms.
It is in committee rooms that legislation not desired by the interests
dies. It is in committee rooms that legislation desired by the interests
is framed and brought forth. There is not enough debate of it in open
house, in most cases, to disclose the real meaning of the proposals made.
Clauses lie quietly unexplained and unchallenged in our statutes which
contain the whole gist and purpose of the act; qualifying phrases which
escape the public attention, casual definitions which do not attract
attention, classifications so technical as not to be generally understood,
and which every one most intimately concerned is careful not to explain or
expound, contain the whole purpose of the law. Only after it has been
enacted and has come to adjudication in the courts is its scheme as a
whole divulged. The beneficiaries are then safe behind their bulwarks.

Of course, the chief triumphs of committee work, of covert phrase and
unexplained classification, are accomplished in the framing of tariffs.
Ever since the passage of the outrageous Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act our
people have been discovering the concealed meanings and purposes which lay
hidden in it. They are discovering item by item how deeply and
deliberately they were deceived and cheated. This did not happen by
accident; it came about by design, by elaborated, secret design. Questions
put upon the floor in the House and Senate were not frankly or truly
answered, and an elaborate piece of legislation was foisted on the country
which could not possibly have passed if it had been generally
comprehended.

And we know, those of us who handle the machinery of politics, that the
great difficulty in breaking up the control of the political boss is that
he is backed by the money and the influence of these very people who are
intrenched in these very schedules. The tariff could never have been built
up item by item by public discussion, and it never could have passed, if
item by item it had been explained to the people of this country. It was
built up by arrangement and by the subtle management of a political
organization represented in the Senate of the United States by the senior
Senator from Rhode Island, and in the House of Representatives by one of
the Representatives from Illinois. These gentlemen did not build that
tariff upon the evidence that was given before the Committee on Ways and
Means as to what the manufacturer and the workingmen, the consumers and
the producers, of this country want. It was not built upon what the
interests of the country called for. It was built upon understandings
arrived at outside of the rooms where testimony was given and debate was
held.

I am not even now suggesting corrupt influence. That is not my point.
Corruption is a very difficult thing to manage in its literal sense. The
payment of money is very easily detected, and men of this kind who control
these interests by secret arrangement would not consent to receive a
dollar in money. They are following their own principles,--that is to say,
the principles which they think and act upon,--and they think that they
are perfectly honorable and incorruptible men; but they believe one thing
that I do not believe and that it is evident the people of the country do
not believe: they believe that the prosperity of the country depends upon
the arrangements which certain party leaders make with certain business
leaders. They believe that, but the proposition has merely to be stated
to the jury to be rejected. The prosperity of this country depends upon
the interests of all of us and cannot be brought about by arrangement
between any groups of persons. Take any question you like out to the
country,--let it be threshed out in public debate,--and you will have made
these methods impossible.

This is what sometimes happens: They promise you a particular piece of
legislation. As soon as the legislature meets, a bill embodying that
legislation is introduced. It is referred to a committee. You never hear
of it again. What happened? Nobody knows what happened.

I am not intimating that corruption creeps in; I do not know what creeps
in. The point is that we not only do not know, but it is intimated, if we
get inquisitive, that it is none of our business. My reply is that it is
our business, and it is the business of every man in the state; we have a
right to know all the particulars of that bill's history. There is not any
legitimate privacy about matters of government. Government must, if it is
to be pure and correct in its processes, be absolutely public in
everything that affects it. I cannot imagine a public man with a
conscience having a secret that he would keep from the people about their
own affairs.

I know how some of these gentlemen reason. They say that the influences to
which they are yielding are perfectly legitimate influences, but that if
they were disclosed they would not be understood. Well, I am very sorry,
but nothing is legitimate that cannot be understood. If you cannot explain
it properly, then there is something about it that cannot _be_ explained
at all. I know from the circumstances of the case, not what is happening,
but that something private is happening, and that every time one of these
bills gets into committee, something private stops it, and it never comes
out again unless forced out by the agitation of the press or the courage
and revolt of brave men in the legislature. I have known brave men of that
sort. I could name some splendid examples of men who, as representatives
of the people, demanded to be told by the chairman of the committee why
the bill was not reported, and who, when they could not find out from him,
investigated and found out for themselves and brought the bill out by
threatening to tell the reason on the floor of the House.

Those are private processes. Those are processes which stand between the
people and the things that are promised them, and I say that until you
drive all of those things into the open, you are not connected with your
government; you are not represented; you are not participants in your
government. Such a scheme of government by private understanding deprives
you of representation, deprives the people of representative institutions.
It has got to be put into the heads of legislators that public business is
public business. I hold the opinion that there can be no confidences as
against the people with respect to their government, and that it is the
duty of every public officer to explain to his fellow-citizens whenever he
gets a chance,--explain exactly what is going on inside of his own office.

There is no air so wholesome as the air of utter publicity.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are other tracts of modern life where jungles have grown up that
must be cut down. Take, for example, the entirely illegitimate extensions
made of the idea of private property for the benefit of modern
corporations and trusts. A modern joint stock corporation cannot in any
proper sense be said to base its rights and powers upon the principles of
private property. Its powers are wholly derived from legislation. It
possesses them for the convenience of business at the sufferance of the
public. Its stock is widely owned, passes from hand to hand, brings
multitudes of men into its shifting partnerships and connects it with the
interests and the investments of whole communities. It is a segment of the
public; bears no analogy to a partnership or to the processes by which
private property is safeguarded and managed, and should not be suffered to
afford any covert whatever to those who are managing it. Its management is
of public and general concern, is in a very proper sense everybody's
business. The business of many of those corporations which we call
public-service corporations, and which are indispensable to our daily
lives and serve us with transportation and light and water and
power,--their business, for instance, is clearly public business; and,
therefore, we can and must penetrate their affairs by the light of
examination and discussion.

In New Jersey the people have realized this for a long time, and a year or
two ago we got our ideas on the subject enacted into legislation. The
corporations involved opposed the legislation with all their might. They
talked about ruin,--and I really believe they did think they would be
somewhat injured. But they have not been. And I hear I cannot tell you how
many men in New Jersey say: "Governor, we were opposed to you; we did not
believe in the things you wanted to do, but now that you have done them,
we take off our hats. That was the thing to do, it did not hurt us a bit;
it just put us on a normal footing; it took away suspicion from our
business." New Jersey, having taken the cold plunge, cries out to the rest
of the states, "Come on in! The water's fine!" I wonder whether these men
who are controlling the government of the United States realize how they
are creating every year a thickening atmosphere of suspicion, in which
presently they will find that business cannot breathe?

So I take it to be a necessity of the hour to open up all the processes of
politics and of public business,--open them wide to public view; to make
them accessible to every force that moves, every opinion that prevails in
the thought of the people; to give society command of its own economic
life again, not by revolutionary measures, but by a steady application of
the principle that the people have a right to look into such matters and
to control them; to cut all privileges and patronage and private advantage
and secret enjoyment out of legislation.

Wherever any public business is transacted, wherever plans affecting the
public are laid, or enterprises touching the public welfare, comfort, or
convenience go forward, wherever political programs are formulated, or
candidates agreed on,--over that place a voice must speak, with the divine
prerogative of a people's will, the words: "Let there be light!"



VII

THE TARIFF--"PROTECTION," OR SPECIAL PRIVILEGE?


Every business question, in this country, comes back, sooner or later, to
the question of the tariff. You cannot escape from it, no matter in which
direction you go. The tariff is situated in relation to other questions
like Boston Common in the old arrangement of that interesting city. I
remember seeing once, in _Life_, a picture of a man standing at the door
of one of the railway stations in Boston and inquiring of a Bostonian the
way to the Common. "Take any of these streets," was the reply, "in either
direction." Now, as the Common was related to the winding streets of
Boston, so the tariff question is related to the economic questions of our
day. Take any direction and you will sooner or later get to the Common.
And, in discussing the tariff you may start at the centre and go in any
direction you please.

Let us illustrate by standing at the centre, the Common itself. As far
back as 1828, when they knew nothing about "practical politics" as
compared with what we know now, a tariff bill was passed which was called
the "Tariff of Abominations," because it had no beginning nor end nor
plan. It had no traceable pattern in it. It was as if the demands of
everybody in the United States had all been thrown indiscriminately into
one basket and that basket presented as a piece of legislation. It had
been a general scramble and everybody who scrambled hard enough had been
taken care of in the schedules resulting. It was an abominable thing to
the thoughtful men of that day, because no man guided it, shaped it, or
tried to make an equitable system out of it. That was bad enough, but at
least everybody had an open door through which to scramble for his
advantage. It was a go-as-you-please, free-for-all struggle, and anybody
who could get to Washington and say he represented an important business
interest could be heard by the Committee on Ways and Means.

We have a very different state of affairs now. The Committee on Ways and
Means and the Finance Committee of the Senate in these sophisticated days
have come to discriminate by long experience among the persons whose
counsel they are to take in respect of tariff legislation. There has been
substituted for the unschooled body of citizens that used to clamor at the
doors of the Finance Committee and the Committee on Ways and Means, one of
the most interesting and able bodies of expert lobbyists that has ever
been developed in the experience of any country,--men who know so much
about the matters they are talking of that you cannot put your knowledge
into competition with theirs. They so overwhelm you with their familiarity
with detail that you cannot discover wherein their scheme lies. They
suggest the change of an innocent fraction in a particular schedule and
explain it to you so plausibly that you cannot see that it means millions
of dollars additional from the consumers of this country. They propose,
for example, to put the carbon for electric lights in two-foot pieces
instead of one-foot pieces,--and you do not see where you are getting
sold, because you are not an expert. If you will get some expert to go
through the schedules of the present Payne-Aldrich tariff, you will find a
"nigger" concealed in almost every woodpile,--some little word, some
little clause, some unsuspected item, that draws thousands of dollars out
of the pockets of the consumer and yet does not seem to mean anything in
particular. They have calculated the whole thing beforehand; they have
analyzed the whole detail and consequence, each one in his specialty. With
the tariff specialist the average business man has no possibility of
competition. Instead of the old scramble, which was bad enough, we get the
present expert control of the tariff schedules. Thus the relation between
business and government becomes, not a matter of the exposure of all the
sensitive parts of the government to all the active parts of the people,
but the special impression upon them of a particular organized force in
the business world.

Furthermore, every expedient and device of secrecy is brought into use to
keep the public unaware of the arguments of the high protectionists, and
ignorant of the facts which refute them; and uninformed of the intentions
of the framers of the proposed legislation. It is notorious, even, that
many members of the Finance Committee of the Senate did not know the
significance of the tariff schedules which were reported in the present
tariff bill to the Senate, and that members of the Senate who asked Mr.
Aldrich direct questions were refused the information they sought;
sometimes, I dare say, because he could not give it, and sometimes, I
venture to say, because disclosure of the information would have
embarrassed the passage of the measure. There were essential papers,
moreover, which could not be got at.

       *       *       *       *       *

Take that very interesting matter, that will-o'-the-wisp, known as "the
cost of production." It is hard for any man who has ever studied
economics at all to restrain a cynical smile when he is told that an
intelligent group of his fellow-citizens are looking for "the cost of
production" as a basis for tariff legislation. It is not the same in any
one factory for two years together. It is not the same in one industry
from one season to another. It is not the same in one country at two
different epochs. It is constantly eluding your grasp. It nowhere exists,
as a scientific, demonstrable fact. But, in order to carry out the
pretences of the "protective" program, it was necessary to go through the
motions of finding out what it was. I am credibly informed that the
government of the United States requested several foreign governments,
among others the government of Germany, to supply it with as reliable
figures as possible concerning the cost of producing certain articles
corresponding with those produced in the United States. The German
government put the matter into the hands of certain of her manufacturers,
who sent in just as complete answers as they could procure from their
books. The information reached our government during the course of the
debate on the Payne-Aldrich Bill and was transmitted,--for the bill by
that time had reached the Senate,--to the Finance Committee of the Senate.
But I am told,--and I have no reason to doubt it,--that it never came out
of the pigeonholes of the committee. I don't know, and that committee
doesn't know, what the information it contained was. When Mr. Aldrich was
asked about it, he first said it was not an official report from the
German government. Afterward he intimated that it was an impudent attempt
on the part of the German government to interfere with tariff legislation
in the United States. But he never said what the cost of production
disclosed by it was. If he had, it is more than likely that some of the
schedules would have been shown to be entirely unjustifiable.

Such instances show you just where the centre of gravity is,--and it is a
matter of gravity indeed, for it is a very grave matter! It lay during the
last Congress in the one person who was the accomplished intermediary
between the expert lobbyists and the legislation of Congress. I am not
saying this in derogation of the character of Mr. Aldrich. It is no
concern of mine what kind of man Mr. Aldrich is; now, particularly, when
he has retired from public life, is it a matter of indifference. The point
is that he, because of his long experience, his long handling of these
delicate and private matters, was the usual and natural instrument by
which the Congress of the United States informed itself, not as to the
wishes of the people of the United States or of the rank and file of
business men of the country, but as to the needs and arguments of the
experts who came to arrange matters with the committees.

The moral of the whole matter is this: The business of the United States
is not as a whole in contact with the government of the United States. So
soon as it is, the matters which now give you, and justly give you, cause
for uneasiness will disappear. Just so soon as the business of this
country has general, free, welcome access to the councils of Congress, all
the friction between business and politics will disappear.

       *       *       *       *       *

The tariff question is not the question that it was fifteen or twenty or
thirty years ago. It used to be said by the advocates of the tariff that
it made no difference even if there were a great wall separating us from
the commerce of the world, because inside the United States there was so
enormous an area of absolute free trade that competition within the
country kept prices down to a normal level; that so long as one state
could compete with all the others in the United States, and all the others
compete with it, there would be only that kind of advantage gained which
is gained by superior brain, superior economy, the better plant, the
better administration; all of the things that have made America supreme,
and kept prices in America down, because American genius was competing
with American genius. I must add that so long as that was true, there was
much to be said in defence of the protective tariff.

But the point now is that the protective tariff has been taken advantage
of by some men to destroy domestic competition, to combine all existing
rivals within our free-trade area, and to make it impossible for new men
to come into the field. Under the high tariff there has been formed a
network of factories which in their connection dominate the market of the
United States and establish their own prices. Whereas, therefore, it was
once arguable that the high tariff did not create the high cost of living,
it is now no longer arguable that these combinations do not,--not by
reason of the tariff, but by reason of their combination under the
tariff,--settle what prices shall be paid; settle how much the product
shall be; and settle, moreover, what shall be the market for labor.

The "protective" policy, as we hear it proclaimed to-day, bears no
relation to the original doctrine enunciated by Webster and Clay. The
"infant industries," which those statesmen desired to encourage, have
grown up and grown gray, but they have always had new arguments for
special favors. Their demands have gone far beyond what they dared ask for
in the days of Mr. Blaine and Mr. McKinley, though both those apostles of
"protection" were, before they died, ready to confess that the time had
even then come to call a halt on the claims of the subsidized industries.
William McKinley, before he died, showed symptoms of adjustment to the new
age such as his successors have not exhibited. You remember what the
utterances of Mr. McKinley's last month were with regard to the policy
with which his name is particularly identified; I mean the policy of
"protection." You remember how he joined in opinion with what Mr. Blaine
before him had said--namely, that we had devoted the country to a policy
which, too rigidly persisted in, was proving a policy of restriction; and
that we must look forward to a time that ought to come very soon when we
should enter into reciprocal relations of trade with all the countries of
the world. This was another way of saying that we must substitute
elasticity for rigidity; that we must substitute trade for closed ports.
McKinley saw what his successors did not see. He saw that we had made for
ourselves a strait-jacket.

When I reflect upon the "protective" policy of this country, and observe
that it is the later aspects and the later uses of that policy which have
built up trusts and monopoly in the United States, I make this contrast in
my thought: Mr. McKinley had already uttered his protest against what he
foresaw; his successor saw what McKinley had only foreseen, but he took no
action. His successor saw those very special privileges, which Mr.
McKinley himself began to suspect, used by the men who had obtained them
to build up a monopoly for themselves, making freedom of enterprise in
this country more and more difficult. I am one of those who have the
utmost confidence that Mr. McKinley would not have sanctioned the later
developments of the policy with which his name stands identified.

What is the present tariff policy of the protectionists? It is not the
ancient protective policy to which I would give all due credit, but an
entirely new doctrine. I ask anybody who is interested in the history of
high "protective" tariffs to compare the latest platforms of the two
"protective" tariff parties with the old doctrine. Men have been struck,
students of this matter, by an entirely new departure. The new doctrine of
the protectionist is that the tariff should represent the difference
between the cost of production in America and the cost of production in
other countries, _plus_ a reasonable profit to those who are engaged in
industry. This is the new part of the protective doctrine: "_plus_ a
reasonable profit." It openly guarantees profit to the men who come and
ask favors of Congress. The old idea of a protective tariff was designed
to keep American industries alive and, therefore, keep American labor
employed. But the favors of protection have become so permanent that this
is what has happened: Men, seeing that they need not fear foreign
competition, have drawn together in great combinations. These combinations
include factories (if it is a combination of factories) of all grades: old
factories and new factories, factories with antiquated machinery and
factories with brand-new machinery; factories that are economically and
factories that are not economically administered; factories that have
been long in the family, which have been allowed to run down, and
factories with all the new modern inventions. As soon as the combination
is effected the less efficient factories are generally put out of
operation. But the stock issued in payment for them has to pay dividends.
And the United States government guarantees profit on investment in
factories that have gone out of business. As soon as these combinations
see prices falling they reduce the hours of labor, they reduce production,
they reduce wages, they throw men out of employment,--in order to do what?
In order to keep the prices up in spite of their lack of efficiency.

There may have been a time when the tariff did not raise prices, but that
time is past; the tariff is now taken advantage of by the great
combinations in such a way as to give them control of prices. These things
do not happen by chance. It does not happen by chance that prices are and
have been rising faster here than in any other country. That river that
divides us from Canada divides us from much cheaper living,
notwithstanding that the Canadian Parliament levies duties on
importations.

       *       *       *       *       *

But "Ah!" exclaim those who do not understand what is going on; "you will
ruin the country with your free trade!" Who said free trade? Who proposed
free trade? You can't have free trade in the United States, because the
government of the United States is of necessity, with our present division
of the field of taxation between the federal and state governments,
supported in large part by the duties collected at the ports. I should
like to ask some gentlemen if very much is collected in the way of duties
at the ports under the particular tariff schedules under which they
operate. Some of the duties are practically prohibitive, and there is no
tariff to be got from them.

When you buy an imported article, you pay a part of the price to the
Federal government in the form of customs duty. But, as a rule, what you
buy is, not the imported article, but a domestic article, the price of
which the manufacturer has been able to raise to a point equal to, or
higher than, the price of the foreign article _plus the duty_. But who
gets the tariff tax in this case? The government? Oh, no; not at all. The
manufacturer. The American manufacturer, who says that while he can't sell
goods as low as the foreign manufacturer, all good Americans ought to buy
of him and pay him a tax on every article for the privilege. Perhaps we
ought. The original idea was that, when he was just starting and needed
support, we ought to buy of him, even if we had to pay a higher price,
till he could get on his feet. Now it is said that we ought to buy of him
and pay him a price 15 to 120 per cent. higher than we need pay the
foreign manufacturer, even if he is a six-foot, bearded "infant," because
the cost of production is necessarily higher here than anywhere else. I
don't know why it should be. The American workingman used to be able to do
so much more and better work than the foreigner that that more than
compensated for his higher wages and made him a good bargain at any wage.

Of course, if we are going to agree to give any fellow-citizen who takes
a notion to go into some business or other for which the country is not
especially adapted,--if we are going to give him a bonus on every article
he produces big enough to make up for the handicap he labors under because
of some natural reason or other,--why, we may indeed gloriously diversify
our industries, but we shall beggar ourselves. On this principle, we shall
have in Connecticut, or Michigan, or somewhere else, miles of hothouses in
which thousands of happy American workingmen, with full dinner-pails, will
be raising bananas,--to be sold at a quarter apiece. Some foolish person,
a benighted Democrat like as not, might timidly suggest that bananas were
a greater public blessing when they came from Jamaica and were three for a
nickel, but what patriotic citizen would listen for a moment to the
criticisms of a person without any conception of the beauty and glory of
the great American banana industry, without realization of the proud
significance of the fact that Old Glory floats over the biggest banana
hothouses in the world!

But that is a matter on one side. What I am trying to point out to you
now is that this "protective" tariff, so-called, has become a means of
fostering the growth of particular groups of industry at the expense of
the economic vitality of the rest of the country. What the people now
propose is a very practical thing indeed: They propose to unearth these
special privileges and to cut them out of the tariff. They propose not to
leave a single concealed private advantage in the statutes concerning the
duties that can possibly be eradicated without affecting the part of the
business that is sound and legitimate and which we all wish to see
promoted.

Some men talk as if the tariff-reformers, as if the Democrats, weren't
part of the United States. I met a lady the other day, not an elderly
lady, who said to me with pride: "Why, I have been a Democrat ever since
they hunted them with dogs." And you would really suppose, to hear some
men talk, that Democrats were outlaws and did not share the life of the
United States. Why, Democrats constitute nearly one half the voters of
this country. They are engaged in all sorts of enterprises, big and
little. There isn't a walk of life or a kind of occupation in which you
won't find them; and, as a Philadelphia paper very wittily said the other
day, they can't commit economic murder without committing economic
suicide. Do you suppose, therefore, that half of the population of the
United States is going about to destroy the very foundations of our
economic life by simply running amuck amidst the schedules of the tariff?
Some of the schedules are so tough that they wouldn't be hurt, if it did.
But that isn't the program, and anybody who says that it is simply doesn't
understand the situation at all. All that the tariff-reformers claim is
this: that the partnership ought to be bigger than it is. Just because
there are so many of them, they know how many are outside. And let me tell
you, just as many Republicans are outside. The only thing I have against
my protectionist fellow-citizens is that they have allowed themselves to
be imposed upon so many years. Think of saying that the "protective"
tariff is for the benefit of the workingman, in the presence of all those
facts that have just been disclosed in Lawrence, Mass., where the worst
schedule of all--"Schedule K"--operates to keep men on wages on which they
cannot live. Why, the audacity, the impudence, of the claim is what
strikes one; and in face of the fact that the workingmen of this country
who are in unprotected industries are better paid than those who are in
"protected" industries; at any rate, in the conspicuous industries! The
Steel schedule, I dare say, is rather satisfactory to those who
manufacture steel, but is it satisfactory to those who make the steel with
their own tired hands? Don't you know that there are mills in which men
are made to work seven days in the week for twelve hours a day, and in the
three hundred and sixty-five weary days of the year can't make enough to
pay their bills? And this in one of the giants among our industries, one
of the undertakings which have thriven to gigantic size upon this very
system.

Ah, the whole mass of the fraud is falling away, and men are beginning to
see disclosed little groups of persons maintaining a control over the
dominant party and through the dominant party over the government, in
their own interest, and not in the interest of the people of the United
States!

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me repeat: There cannot be free trade in the United States so long as
the established fiscal policy of the federal government is maintained. The
federal government has chosen throughout all the generations that have
preceded us to maintain itself chiefly on indirect instead of direct
taxation. I dare say we shall never see a time when it can alter that
policy in any substantial degree; and there is no Democrat of
thoughtfulness that I have met who contemplates a program of free trade.

But what we intend to do, what the House of Representatives has been
attempting to do and will attempt to do again, and succeed in doing, is to
weed this garden that we have been cultivating. Because, if we have been
laying at the roots of our industrial enterprises this fertilization of
protection, if we have been stimulating it by this policy, we have found
that the stimulation was not equal in respect of all the growths in the
garden, and that there are some growths, which every man can distinguish
with the naked eye, which have so overtopped the rest, which have so
thrown the rest into destroying shadow, that it is impossible for the
industries of the United States as a whole to prosper under their
blighting shade. In other words, we have found out that this that
professes to be a process of protection has become a process of
favoritism, and that the favorites of this policy have flourished at the
expense of all the rest. And now we are going into this garden and weed
it. We are going into this garden and give the little plants air and light
in which to grow. We are going to pull up every root that has so spread
itself as to draw the nutriment of the soil from the other roots. We are
going in there to see to it that the fertilization of intelligence, of
invention, of origination, is once more applied to a set of industries now
threatening to be stagnant, because threatening to be too much
concentrated. The policy of freeing the country from the restrictive
tariff will so variegate and multiply the undertakings in the country that
there will be a wider market and a greater competition for labor; it will
let the sun shine through the clouds again as once it shone on the free,
independent, unpatronized intelligence and energy of a great people.

One of the counts of the indictment against the so-called "protective"
tariff is that it has robbed Americans of their independence,
resourcefulness, and self-reliance. Our industry has grown invertebrate,
cowardly, dependent on government aid. When I hear the argument of some of
the biggest business men in this country, that if you took the
"protection" of the tariff off they would be overcome by the competition
of the world, I ask where and when it happened that the boasted genius of
America became afraid to go out into the open and compete with the world?
Are we children, are we wards, are we still such puerile infants that we
have to be fed out of a bottle? Isn't it true that we know how to make
steel in America better than anybody else in the world? Yet they say, "For
Heaven's sake don't expose us to the chill of prices coming from any other
quarter of the globe." Mind you, we can compete with those prices. Steel
is sold abroad, steel made in America is sold abroad in many of its forms,
much cheaper than it is sold in America. It is so hard for people to get
that into their heads!

We set up a kindergarten in New York. We called it the Chamber of Horrors.
We exhibited there a great many things manufactured in the United States,
with the prices at which they were sold in the United States, and the
prices at which they were sold outside of the United States, marked on
them. If you tell a woman that she can buy a sewing machine for eighteen
dollars in Mexico that she has to pay thirty dollars for in the United
States, she will not heed it or she will forget it unless you take her and
show her the machine with the price marked on it. My very distinguished
friend, Senator Gore, of Oklahoma, made this interesting proposal: that
we should pass a law that every piece of goods sold in the United States
should have on it a label bearing the price at which it sells under the
tariff and the price at which it would sell if there were no tariff, and
then the Senator suggests that we have a very easy solution for the tariff
question. He does not want to oblige that great body of our
fellow-citizens who have a conscientious belief in "protection" to turn
away from it. He proposes that everybody who believes in the "protective"
tariff should pay it and the rest of us should not; if they want to
subscribe, it is open to them to subscribe.

As for the rest of us, the time is coming when we shall not have to
subscribe. The people of this land have made up their minds to cut all
privilege and patronage out of our fiscal legislation, particularly out of
that part of it which affects the tariff. We have come to recognize in the
tariff as it is now constructed, not a system of protection, but a system
of favoritism, of privilege, too often granted secretly and by subterfuge,
instead of openly and frankly and legitimately, and we have determined to
put an end to the whole bad business, not by hasty and drastic changes,
but by the adoption of an entirely new principle,--by the reformation of
the whole purpose of legislation of that kind. We mean that our tariff
legislation henceforth shall have as its object, not private profit, but
the general public development and benefit. We shall make our fiscal laws,
not like those who dole out favors, but like those who serve a nation. We
are going to begin with those particular items where we find special
privilege intrenched. We know what those items are; these gentlemen have
been kind enough to point them out themselves. What we are interested in
first of all with regard to the tariff is getting the grip of special
interests off the throat of Congress. We do not propose that special
interests shall any longer camp in the rooms of the Committee on Ways and
Means of the House and the Finance Committee of the Senate. We mean that
those shall be places where the people of the United States shall come and
be represented, in order that everything may be done in the general
interest, and not in the interest of particular groups of persons who
already dominate the industries and the industrial development of this
country. Because no matter how wise these gentlemen may be, no matter how
patriotic, no matter how singularly they may be gifted with the power to
divine the right courses of business, there isn't any group of men in the
United States or in any other country who are wise enough to have the
destinies of a great people put into their hands as trustees. We mean that
business in this land shall be released, emancipated.



VIII

MONOPOLY, OR OPPORTUNITY?


Gentlemen say, they have been saying for a long time, and, therefore, I
assume that they believe, that trusts are inevitable. They don't say that
big business is inevitable. They don't say merely that the elaboration of
business upon a great co-operative scale is characteristic of our time and
has come about by the natural operation of modern civilization. We would
admit that. But they say that the particular kind of combinations that are
now controlling our economic development came into existence naturally and
were inevitable; and that, therefore, we have to accept them as
unavoidable and administer our development through them. They take the
analogy of the railways. The railways were clearly inevitable if we were
to have transportation, but railways after they are once built stay put.
You can't transfer a railroad at convenience; and you can't shut up one
part of it and work another part. It is in the nature of what economists,
those tedious persons, call natural monopolies; simply because the whole
circumstances of their use are so stiff that you can't alter them. Such
are the analogies which these gentlemen choose when they discuss the
modern trust.

I admit the popularity of the theory that the trusts have come about
through the natural development of business conditions in the United
States, and that it is a mistake to try to oppose the processes by which
they have been built up, because those processes belong to the very nature
of business in our time, and that therefore the only thing we can do, and
the only thing we ought to attempt to do, is to accept them as inevitable
arrangements and make the best out of it that we can by regulation.

I answer, nevertheless, that this attitude rests upon a confusion of
thought. Big business is no doubt to a large extent necessary and natural.
The development of business upon a great scale, upon a great scale of
co-operation, is inevitable, and, let me add, is probably desirable. But
that is a very different matter from the development of trusts, because
the trusts have not grown. They have been artificially created; they have
been put together, not by natural processes, but by the will, the
deliberate planning will, of men who were more powerful than their
neighbors in the business world, and who wished to make their power secure
against competition.

The trusts do not belong to the period of infant industries. They are not
the products of the time, that old laborious time, when the great
continent we live on was undeveloped, the young nation struggling to find
itself and get upon its feet amidst older and more experienced
competitors. They belong to a very recent and very sophisticated age, when
men knew what they wanted and knew how to get it by the favor of the
government.

Did you ever look into the way a trust was made? It is very natural, in
one sense, in the same sense in which human greed is natural. If I
haven't efficiency enough to beat my rivals, then the thing I am inclined
to do is to get together with my rivals and say: "Don't let's cut each
other's throats; let's combine and determine prices for ourselves;
determine the output, and thereby determine the prices: and dominate and
control the market." That is very natural. That has been done ever since
freebooting was established. That has been done ever since power was used
to establish control. The reason that the masters of combination have
sought to shut out competition is that the basis of control under
competition is brains and efficiency. I admit that any large corporation
built up by the legitimate processes of business, by economy, by
efficiency, is natural; and I am not afraid of it, no matter how big it
grows. It can stay big only by doing its work more thoroughly than anybody
else. And there is a point of bigness,--as every business man in this
country knows, though some of them will not admit it,--where you pass the
limit of efficiency and get into the region of clumsiness and
unwieldiness. You can make your combine so extensive that you can't
digest it into a single system; you can get so many parts that you can't
assemble them as you would an effective piece of machinery. The point of
efficiency is overstepped in the natural process of development
oftentimes, and it has been overstepped many times in the artificial and
deliberate formation of trusts.

A trust is formed in this way: a few gentlemen "promote" it--that is to
say, they get it up, being given enormous fees for their kindness, which
fees are loaded on to the undertaking in the form of securities of one
kind or another. The argument of the promoters is, not that every one who
comes into the combination can carry on his business more efficiently than
he did before; the argument is: we will assign to you as your share in the
pool twice, three times, four times, or five times what you could have
sold your business for to an individual competitor who would have to run
it on an economic and competitive basis. We can afford to buy it at such a
figure because we are shutting out competition. We can afford to make the
stock of the combination half a dozen times what it naturally would be
and pay dividends on it, because there will be nobody to dispute the
prices we shall fix.

Talk of that as sound business? Talk of that as inevitable? It is based
upon nothing except power. It is not based upon efficiency. It is no
wonder that the big trusts are not prospering in proportion to such
competitors as they still have in such parts of their business as
competitors have access to; they are prospering freely only in those
fields to which competition has no access. Read the statistics of the
Steel Trust, if you don't believe it. Read the statistics of any trust.
They are constantly nervous about competition, and they are constantly
buying up new competitors in order to narrow the field. The United States
Steel Corporation is gaining in its supremacy in the American market only
with regard to the cruder manufactures of iron and steel, but wherever, as
in the field of more advanced manufactures of iron and steel, it has
important competitors, its portion of the product is not increasing, but
is decreasing, and its competitors, where they have a foothold, are often
more efficient than it is.

Why? Why, with unlimited capital and innumerable mines and plants
everywhere in the United States, can't they beat the other fellows in the
market? Partly because they are carrying too much. Partly because they are
unwieldy. Their organization is imperfect. They bought up inefficient
plants along with efficient, and they have got to carry what they have
paid for, even if they have to shut some of the plants up in order to make
any interest on their investments; or, rather, not interest on their
investments, because that is an incorrect word,--on their alleged
capitalization. Here we have a lot of giants staggering along under an
almost intolerable weight of artificial burdens, which they have put on
their own backs, and constantly looking about lest some little pigmy with
a round stone in a sling may come out and slay them.

For my part, I want the pigmy to have a chance to come out. And I foresee
a time when the pigmies will be so much more athletic, so much more
astute, so much more active, than the giants, that it will be a case of
Jack the giant-killer. Just let some of the youngsters I know have a
chance and they'll give these gentlemen points. Lend them a little money.
They can't get any now. See to it that when they have got a local market
they can't be squeezed out of it. Give them a chance to capture that
market and then see them capture another one and another one, until these
men who are carrying an intolerable load of artificial securities find
that they have got to get down to hard pan to keep their foothold at all.
I am willing to let Jack come into the field with the giant, and if Jack
has the brains that some Jacks that I know in America have, then I should
like to see the giant get the better of him, with the load that he, the
giant, has to carry,--the load of water. For I'll undertake to put a
water-logged giant out of business any time, if you will give me a fair
field and as much credit as I am entitled to, and let the law do what from
time immemorial law has been expected to do,--see fair play.

As for watered stock, I know all the sophistical arguments, and they are
many, for capitalizing earning capacity. It is a very attractive and
interesting argument, and in some instances it is legitimately used. But
there is a line you cross, above which you are not capitalizing your
earning capacity, but capitalizing your control of the market,
capitalizing the profits which you got by your control of the market, and
didn't get by efficiency and economy. These things are not hidden even
from the layman. These are not half-hidden from college men. The college
men's days of innocence have passed, and their days of sophistication have
come. They know what is going on, because we live in a talkative world,
full of statistics, full of congressional inquiries, full of trials of
persons who have attempted to live independently of the statutes of the
United States; and so a great many things have come to light under oath,
which we must believe upon the credibility of the witnesses who are,
indeed, in many instances very eminent and respectable witnesses.

I take my stand absolutely, where every progressive ought to take his
stand, on the proposition that private monopoly is indefensible and
intolerable. And there I will fight my battle. And I know how to fight it.
Everybody who has even read the newspapers knows the means by which these
men built up their power and created these monopolies. Any decently
equipped lawyer can suggest to you statutes by which the whole business
can be stopped. What these gentlemen do not want is this: they do not want
to be compelled to meet all comers on equal terms. I am perfectly willing
that they should beat any competitor by fair means; but I know the foul
means they have adopted, and I know that they can be stopped by law. If
they think that coming into the market upon the basis of mere efficiency,
upon the mere basis of knowing how to manufacture goods better than
anybody else and to sell them cheaper than anybody else, they can carry
the immense amount of water that they have put into their enterprises in
order to buy up rivals, then they are perfectly welcome to try it. But
there must be no squeezing out of the beginner, no crippling his credit;
no discrimination against retailers who buy from a rival; no threats
against concerns who sell supplies to a rival; no holding back of raw
material from him; no secret arrangements against him. All the fair
competition you choose, but no unfair competition of any kind. And then
when unfair competition is eliminated, let us see these gentlemen carry
their tanks of water on their backs. All that I ask and all I shall fight
for is that they shall come into the field against merit and brains
everywhere. If they can beat other American brains, then they have got the
best brains.

But if you want to know how far brains go, as things now are, suppose you
try to match your better wares against these gentlemen, and see them
undersell you before your market is any bigger than the locality and make
it absolutely impossible for you to get a fast foothold. If you want to
know how brains count, originate some invention which will improve the
kind of machinery they are using, and then see if you can borrow enough
money to manufacture it. You may be offered something for your patent by
the corporation,--which will perhaps lock it up in a safe and go on using
the old machinery; but you will not be allowed to manufacture. I know men
who have tried it, and they could not get the money, because the great
money lenders of this country are in the arrangement with the great
manufacturers of this country, and they do not propose to see their
control of the market interfered with by outsiders. And who are outsiders?
Why, all the rest of the people of the United States are outsiders.

They are rapidly making us outsiders with respect even of the things that
come from the bosom of the earth, and which belong to us in a peculiar
sense. Certain monopolies in this country have gained almost complete
control of the raw material, chiefly in the mines, out of which the great
body of manufactures are carried on, and they now discriminate, when they
will, in the sale of that raw material between those who are rivals of the
monopoly and those who submit to the monopoly. We must soon come to the
point where we shall say to the men who own these essentials of industry
that they have got to part with these essentials by sale to all citizens
of the United States with the same readiness and upon the same terms. Or
else we shall tie up the resources of this country under private control
in such fashion as will make our independent development absolutely
impossible.

There is another injustice that monopoly engages in. The trust that deals
in the cruder products which are to be transformed into the more elaborate
manufactures often will not sell these crude products except upon the
terms of monopoly,--that is to say, the people that deal with them must
buy exclusively from them. And so again you have the lines of development
tied up and the connections of development knotted and fastened so that
you cannot wrench them apart.

Again, the manufacturing monopolies are so interlaced in their personal
relationships with the great shipping interests of this country, and with
the great railroads, that they can often largely determine the rates of
shipment.

The people of this country are being very subtly dealt with. You know, of
course, that, unless our Commerce Commissions are absolutely sleepless,
you can get rebates without calling them such at all. The most complicated
study I know of is the classification of freight by the railway company.
If I wanted to make a special rate on a special thing, all I should have
to do is to put it in a special class in the freight classification, and
the trick is done. And when you reflect that the twenty-four men who
control the United States Steel Corporation, for example, are either
presidents or vice-presidents or directors in 55 per cent. of the railways
of the United States, reckoning by the valuation of those railroads and
the amount of their stock and bonds, you know just how close the whole
thing is knitted together in our industrial system, and how great the
temptation is. These twenty-four gentlemen administer that corporation as
if it belonged to them. The amazing thing to me is that the people of the
United States have not seen that the administration of a great business
like that is not a private affair; it is a public affair.

I have been told by a great many men that the idea I have, that by
restoring competition you can restore industrial freedom, is based upon a
failure to observe the actual happenings of the last decades in this
country; because, they say, it is just free competition that has made it
possible for the big to crush the little.

I reply, it is not free competition that has done that; it is illicit
competition. It is competition of the kind that the law ought to stop, and
can stop,--this crushing of the little man.

You know, of course, how the little man is crushed by the trusts. He gets
a local market. The big concerns come in and undersell him in his local
market, and that is the only market he has; if he cannot make a profit
there, he is killed. They can make a profit all through the rest of the
Union, while they are underselling him in his locality, and recouping
themselves by what they can earn elsewhere. Thus their competitors can be
put out of business, one by one, wherever they dare to show a head.
Inasmuch as they rise up only one by one, these big concerns can see to it
that new competitors never come into the larger field. You have to begin
somewhere. You can't begin in space. You can't begin in an airship. You
have got to begin in some community. Your market has got to be your
neighbors first and those who know you there. But unless you have
unlimited capital (which of course you wouldn't have when you were
beginning) or unlimited credit (which these gentlemen can see to it that
you shan't get), they can kill you out in your local market any time they
try, on the same basis exactly as that on which they beat organized labor;
for they can sell at a loss in your market because they are selling at a
profit everywhere else, and they can recoup the losses by which they beat
you by the profits which they make in fields where they have beaten other
fellows and put them out. If ever a competitor who by good luck has plenty
of money does break into the wider market, then the trust has to buy him
out, paying three or four times what the business is worth. Following
such a purchase it has got to pay the interest on the price it has paid
for the business, and it has got to tax the whole people of the United
States, in order to pay the interest on what it borrowed to do that, or on
the stocks and bonds it issued to do it with. Therefore the big trusts,
the big combinations, are the most wasteful, the most uneconomical, and,
after they pass a certain size, the most inefficient, way of conducting
the industries of this country.

A notable example is the way in which Mr. Carnegie was bought out of the
steel business. Mr. Carnegie could build better mills and make better
steel rails and make them cheaper than anybody else connected with what
afterward became the United States Steel Corporation. They didn't dare
leave him outside. He had so much more brains in finding out the best
processes; he had so much more shrewdness in surrounding himself with the
most successful assistants; he knew so well when a young man who came into
his employ was fit for promotion and was ripe to put at the head of some
branch of his business and was sure to make good, that he could undersell
every mother's son of them in the market for steel rails. And they bought
him out at a price that amounted to three or four times,--I believe
actually five times,--the estimated value of his properties and of his
business, because they couldn't beat him in competition. And then in what
they charged afterward for their product,--the product of his mills
included,--they made us pay the interest on the four or five times the
difference.

That is the difference between a big business and a trust. A trust is an
arrangement to get rid of competition, and a big business is a business
that has survived competition by conquering in the field of intelligence
and economy. A trust does not bring efficiency to the aid of business; it
_buys efficiency out of business_. I am for big business, and I am against
the trusts. Any man who can survive by his brains, any man who can put the
others out of the business by making the thing cheaper to the consumer at
the same time that he is increasing its intrinsic value and quality, I
take off my hat to, and I say: "You are the man who can build up the
United States, and I wish there were more of you."

There will not be more, unless we find a way to prevent monopoly. You know
perfectly well that a trust business staggering under a capitalization
many times too big is not a business that can afford to admit competitors
into the field; because the minute an economical business, a business with
its capital down to hard pan, with every ounce of its capital working,
comes into the field against such an overloaded corporation, it will
inevitably beat it and undersell it; therefore it is to the interest of
these gentlemen that monopoly be maintained. They cannot rule the markets
of the world in any way but by monopoly. It is not surprising to find them
helping to found a new party with a fine program of benevolence, but also
with a tolerant acceptance of monopoly.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is another matter to which we must direct our attention, whether we
like or not. I do not take these things into my mouth because they please
my palate; I do not talk about them because I want to attack anybody or
upset anything; I talk about them because only by open speech about them
among ourselves shall we learn what the facts are.

You will notice from a recent investigation that things like this take
place: A certain bank invests in certain securities. It appears from
evidence that the handling of these securities was very intimately
connected with the maintenance of the price of a particular commodity.
Nobody ought, and in normal circumstances nobody would, for a moment think
of suspecting the managers of a great bank of making such an investment in
order to help those who were conducting a particular business in the
United States maintain the price of their commodity; but the circumstances
are not normal. It is beginning to be believed that in the big business of
this country nothing is disconnected from anything else. I do not mean in
this particular instance to which I have referred, and I do not have in
mind to draw any inference at all, for that would be unjust; but take any
investment of an industrial character by a great bank. It is known that
the directorate of that bank interlaces in personnel with ten, twenty,
thirty, forty, fifty, sixty boards of directors of all sorts, of railroads
which handle commodities, of great groups of manufacturers which
manufacture commodities, and of great merchants who distribute
commodities; and the result is that every great bank is under suspicion
with regard to the motive of its investments. It is at least considered
possible that it is playing the game of somebody who has nothing to do
with banking, but with whom some of its directors are connected and joined
in interest. The ground of unrest and uneasiness, in short, on the part of
the public at large, is the growing knowledge that many large undertakings
are interlaced with one another, are indistinguishable from one another in
personnel.

Therefore, when a small group of men approach Congress in order to induce
the committee concerned to concur in certain legislation, nobody knows the
ramifications of the interests which those men represent; there seems no
frank and open action of public opinion in public counsel, but every man
is suspected of representing some other man and it is not known where his
connections begin or end.

I am one of those who have been so fortunately circumstanced that I have
had the opportunity to study the way in which these things come about in
complete disconnection from them, and I do not suspect that any man has
deliberately planned the system. I am not so uninstructed and misinformed
as to suppose that there is a deliberate and malevolent combination
somewhere to dominate the government of the United States. I merely say
that, by certain processes, now well known, and perhaps natural in
themselves, there has come about an extraordinary and very sinister
concentration in the control of business in the country.

However it has come about, it is more important still that the control of
credit also has become dangerously centralized. It is the mere truth to
say that the financial resources of the country are not at the command of
those who do not submit to the direction and domination of small groups of
capitalists who wish to keep the economic development of the country under
their own eye and guidance. The great monopoly in this country is the
monopoly of big credits. So long as that exists, our old variety and
freedom and individual energy of development are out of the question. A
great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system
of credit is privately concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore,
and all our activities are in the hands of a few men who, even if their
action be honest and intended for the public interest, are necessarily
concentrated upon the great undertakings in which their own money is
involved and who necessarily, by very reason of their own limitations,
chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom. This is the greatest
question of all, and to this statesmen must address themselves with an
earnest determination to serve the long future and the true liberties of
men.

This money trust, or, as it should be more properly called, this credit
trust, of which Congress has begun an investigation, is no myth; it is no
imaginary thing. It is not an ordinary trust like another. It doesn't do
business every day. It does business only when there is occasion to do
business. You can sometimes do something large when it isn't watching, but
when it is watching, you can't do much. And I have seen men squeezed by
it; I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put "out of
business by Wall Street," because Wall Street found them inconvenient and
didn't want their competition.

Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall
Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for
the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty
oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the
market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the
country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can
imagine them using this argument to themselves.

The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great
individual combinations,--that is dangerous enough in all conscience,--but
the combination of the combinations,--of the railways, the manufacturing
enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the
development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together
in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of
interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that
dare appear in the open.

The organization of business has become more centralized, vastly more
centralized, than the political organization of the country itself.
Corporations have come to cover greater areas than states; have come to
live under a greater variety of laws than the citizen himself, have
excelled states in their budgets and loomed bigger than whole
commonwealths in their influence over the lives and fortunes of entire
communities of men. Centralized business has built up vast structures of
organization and equipment which overtop all states and seem to have no
match or competitor except the federal government itself.

What we have got to do,--and it is a colossal task not to be undertaken
with a light head or without judgment,--what we have got to do is to
disentangle this colossal "community of interest." No matter how we may
purpose dealing with a single combination in restraint of trade, you will
agree with me in this, that no single, avowed, combination is big enough
for the United States to be afraid of; but when all the combinations are
combined and this final combination is not disclosed by any process of
incorporation or law, but is merely an identity of personnel, or of
interest, then there is something that even the government of the nation
itself might come to fear,--something for the law to pull apart, and
gently, but firmly and persistently, dissect.

You know that the chemist distinguishes between a chemical combination and
an amalgam. A chemical combination has done something which I cannot
scientifically describe, but its molecules have become intimate with one
another and have practically united, whereas an amalgam has a mere
physical union created by pressure from without. Now, you can destroy that
mere physical contact without hurting the individual elements, and this
community of interest is an amalgam; you can break it up without hurting
any one of the single interests combined. Not that I am particularly
delicate of some of the interests combined,--I am not under bonds to be
unduly polite to them,--but I am interested in the business of the
country, and believe its integrity depends upon this dissection. I do not
believe any one group of men has vision enough or genius enough to
determine what the development of opportunity and the accomplishment by
achievement shall be in this country.

The facts of the situation amount to this: that a comparatively small
number of men control the raw material of this country; that a
comparatively small number of men control the water-powers that can be
made useful for the economical production of the energy to drive our
machinery; that that same number of men largely control the railroads;
that by agreements handed around among themselves they control prices, and
that that same group of men control the larger credits of the country.

       *       *       *       *       *

When we undertake the strategy which is going to be necessary to overcome
and destroy this far-reaching system of monopoly, we are rescuing the
business of this country, we are not injuring it; and when we separate the
interests from each other and dismember these communities of connection,
we have in mind a greater community of interest, a vaster community of
interest, the community of interest that binds the virtues of all men
together, that community of mankind which is broad and catholic enough to
take under the sweep of its comprehension all sorts and conditions of men;
that vision which sees that no society is renewed from the top but that
every society is renewed from the bottom. Limit opportunity, restrict the
field of originative achievement, and you have cut out the heart and root
of all prosperity.

The only thing that can ever make a free country is to keep a free and
hopeful heart under every jacket in it. Honest American industry has
always thriven, when it has thriven at all, on freedom; it has never
thriven on monopoly. It is a great deal better to shift for yourselves
than to be taken care of by a great combination of capital. I, for my
part, do not want to be taken care of. I would rather starve a free man
than be fed a mere thing at the caprice of those who are organizing
American industry as they please to organize it. I know, and every man in
his heart knows, that the only way to enrich America is to make it
possible for any man who has the brains to get into the game. I am not
jealous of the size of any business that has _grown_ to that size. I am
not jealous of any process of growth, no matter how huge the result,
provided the result was indeed obtained by the processes of wholesome
development, which are the processes of efficiency, of economy, of
intelligence, and of invention.



IX

BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE?


The doctrine that monopoly is inevitable and that the only course open to
the people of the United States is to submit to and regulate it found a
champion during the campaign of 1912 in the new party, or branch of the
Republican party, founded under the leadership of Mr. Roosevelt, with the
conspicuous aid,--I mention him with no satirical intention, but merely to
set the facts down accurately,--of Mr. George W. Perkins, organizer of the
Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust, and with the support of more than
three millions of citizens, many of them among the most patriotic,
conscientious and high-minded men and women of the land. The fact that its
acceptance of monopoly was a feature of the new party platform from which
the attention of the generous and just was diverted by the charm of a
social program of great attractiveness to all concerned for the
amelioration of the lot of those who suffer wrong and privation, and the
further fact that, even so, the platform was repudiated by the majority of
the nation, render it no less necessary to reflect on the significance of
the confession made for the first time by any party in the country's
history. It may be useful, in order to the relief of the minds of many
from an error of no small magnitude, to consider now, the heat of a
presidential contest being past, exactly what it was that Mr. Roosevelt
proposed.

Mr. Roosevelt attached to his platform some very splendid suggestions as
to noble enterprises which we ought to undertake for the uplift of the
human race; but when I hear an ambitious platform put forth, I am very
much more interested in the dynamics of it than in the rhetoric of it. I
have a very practical mind, and I want to know who are going to do those
things and how they are going to be done. If you have read the trust plank
in that platform as often as I have read it, you have found it very long,
but very tolerant. It did not anywhere condemn monopoly, except in words;
its essential meaning was that the trusts have been bad and must be made
to be good. You know that Mr. Roosevelt long ago classified trusts for us
as good and bad, and he said that he was afraid only of the bad ones. Now
he does not desire that there should be any more bad ones, but proposes
that they should all be made good by discipline, directly applied by a
commission of executive appointment. All he explicitly complains of is
lack of publicity and lack of fairness; not the exercise of power, for
throughout that plank the power of the great corporations is accepted as
the inevitable consequence of the modern organization of industry. All
that it is proposed to do is to take them under control and regulation.
The national administration having for sixteen years been virtually under
the regulation of the trusts, it would be merely a family matter were the
parts reversed and were the other members of the family to exercise the
regulation. And the trusts, apparently, which might, in such
circumstances, comfortably continue to administer our affairs under the
mollifying influences of the federal government, would then, if you
please, be the instrumentalities by which all the humanistic, benevolent
program of the rest of that interesting platform would be carried out!

I have read and reread that plank, so as to be sure that I get it right.
All that it complains of is,--and the complaint is a just one,
surely,--that these gentlemen exercise their power in a way that is
secret. Therefore, we must have publicity. Sometimes they are arbitrary;
therefore they need regulation. Sometimes they do not consult the general
interests of the community; therefore they need to be reminded of those
general interests by an industrial commission. But at every turn it is the
trusts who are to do us good, and not we ourselves.

Again, I absolutely protest against being put into the hands of trustees.
Mr. Roosevelt's conception of government is Mr. Taft's conception, that
the Presidency of the United States is the presidency of a board of
directors. I am willing to admit that if the people of the United States
cannot get justice for themselves, then it is high time that they should
join the third party and get it from somebody else. The justice proposed
is very beautiful; it is very attractive; there were planks in that
platform which stir all the sympathies of the heart; they proposed things
that we all want to do; but the question is, Who is going to do them?
Through whose instrumentality? Are Americans ready to ask the trusts to
give us in pity what we ought, in justice, to take?

The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has
come to stay. Mind you, these artificially built up things, these things
that can't maintain themselves in the market without monopoly, have come
to stay, and the only thing that the government can do, the only thing
that the third party proposes should be done, is to set up a commission to
regulate them. It accepts them. It says: "We will not undertake, it were
futile to undertake, to prevent monopoly, but we will go into an
arrangement by which we will make these monopolies kind to you. We will
guarantee that they shall be pitiful. We will guarantee that they shall
pay the right wages. We will guarantee that they shall do everything kind
and public-spirited, which they have never heretofore shown the least
inclination to do."

Don't you realize that that is a blind alley? You can't find your way to
liberty that way. You can't find your way to social reform through the
forces that have made social reform necessary.

The fundamental part of such a program is that the trusts shall be
recognized as a permanent part of our economic order, and that the
government shall try to make trusts the ministers, the instruments,
through which the life of this country shall be justly and happily
developed on its industrial side. Now, everything that touches our lives
sooner or later goes back to the industries which sustain our lives. I
have often reflected that there is a very human order in the petitions in
our Lord's prayer. For we pray first of all, "Give us this day our daily
bread," knowing that it is useless to pray for spiritual graces on an
empty stomach, and that the amount of wages we get, the kind of clothes we
wear, the kind of food we can afford to buy, is fundamental to everything
else.

Those who administer our physical life, therefore, administer our
spiritual life; and if we are going to carry out the fine purpose of that
great chorus which supporters of the third party sang almost with
religious fervor, then we have got to find out through whom these purposes
of humanity are going to be realized. It is a mere enterprise, so far as
that part of it is concerned, of making the monopolies philanthropic.

I do not want to live under a philanthropy. I do not want to be taken care
of by the government, either directly, or by any instruments through which
the government is acting. I want only to have right and justice prevail,
so far as I am concerned. Give me right and justice and I will undertake
to take care of myself. If you enthrone the trusts as the means of the
development of this country under the supervision of the government, then
I shall pray the old Spanish proverb, "God save me from my friends, and
I'll take care of my enemies." Because I want to be saved from these
friends. Observe that I say these friends, for I am ready to admit that a
great many men who believe that the development of industry in this
country through monopolies is inevitable intend to be the friends of the
people. Though they profess to be my friends, they are undertaking a way
of friendship which renders it impossible that they should do me the
fundamental service that I demand--namely, that I should be free and
should have the same opportunities that everybody else has.

For I understand it to be the fundamental proposition of American liberty
that we do not desire special privilege, because we know special privilege
will never comprehend the general welfare. This is the fundamental,
spiritual difference between adherents of the party now about to take
charge of the government and those who have been in charge of it in recent
years. They are so indoctrinated with the idea that only the big business
interests of this country understand the United States and can make it
prosperous that they cannot divorce their thoughts from that obsession.
They have put the government into the hands of trustees, and Mr. Taft and
Mr. Roosevelt were the rival candidates to preside over the board of
trustees. They were candidates to serve the people, no doubt, to the best
of their ability, but it was not their idea to serve them directly; they
proposed to serve them indirectly through the enormous forces already set
up, which are so great that there is almost an open question whether the
government of the United States with the people back of it is strong
enough to overcome and rule them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Shall we try to get the grip of monopoly away from our lives, or shall we
not? Shall we withhold our hand and say monopoly is inevitable, that all
that we can do is to regulate it? Shall we say that all that we can do is
to put government in competition with monopoly and try its strength
against it? Shall we admit that the creature of our own hands is stronger
than we are? We have been dreading all along the time when the combined
power of high finance would be greater than the power of the government.
Have we come to a time when the President of the United States or any man
who wishes to be the President must doff his cap in the presence of this
high finance, and say, "You are our inevitable master, but we will see how
we can make the best of it?"

We are at the parting of the ways. We have, not one or two or three, but
many, established and formidable monopolies in the United States. We have,
not one or two, but many, fields of endeavor into which it is difficult,
if not impossible, for the independent man to enter. We have restricted
credit, we have restricted opportunity, we have controlled development,
and we have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely
controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world--no longer a
government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the
vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of
small groups of dominant men.

If the government is to tell big business men how to run their business,
then don't you see that big business men have to get closer to the
government even than they are now? Don't you see that they must capture
the government, in order not to be restrained too much by it? Must capture
the government? They have already captured it. Are you going to invite
those inside to stay inside? They don't have to get there. They are there.
Are you going to own your own premises, or are you not? That is your
choice. Are you going to say: "You didn't get into the house the right
way, but you are in there, God bless you; we will stand out here in the
cold and you can hand us out something once in a while?"

At the least, under the plan I am opposing, there will be an avowed
partnership between the government and the trusts. I take it that the firm
will be ostensibly controlled by the senior member. For I take it that the
government of the United States is at least the senior member, though the
younger member has all along been running the business. But when all the
momentum, when all the energy, when a great deal of the genius, as so
often happens in partnerships the world over, is with the junior partner,
I don't think that the superintendence of the senior partner is going to
amount to very much. And I don't believe that benevolence can be read into
the hearts of the trusts by the superintendence and suggestions of the
federal government; because the government has never within my
recollection had its suggestions accepted by the trusts. On the contrary,
the suggestions of the trusts have been accepted by the government.

There is no hope to be seen for the people of the United States until the
partnership is dissolved. And the business of the party now entrusted with
power is going to be to dissolve it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Those who supported the third party supported, I believe, a program
perfectly agreeable to the monopolies. How those who have been fighting
monopoly through all their career can reconcile the continuation of the
battle under the banner of the very men they have been fighting, I cannot
imagine. I challenge the program in its fundamentals as not a progressive
program at all. Why did Mr. Gary suggest this very method when he was at
the head of the Steel Trust? Why is this very method commended here,
there, and everywhere by the men who are interested in the maintenance of
the present economic system of the United States? Why do the men who do
not wish to be disturbed urge the adoption of this program? The rest of
the program is very handsome; there is beating in it a great pulse of
sympathy for the human race. But I do not want the sympathy of the trusts
for the human race. I do not want their condescending assistance.

And I warn every progressive Republican that by lending his assistance to
this program he is playing false to the very cause in which he had
enlisted. That cause was a battle against monopoly, against control,
against the concentration of power in our economic development, against
all those things that interfere with absolutely free enterprise. I believe
that some day these gentlemen will wake up and realize that they have
misplaced their trust, not in an individual, it may be, but in a program
which is fatal to the things we hold dearest.

If there is any meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this: that
the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic
organization of our industrial life. That is the thing which certain
Republicans became "insurgents" in order to throw off. And yet some of
them allowed themselves to be so misled as to go into the camp of the
third party in order to remove what the third party proposed to legalize.
My point is that this is a method conceived from the point of view of the
very men who are to be controlled, and that this is just the wrong point
of view from which to conceive it.

I said not long ago that Mr. Roosevelt was promoting a plan for the
control of monopoly which was supported by the United States Steel
Corporation. Mr. Roosevelt denied that he was being supported by more than
one member of that corporation. He was thinking of money. I was thinking
of ideas. I did not say that he was getting money from these gentlemen; it
was a matter of indifference to me where he got his money; but it was a
matter of a great deal of difference to me where he got his ideas. He got
his idea with regard to the regulation of monopoly from the gentlemen who
form the United States Steel Corporation. I am perfectly ready to admit
that the gentlemen who control the United States Steel Corporation have a
perfect right to entertain their own ideas about this and to urge them
upon the people of the United States; but I want to say that their ideas
are not my ideas; and I am perfectly certain that they would not promote
any idea which interfered with their monopoly. Inasmuch, therefore, as I
hope and intend to interfere with monopoly just as much as possible, I
cannot subscribe to arrangements by which they know that it will not be
disturbed.

The Roosevelt plan is that there shall be an industrial commission charged
with the supervision of the great monopolistic combinations which have
been formed under the protection of the tariff, and that the government of
the United States shall see to it that these gentlemen who have conquered
labor shall be kind to labor. I find, then, the proposition to be this:
That there shall be two masters, the great corporation, and over it the
government of the United States; and I ask who is going to be master of
the government of the United States? It has a master now,--those who in
combination control these monopolies. And if the government controlled by
the monopolies in its turn controls the monopolies, the partnership is
finally consummated.

I don't care how benevolent the master is going to be, I will not live
under a master. That is not what America was created for. America was
created in order that every man should have the same chance as every other
man to exercise mastery over his own fortunes. What I want to do is
analogous to what the authorities of the city of Glasgow did with tenement
houses. I want to light and patrol the corridors of these great
organizations in order to see that nobody who tries to traverse them is
waylaid and maltreated. If you will but hold off the adversaries, if you
will but see to it that the weak are protected, I will venture a wager
with you that there are some men in the United States, now weak,
economically weak, who have brains enough to compete with these gentlemen
and who will presently come into the market and put these gentlemen on
their mettle. And the minute they come into the market there will be a
bigger market for labor and a different wage scale for labor.

Because it is susceptible of convincing proof that the high-paid labor of
America,--where it is high paid,--is cheaper than the low-paid labor of
the continent of Europe. Do you know that about ninety per cent. of those
who are employed in labor in this country are not employed in the
"protected" industries, and that their wages are almost without exception
higher than the wages of those who are employed in the "protected"
industries? There is no corner on carpenters, there is no corner on
bricklayers, there is no corner on scores of individual classes of skilled
laborers; but there is a corner on the poolers in the furnaces, there is a
corner on the men who dive down into the mines; they are in the grip of a
controlling power which determines the market rates of wages in the United
States. Only where labor is free is labor highly paid in America.

When I am fighting monopolistic control, therefore, I am fighting for the
liberty of every man in America, and I am fighting for the liberty of
American industry.

It is significant that the spokesman for the plan of adopting monopoly
declares his devoted adherence to the principle of "protection." Only
those duties which are manifestly too high even to serve the interests of
those who are directly "protected" ought in his view to be lowered. He
declares that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of
money is taken out of the pocket of the general taxpayer and put into the
pocket of particular classes of "protected" manufacturers, but that his
concern is that so little of this money gets into the pocket of the
laboring man and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the
employers. I have searched his program very thoroughly for an indication
of what he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger proportion
of this "prize" money gets into the pay envelope, and have found none. Mr.
Roosevelt, in one of his speeches, proposed that manufacturers who did not
share their profits liberally enough with their workmen should be
penalized by a sharp cut in the "protection" afforded them; but the
platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing.

Moreover, under the system proposed, most employers,--at any rate,
practically all of the most powerful of them,--would be, to all intents
and purposes, wards and protégés of the government which is the master of
us all; for no part of this program can be discussed intelligently without
remembering that monopoly, as handled by it, is not to be prevented, but
accepted. It is to be accepted and regulated. All attempt to resist it is
to be given up. It is to be accepted as inevitable. The government is to
set up a commission whose duty it will be, not to check or defeat it, but
merely to regulate it under rules which it is itself to frame and develop.
So that the chief employers will have this tremendous authority behind
them: what they do, they will have the license of the federal government
to do.

And it is worth the while of the workingmen of the country to recall what
the attitude toward organized labor has been of these masters of
consolidated industries whom it is proposed that the federal government
should take under its patronage as well as under its control. They have
been the stoutest and most successful opponents of organized labor, and
they have tried to undermine it in a great many ways. Some of the ways
they have adopted have worn the guise of philanthropy and good-will, and
have no doubt been used, for all I know, in perfect good faith. Here and
there they have set up systems of profit sharing, of compensation for
injuries, and of bonuses, and even pensions; but every one of these plans
has merely bound their workingmen more tightly to themselves. Rights under
these various arrangements are not legal rights. They are merely
privileges which employees enjoy only so long as they remain in the
employment and observe the rules of the great industries for which they
work. If they refuse to be weaned away from their independence they
cannot continue to enjoy the benefits extended to them.

       *       *       *       *       *

When you have thought the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that
the program of the new party legalizes monopolies and systematically
subordinates workingmen to them and to plans made by the government both
with regard to employment and with regard to wages. Take the thing as a
whole, and it looks strangely like economic mastery over the very lives
and fortunes of those who do the daily work of the nation; and all this
under the overwhelming power and sovereignty of the national government.
What most of us are fighting for is to break up this very partnership
between big business and the government. We call upon all intelligent men
to bear witness that if this plan were consummated, the great employers
and capitalists of the country would be under a more overpowering
temptation than ever to take control of the government and keep it
subservient to their purpose.

What a prize it would be to capture! How unassailable would be the
majesty and the tyranny of monopoly if it could thus get sanction of law
and the authority of government! By what means, except open revolt, could
we ever break the crust of our life again and become free men, breathing
an air of our own, living lives that we wrought out for ourselves?

You cannot use monopoly in order to serve a free people. You cannot use
great combinations of capital to be pitiful and righteous when the
consciences of great bodies of men are enlisted, not in the promotion of
special privilege, but in the realization of human rights. When I read
those beautiful portions of the program of the third party devoted to the
uplift of mankind and see noble men and women attaching themselves to that
party in the hope that regulated monopoly may realize these dreams of
humanity, I wonder whether they have really studied the instruments
through which they are going to do these things. The man who is leading
the third party has not changed his point of view since he was President
of the United States. I am not asking him to change it. I am not saying
that he has not a perfect right to retain it. But I do say that it is not
surprising that a man who had the point of view with regard to the
government of this country which he had when he was President was not
chosen as President again, and allowed to patent the present processes of
industry and personally direct them how to treat the people of the United
States.

There has been a history of the human race, you know, and a history of
government; it is recorded; and the kind of thing proposed has been tried
again and again and has always led to the same result. History is strewn
all along its course with the wrecks of governments that tried to be
humane, tried to carry out humane programs through the instrumentality of
those who controlled the material fortunes of the rest of their
fellow-citizens.

I do not trust any promises of a change of temper on the part of monopoly.
Monopoly never was conceived in the temper of tolerance. Monopoly never
was conceived with the purpose of general development. It was conceived
with the purpose of special advantage. Has monopoly been very benevolent
to its employees? Have the trusts had a soft heart for the working people
of America? Have you found trusts that cared whether women were sapped of
their vitality or not? Have you found trusts who are very scrupulous about
using children in their tender years? Have you found trusts that were keen
to protect the lungs and the health and the freedom of their employees?
Have you found trusts that thought as much of their men as they did of
their machinery? Then who is going to convert these men into the chief
instruments of justice and benevolence?

If you will point me to the least promise of disinterestedness on the part
of the masters of our lives, then I will conceive you some ray of hope;
but only upon this hypothesis, only upon this conjecture: that the history
of the world is going to be reversed, and that the men who have the power
to oppress us will be kind to us, and will promote our interests, whether
our interests jump with theirs or not.

After you have made the partnership between monopoly and your government
permanent, then I invite all the philanthropists in the United States to
come and sit on the stage and go through the motions of finding out how
they are going to get philanthropy out of their masters.

I do not want to see the special interests of the United States take care
of the workingmen, women, and children. I want to see justice,
righteousness, fairness and humanity displayed in all the laws of the
United States, and I do not want any power to intervene between the people
and their government. Justice is what we want, not patronage and
condescension and pitiful helpfulness. The trusts are our masters now, but
I for one do not care to live in a country called free even under kind
masters. I prefer to live under no masters at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

I agree that as a nation we are now about to undertake what may be
regarded as the most difficult part of our governmental enterprises. We
have gone along so far without very much assistance from our government.
We have felt, and felt more and more in recent months, that the American
people were at a certain disadvantage as compared with the people of other
countries, because of what the governments of other countries were doing
for them and our government omitting to do for us.

It is perfectly clear to every man who has any vision of the immediate
future, who can forecast any part of it from the indications of the
present, that we are just upon the threshold of a time when the systematic
life of this country will be sustained, or at least supplemented, at every
point by governmental activity. And we have now to determine what kind of
governmental activity it shall be; whether, in the first place, it shall
be direct from the government itself, or whether it shall be indirect,
through instrumentalities which have already constituted themselves and
which stand ready to supersede the government.

I believe that the time has come when the governments of this country,
both state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely
and carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of
life. It has been free and easy with us so far; it has been go as you
please; it has been every man look out for himself; and we have continued
to assume, up to this year when every man is dealing, not with another
man, in most cases, but with a body of men whom he has not seen, that the
relationships of property are the same that they always were. We have
great tasks before us, and we must enter on them as befits men charged
with the responsibility of shaping a new era.

We have a great program of governmental assistance ahead of us in the
co-operative life of the nation; but we dare not enter upon that program
until we have freed the government. That is the point. Benevolence never
developed a man or a nation. We do not want a benevolent government. We
want a free and a just government. Every one of the great schemes of
social uplift which are now so much debated by noble people amongst us is
based, when rightly conceived, upon justice, not upon benevolence. It is
based upon the right of men to breathe pure air, to live; upon the right
of women to bear children, and not to be overburdened so that disease and
breakdown will come upon them; upon the right of children to thrive and
grow up and be strong; upon all these fundamental things which appeal,
indeed, to our hearts, but which our minds perceive to be part of the
fundamental justice of life.

Politics differs from philanthropy in this: that in philanthropy we
sometimes do things through pity merely, while in politics we act always,
if we are righteous men, on grounds of justice and large expediency for
men in the mass. Sometimes in our pitiful sympathy with our fellow-men we
must do things that are more than just. We must forgive men. We must help
men who have gone wrong. We must sometimes help men who have gone
criminally wrong. But the law does not forgive. It is its duty to equalize
conditions, to make the path of right the path of safety and advantage, to
see that every man has a fair chance to live and to serve himself, to see
that injustice and wrong are not wrought upon any.

We ought not to permit passion to enter into our thoughts or our hearts
in this great matter; we ought not to allow ourselves to be governed by
resentment or any kind of evil feeling, but we ought, nevertheless, to
realize the seriousness of our situation. That seriousness consists,
singularly enough, not in the malevolence of the men who preside over our
industrial life, but in their genius and in their honest thinking. These
men believe that the prosperity of the United States is not safe unless it
is in their keeping. If they were dishonest, we might put them out of
business by law; since most of them are honest, we can put them out of
business only by making it impossible for them to realize their genuine
convictions. I am not afraid of a knave. I am not afraid of a rascal. I am
afraid of a strong man who is wrong, and whose wrong thinking can be
impressed upon other persons by his own force of character and force of
speech. If God had only arranged it that all the men who are wrong were
rascals, we could put them out of business very easily, because they would
give themselves away sooner or later; but God has made our task heavier
than that,--he has made some good men who think wrong. We cannot fight
them because they are bad, but because they are wrong. We must overcome
them by a better force, the genial, the splendid, the permanent force of a
better reason.

The reason that America was set up was that she might be different from
all the nations of the world in this: that the strong could not put the
weak to the wall, that the strong could not prevent the weak from entering
the race. America stands for opportunity. America stands for a free field
and no favor. America stands for a government responsive to the interests
of all. And until America recovers those ideals in practice, she will not
have the right to hold her head high again amidst the nations as she used
to hold it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is like coming out of a stifling cellar into the open where we can
breathe again and see the free spaces of the heavens to turn away from
such a doleful program of submission and dependence toward the other plan,
the confident purpose for which the people have given their mandate. Our
purpose is the restoration of freedom. We purpose to prevent private
monopoly by law, to see to it that the methods by which monopolies have
been built up are legally made impossible. We design that the limitations
on private enterprise shall be removed, so that the next generation of
youngsters, as they come along, will not have to become protégés of
benevolent trusts, but will be free to go about making their own lives
what they will; so that we shall taste again the full cup, not of charity,
but of liberty,--the only wine that ever refreshed and renewed the spirit
of a people.



X

THE WAY TO RESUME IS TO RESUME


One of the wonderful things about America, to my mind, is this: that for
more than a generation it has allowed itself to be governed by persons who
were not invited to govern it. A singular thing about the people of the
United States is their almost infinite patience, their willingness to
stand quietly by and see things done which they have voted against and do
not want done, and yet never lay the hand of disorder upon any arrangement
of government.

There is hardly a part of the United States where men are not aware that
secret private purposes and interests have been running the government.
They have been running it through the agency of those interesting persons
whom we call political "bosses." A boss is not so much a politician as the
business agent in politics of the special interests. The boss is not a
partisan; he is quite above politics! He has an understanding with the
boss of the other party, so that, whether it is heads or tails, we lose.
The two receive contributions from the same sources, and they spend those
contributions for the same purposes.

Bosses are men who have worked their way by secret methods to the place of
power they occupy; men who were never elected to anything; men who were
not asked by the people to conduct their government, and who are very much
more powerful than if you had asked them, so long as you leave them where
they are, behind closed doors, in secret conference. They are not
politicians; they have no policies,--except concealed policies of private
aggrandizement. A boss isn't a leader of a party. Parties do not meet in
back rooms; parties do not make arrangements which do not get into the
newspapers. Parties, if you reckon them by voting strength, are great
masses of men who, because they can't vote any other ticket, vote the
ticket that was prepared for them by the aforesaid arrangement in the
aforesaid back room in accordance with the aforesaid understanding. A boss
is the manipulator of a "machine." A "machine" is that part of a political
organization which has been taken out of the hands of the rank and file of
the party, captured by half a dozen men. It is the part that has ceased to
be political and has become an agency for the purposes of unscrupulous
business.

Do not lay up the sins of this kind of business to political
organizations. Organization is legitimate, is necessary, is even
distinguished, when it lends itself to the carrying out of great causes.
Only the man who uses organization to promote private purposes is a boss.
Always distinguish between a political leader and a boss. I honor the man
who makes the organization of a great party strong and thorough, in order
to use it for public service. But he is not a boss. A boss is a man who
uses this splendid, open force for secret purposes.

One of the worst features of the boss system is this fact, that it works
secretly. I would a great deal rather live under a king whom I should at
least know, than under a boss whom I don't know. A boss is a much more
formidable master than a king, because a king is an obvious master,
whereas the hands of the boss are always where you least expect them to
be.

When I was in Oregon, not many months ago, I had some very interesting
conversations with Mr. U'Ren, who is the father of what is called the
Oregon System, a system by which he has put bosses out of business. He is
a member of a group of public-spirited men who, whenever they cannot get
what they want through the legislature, draw up a bill and submit it to
the people, by means of the initiative, and generally get what they want.
The day I arrived in Portland, a morning paper happened to say, very
ironically, that there were two legislatures in Oregon, one at Salem, the
state capital, and the other going around under the hat of Mr. U'Ren. I
could not resist the temptation of saying, when I spoke that evening,
that, while I was the last man to suggest that power should be
concentrated in any single individual or group of individuals, I would,
nevertheless, after my experience in New Jersey, rather have a legislature
that went around under the hat of somebody in particular whom I knew I
could find than a legislature that went around under God knows who's hat;
because then you could at least put your finger on your governing force;
you would know where to find it.

Why do we continue to permit these things? Isn't it about time that we
grew up and took charge of our own affairs? I am tired of being under age
in politics. I don't want to be associated with anybody except those who
are politically over twenty-one. I don't wish to sit down and let any man
take care of me without my having at least a voice in it; and if he
doesn't listen to my advice, I am going to make it as unpleasant for him
as I can. Not because my advice is necessarily good, but because no
government is good in which every man doesn't insist upon his advice being
heard, at least, whether it is heeded or not.

Some persons have said that representative government has proved too
indirect and clumsy an instrument, and has broken down as a means of
popular control. Others, looking a little deeper, have said that it was
not representative government that had broken down, but the effort to get
it. They have pointed out that, with our present methods of machine
nomination and our present methods of election, which give us nothing more
than a choice between one set of machine nominees and another, we do not
get representative government at all,--at least not government
representative of the people, but merely government representative of
political managers who serve their own interests and the interests of
those with whom they find it profitable to establish partnerships.

Obviously, this is something that goes to the root of the whole matter.
Back of all reform lies the method of getting it. Back of the question,
What do you want, lies the question,--the fundamental question of all
government,--How are you going to get it? How are you going to get public
servants who will obtain it for you? How are you going to get genuine
representatives who will serve your interests, and not their own or the
interests of some special group or body of your fellow-citizens whose
power is of the few and not of the many? These are the queries which have
drawn the attention of the whole country to the subject of the direct
primary, the direct choice of their officials by the people, without the
intervention of the nominating machine; to the subject of the direct
election of United States Senators; and to the question of the initiative,
referendum, and recall.

       *       *       *       *       *

The critical moment in the choosing of officials is that of their
nomination more often than that of their election. When two party
organizations, nominally opposing each other but actually working in
perfect understanding and co-operation, see to it that both tickets have
the same kind of men on them, it is Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so far as
the people are concerned; the political managers have us coming and going.
We may delude ourselves with the pleasing belief that we are electing our
own officials, but of course the fact is we are merely making an
indifferent and ineffectual choice between two sets of men named by
interests which are not ours.

So that what we establish the direct primary for is this: to break up the
inside and selfish determination of the question who shall be elected to
conduct the government and make the laws of our commonwealths and our
nation. Everywhere the impression is growing stronger that there can be no
means of dominating those who have dominated us except by taking this
process of the original selection of nominees into our own hands. Does
that upset any ancient foundations? Is it not the most natural and simple
thing in the world? You say that it does not always work; that the people
are too busy or too lazy to bother about voting at primary elections?
True, sometimes the people of a state or a community do let a direct
primary go by without asserting their authority as against the bosses. The
electorate of the United States is occasionally like the god Baal: it is
sometimes on a journey or it is sometimes asleep; but when it does awake,
it does not resemble the god Baal in the slightest degree. It is a great
self-possessed power which effectually takes control of its own affairs. I
am willing to wait. I am among those who believe so firmly in the
essential doctrines of democracy that I am willing to wait on the
convenience of this great sovereign, provided I know that he has got the
instrument to dominate whenever he chooses to grasp it.

Then there is another thing that the conservative people are concerned
about: the direct election of United States Senators. I have seen some
thoughtful men discuss that with a sort of shiver, as if to disturb the
original constitution of the United States Senate was to do something
touched with impiety, touched with irreverence for the Constitution
itself. But the first thing necessary to reverence for the United States
Senate is respect for United States Senators. I am not one of those who
condemn the United States Senate as a body; for, no matter what has
happened there, no matter how questionable the practices or how corrupt
the influences which have filled some of the seats in that high body, it
must in fairness be said that the majority in it has all the years through
been untouched by stain, and that there has always been there a sufficient
number of men of integrity to vindicate the self-respect and the
hopefulness of America with regard to her institutions.

But you need not be told, and it would be painful to repeat to you, how
seats have been bought in the Senate; and you know that a little group of
Senators holding the balance of power has again and again been able to
defeat programs of reform upon which the whole country had set its heart;
and that whenever you analyzed the power that was behind those little
groups you have found that it was not the power of public opinion, but
some private influence, hardly to be discerned by superficial scrutiny,
that had put those men there to do that thing.

Now, returning to the original principles upon which we profess to stand,
have the people of the United States not the right to see to it that every
seat in the Senate represents the unbought United States of America? Does
the direct election of Senators touch anything except the private control
of seats in the Senate? We remember another thing: that we have not been
without our suspicions concerning some of the legislatures which elect
Senators. Some of the suspicions which we entertained in New Jersey about
them turned out to be founded upon very solid facts indeed. Until two
years ago New Jersey had not in half a generation been represented in the
United States Senate by the men who would have been chosen if the process
of selecting them had been free and based upon the popular will.

We are not to deceive ourselves by putting our heads into the sand and
saying, "Everything is all right." Mr. Gladstone declared that the
American Constitution was the most perfect instrument ever devised by the
brain of man. We have been praised all over the world for our singular
genius for setting up successful institutions, but a very thoughtful
Englishman, and a very witty one, said a very instructive thing about
that: he said that to show that the American Constitution had worked well
was no proof that it is an excellent constitution, because Americans could
run any constitution,--a compliment which we laid like sweet unction to
our soul; and yet a criticism which ought to set us thinking.

While it is true that when American forces are awake they can conduct
American processes without serious departure from the ideals of the
Constitution, it is nevertheless true that we have had many shameful
instances of practices which we can absolutely remove by the direct
election of Senators by the people themselves. And therefore I, for one,
will not allow any man who knows his history to say to me that I am acting
inconsistently with either the spirit or the essential form of the
American government in advocating the direct election of United States
Senators.

Take another matter. Take the matter of the initiative and referendum,
and the recall. There are communities, there are states in the Union, in
which I am quite ready to admit that it is perhaps premature, that perhaps
it will never be necessary, to discuss these measures. But I want to call
your attention to the fact that they have been adopted to the general
satisfaction in a number of states where the electorate had become
convinced that they did not have representative government.

Why do you suppose that in the United States, the place in all the world
where the people were invited to control their own government, we should
set up such an agitation as that for the initiative and referendum and the
recall. When did this thing begin? I have been receiving circulars and
documents from little societies of men all over the United States with
regard to these matters, for the last twenty-five years. But the circulars
for a long time kindled no fire. Men felt that they had representative
government and they were content. But about ten or fifteen years ago the
fire began to burn,--and it has been sweeping over wider and wider areas
of the country, because of the growing consciousness that something
intervenes between the people and the government, and that there must be
some arm direct enough and strong enough to thrust aside the something
that comes in the way.

I believe that we are upon the eve of recovering some of the most
important prerogatives of a free people, and that the initiative and
referendum are playing a great part in that recovery. I met a man the
other day who thought that the referendum was some kind of an animal,
because it had a Latin name; and there are still people in this country
who have to have it explained to them. But most of us know and are deeply
interested. Why? Because we have felt that in too many instances our
government did not represent us, and we have said: "We have got to have a
key to the door of our own house. The initiative and referendum and the
recall afford such a key to our own premises. If the people inside the
house will run the place as we want it run, they may stay inside and we
will keep the latchkeys in our pockets. If they do not, we shall have to
re-enter upon possession."

Let no man be deceived by the cry that somebody is proposing to substitute
direct legislation by the people, or the direct reference of laws passed
in the legislature, to the vote of the people, for representative
government. The advocates of these reforms have always declared, and
declared in unmistakable terms, that they were intending to recover
representative government, not supersede it; that the initiative and
referendum would find no use in places where legislatures were really
representative of the people whom they were elected to serve. The
initiative is a means of seeing to it that measures which the people want
shall be passed,--when legislatures defy or ignore public opinion. The
referendum is a means of seeing to it that the unrepresentative measures
which they do not want shall not be placed upon the statute book.

When you come to the recall, the principle is that if an administrative
officer,--for we will begin with the administrative officer,--is corrupt
or so unwise as to be doing things that are likely to lead to all sorts of
mischief, it will be possible by a deliberate process prescribed by the
law to get rid of that officer before the end of his term. You must admit
that it is a little inconvenient sometimes to have what has been called an
astronomical system of government, in which you can't change anything
until there has been a certain number of revolutions of the seasons. In
many of our oldest states the ordinary administrative term is a single
year. The people of those states have not been willing to trust an
official out of their sight more than twelve months. Elections there are a
sort of continuous performance, based on the idea of the constant touch of
the hand of the people on their own affairs. That is exactly the principle
of the recall. I don't see how any man grounded in the traditions of
American affairs can find any valid objection to the recall of
administrative officers. The meaning of the recall is merely this,--not
that we should have unstable government, not that officials should not
know how long their power might last,--but that we might have government
exercised by officials who know whence their power came and that if they
yield to private influences they will presently be displaced by public
influences.

You will of course understand that, both in the case of the initiative and
referendum and in that of the recall, the very existence of these powers,
the very possibilities which they imply, are half,--indeed, much more than
half,--the battle. They rarely need to be actually exercised. The fact
that the people may initiate keeps the members of the legislature awake to
the necessity of initiating themselves; the fact that the people have the
right to demand the submission of a legislative measure to popular vote
renders the members of the legislature wary of bills that would not pass
the people; the very possibility of being recalled puts the official on
his best behavior.

It is another matter when we come to the judiciary. I myself have never
been in favor of the recall of judges. Not because some judges have not
deserved to be recalled. That isn't the point. The point is that the
recall of judges is treating the symptom instead of the disease. The
disease lies deeper, and sometimes it is very virulent and very dangerous.
There have been courts in the United States which were controlled by
private interests. There have been supreme courts in our states before
which plain men could not get justice. There have been corrupt judges;
there have been controlled judges; there have been judges who acted as
other men's servants and not as the servants of the public. Ah, there are
some shameful chapters in the story! The judicial process is the ultimate
safeguard of the things that we must hold stable in this country. But
suppose that that safeguard is corrupted; suppose that it does not guard
my interests and yours, but guards merely the interests of a very small
group of individuals; and, whenever your interest clashes with theirs,
yours will have to give way, though you represent ninety per cent. of the
citizens, and they only ten per cent. Then where is your safeguard?

The just thought of the people must control the judiciary, as it controls
every other instrument of government. But there are ways and ways of
controlling it. If,--mark you, I say _if_,--at one time the Southern
Pacific Railroad owned the supreme court of the State of California, would
you remedy that situation by recalling the judges of the court? What good
would that do, so long as the Southern Pacific Railroad could substitute
others for them? You would not be cutting deep enough. Where you want to
go is to the process by which those judges were selected. And when you get
there, you will reach the moral of the whole of this discussion, because
the moral of it all is that the people of the United States have
suspected, until their suspicions have been justified by all sorts of
substantial and unanswerable evidence, that, in place after place, at
turning-points in the history of this country, we have been controlled by
private understandings and not by the public interest; and that influences
which were improper, if not corrupt, have determined everything from the
making of laws to the administration of justice. The disease lies in the
region where these men get their nominations; and if you can recover for
the people the _selecting_ of judges, you will not have to trouble about
their recall. Selection is of more radical consequence than election.

       *       *       *       *       *

I am aware that those who advocate these measures which we have been
discussing are denounced as dangerous radicals. I am particularly
interested to observe that the men who cry out most loudly against what
they call radicalism are the men who find that their private game in
politics is being spoiled. Who are the arch-conservatives nowadays? Who
are the men who utter the most fervid praise of the Constitution of the
United States and the constitutions of the states? They are the gentlemen
who used to get behind those documents to play hide-and-seek with the
people whom they pretended to serve. They are the men who entrenched
themselves in the laws which they misinterpreted and misused. If now they
are afraid that "radicalism" will sweep them away,--and I believe it
will,--they have only themselves to thank.

Yet how absurd is the charge that we who are demanding that our government
be made representative of the people and responsive to their demands,--how
fictitious and hypocritical is the charge that we are attacking the
fundamental principles of republican institutions! These very men who
hysterically profess their alarm would declaim loudly enough on the Fourth
of July of the Declaration of Independence; they would go on and talk of
those splendid utterances in our earliest state constitutions, which have
been copied in all our later ones, taken from the Petition of Rights, or
the Declaration of Rights, those great fundamental documents of the
struggle for liberty in England; and yet in these very documents we read
such uncompromising statements as this: that, when at any time the people
of a commonwealth find that their government is not suitable to the
circumstances of their lives or the promotion of their liberties, it is
their privilege to alter it at their pleasure, and alter it in any
degree. That is the foundation, that is the very central doctrine, that is
the ground principle, of American institutions.

I want you to read a passage from the Virginia Bill of Rights, that
immortal document which has been a model for declarations of liberty
throughout the rest of the continent:

    That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the
    people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all
    times amenable to them.

    That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit,
    protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all
    the various modes and forms of government, that is the best which is
    capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and
    is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration;
    and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to
    these purposes, a majority of the community bath an indubitable,
    inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it,
    in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

I have heard that read a score of times on the Fourth of July, but I never
heard it read where actual measures were being debated. No man who
understands the principles upon which this Republic was founded has the
slightest dread of the gentle,--though very effective,--measures by which
the people are again resuming control of their own affairs.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nor need any lover of liberty be anxious concerning the outcome of the
struggle upon which we are now embarked. The victory is certain, and the
battle is not going to be an especially sanguinary one. It is hardly going
to be worth the name of a battle. Let me tell the story of the
emancipation of one State,--New Jersey:

It has surprised the people of the United States to find New Jersey at the
front in enterprises of reform. I, who have lived in New Jersey the
greater part of my mature life, know that there is no state in the Union
which, so far as the hearts and intelligence of its people are concerned,
has more earnestly desired reform than has New Jersey. There are men who
have been prominent in the affairs of the State who again and again
advocated with all the earnestness that was in them the things that we
have at last been able to do. There are men in New Jersey who have spent
some of the best energies of their lives in trying to win elections in
order to get the support of the citizens of New Jersey for programs of
reform.

The people had voted for such things very often before the autumn of 1910,
but the interesting thing is that nothing had happened. They were
demanding the benefit of remedial measures such as had been passed in
every progressive state of the Union, measures which had proved not only
that they did not upset the life of the communities to which they were
applied but that they quickened every force and bettered every condition
in those communities. But the people of New Jersey could not get them, and
there had come upon them a certain pessimistic despair. I used to meet men
who shrugged their shoulders and said: "What difference does it make how
we vote? Nothing ever results from our votes." The force that is behind
the new party that has recently been formed, the so-called "Progressive
Party," is a force of discontent with the old parties of the United
States. It is the feeling that men have gone into blind alleys often
enough, and that somehow there must be found an open road through which
men may pass to some purpose.

In the year 1910 there came a day when the people of New Jersey took heart
to believe that something could be accomplished. I had no merit as a
candidate for Governor, except that I said what I really thought, and the
compliment that the people paid me was in believing that I meant what I
said. Unless they had believed in the Governor whom they then elected,
unless they had trusted him deeply and altogether, he could have done
absolutely nothing. The force of the public men of a nation lies in the
faith and the backing of the people of the country, rather than in any
gifts of their own. In proportion as you trust them, in proportion as you
back them up, in proportion as you lend them your strength, are they
strong. The things that have happened in New Jersey since 1910 have
happened because the seed was planted in this fine fertile soil of
confidence, of trust, of renewed hope.

The moment the forces in New Jersey that had resisted reform realized that
the people were backing new men who meant what they had said, they
realized that they dare not resist them. It was not the personal force of
the new officials; it was the moral strength of their backing that
accomplished the extraordinary result.

And what was accomplished? Mere justice to classes that had not been
treated justly before.

Every schoolboy in the State of New Jersey, if he cared to look into the
matter, could comprehend the fact that the laws applying to laboring-men
with respect of compensation when they were hurt in their various
employments had originated at a time when society was organized very
differently from the way in which it is organized now, and that because
the law had not been changed, the courts were obliged to go blindly on
administering laws which were cruelly unsuitable to existing conditions,
so that it was practically impossible for the workingmen of New Jersey to
get justice from the courts; the legislature of the commonwealth had not
come to their assistance with the necessary legislation. Nobody seriously
debated the circumstances; everybody knew that the law was antiquated and
impossible; everybody knew that justice waited to be done. Very well,
then, why wasn't it done?

There was another thing that we wanted to do: We wanted to regulate our
public service corporations so that we could get the proper service from
them, and on reasonable terms. That had been done elsewhere, and where it
had been done it had proved just as much for the benefit of the
corporations themselves as for the benefit of the people. Of course it was
somewhat difficult to convince the corporations. It happened that one of
the men who knew the least about the subject was the president of the
Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. I have heard speeches from that
gentleman that exhibited a total lack of acquaintance with the
circumstances of our times. I have never known ignorance so complete in
its detail; and, being a man of force and ignorance, he naturally set all
his energy to resist the things that he did not comprehend.

I am not interested in questioning the motives of men in such positions. I
am only sorry that they don't know more. If they would only join the
procession they would find themselves benefited by the healthful exercise,
which, for one thing, would renew within them the capacity to learn which
I hope they possessed when they were younger. We were not trying to do
anything novel in New Jersey in regulating the Public Service Corporation;
we were simply trying to adopt there a tested measure of public justice.
We adopted it. Has anybody gone bankrupt since? Does anybody now doubt
that it was just as much for the benefit of the Public Service Corporation
as for the people of the State?

Then there was another thing that we modestly desired: We wanted fair
elections; we did not want candidates to buy themselves into office. That
seemed reasonable. So we adopted a law, unique in one particular, namely:
that if you bought an office, you didn't get it. I admit that that is
contrary to all commercial principles, but I think it is pretty good
political doctrine. It is all very well to put a man in jail for buying an
office, but it is very much better, besides putting him in jail, to show
him that if he has paid out a single dollar for that office, he does not
get it, though a huge majority voted for him. We reversed the laws of
trade; when you buy something in politics in New Jersey, you do not get
it. It seemed to us that that was the best way to discourage improper
political argument. If your money does not produce the goods, then you are
not tempted to spend your money.

We adopted a Corrupt Practices Act, the reasonable foundation of which no
man could question, and an Election Act, which every man predicted was not
going to work, but which did work,--to the emancipation of the voters of
New Jersey.

All these things are now commonplaces with us. We like the laws that we
have passed, and no man ventures to suggest any material change in them.
Why didn't we get them long ago? What hindered us? Why, because we had a
closed government; not an open government. It did not belong to us. It was
managed by little groups of men whose names we knew, but whom somehow we
didn't seem able to dislodge. When we elected men pledged to dislodge
them, they only went into partnership with them. Apparently what was
necessary was to call in an amateur who knew so little about the game that
he supposed that he was expected to do what he had promised to do.

There are gentlemen who have criticised the Governor of New Jersey because
he did not do certain things,--for instance, bring a lot of indictments.
The Governor of New Jersey does not think it necessary to defend himself;
but he would like to call attention to a very interesting thing that
happened in his State: When the people had taken over control of the
government, a curious change was wrought in the souls of a great many men;
a sudden moral awakening took place, and we simply could not find
culprits against whom to bring indictments; it was like a Sunday school,
the way they obeyed the laws.

       *       *       *       *       *

So I say, there is nothing very difficult about resuming our own
government. There is nothing to appall us when we make up our minds to set
about the task. "The way to resume is to resume," said Horace Greeley,
once, when the country was frightened at a prospect which turned out to be
not in the least frightful; it was at the moment of the resumption of
specie payments for Treasury notes. The Treasury simply resumed,--there
was not a ripple of danger or excitement when the day of resumption came
around.

It will be precisely so when the people resume control of their own
government. The men who conduct the political machines are a small
fraction of the party they pretend to represent, and the men who exercise
corrupt influences upon them are only a small fraction of the business men
of the country. What we are banded together to fight is not a party, is
not a great body of citizens; we have to fight only little coteries,
groups of men here and there, a few men, who subsist by deceiving us and
cannot subsist a moment after they cease to deceive us.

I had occasion to test the power of such a group in the State of New
Jersey, and I had the satisfaction of discovering that I had been right in
supposing that they did not possess any power at all. It looked as if they
were entrenched in a fortress; it looked as if the embrasures of the
fortress showed the muzzles of guns; but, as I told my good
fellow-citizens, all they had to do was to press a little upon it and they
would find that the fortress was a mere cardboard fabric; that it was a
piece of stage property; that just so soon as the audience got ready to
look behind the scenes they would learn that the army which had been
marching and counter-marching in such terrifying array consisted of a
single company that had gone in one wing and around and out at the other
wing, and could have thus marched in procession for twenty-four hours. You
only need about twenty-four men to do the trick. These men are impostors.
They are powerful only in proportion as we are susceptible to absurd fear
of them. Their capital is our ignorance and our credulity.

To-day we are seeing something that some of us have waited all of our
lives to see. We are witnessing a rising of the country. We are seeing a
whole people stand up and decline any longer to be imposed upon. The day
has come when men are saying to each other: "It doesn't make a
peppercorn's difference to me what party I have voted with. I am going to
pick out the men I want and the policies I want, and let the label take
care of itself. I do not find any great difference between my table of
contents and the table of contents of those who have voted with the other
party, and who, like me, are very much dissatisfied with the way in which
their party has rewarded their faithfulness. They want the same things
that I want, and I don't know of anything under God's heaven to prevent
our getting together. We want the same things, we have the same faith in
the old traditions of the American people, and we have made up our minds
that we are going to have now at last the reality instead of the shadow."

We Americans have been too long satisfied with merely going through the
motions of government. We have been having a mock game. We have been going
to the polls and saying: "This is the act of a sovereign people, but we
won't be the sovereign yet; we will postpone that; we will wait until
another time. The managers are still shifting the scenes; we are not ready
for the real thing yet."

My proposal is that we stop going through the mimic play; that we get out
and translate the ideals of American politics into action; so that every
man, when he goes to the polls on election day, will feel the thrill of
executing an actual judgment, as he takes again into his own hands the
great matters which have been too long left to men deputized by their own
choice, and seriously sets about carrying into accomplishment his own
purposes.



XI

THE EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS


In the readjustments that are about to be undertaken in this country not
one single legitimate or honest arrangement is going to be disturbed; but
every impediment to business is going to be removed, every illegitimate
kind of control is going to be destroyed. Every man who wants an
opportunity and has the energy to seize it, is going to be given a chance.
All that we are going to ask the gentlemen who now enjoy monopolistic
advantages to do is to match their brains against the brains of those who
will then compete with them. The brains, the energy, of the rest of us are
to be set free to go into the game,--that is all. There is to be a general
release of the capital, the enterprise, of millions of people, a general
opening of the doors of opportunity. With what a spring of determination,
with what a shout of jubilance, will the people rise to their
emancipation!

I am one of those who believe that we have had such restrictions upon the
prosperity of this country that we have not yet come into our own, and
that by removing those restrictions we shall set free an energy which in
our generation has not been known. It is for that reason that I feel free
to criticise with the utmost frankness these restrictions, and the means
by which they have been brought about. I do not criticise as one without
hope; in describing conditions which so hamper, impede, and imprison, I am
only describing conditions from which we are going to escape into a
contrasting age. I believe that this is a time when there should be
unqualified frankness. One of the distressing circumstances of our day is
this: I cannot tell you how many men of business, how many important men
of business, have communicated their real opinions about the situation in
the United States to me privately and confidentially. They are afraid of
somebody. They are afraid to make their real opinions known publicly;
they tell them to me behind their hand. That is very distressing. That
means that we are not masters of our own opinions, except when we vote,
and even then we are careful to vote very privately indeed.

It is alarming that this should be the case. Why should any man in free
America be afraid of any other man? Or why should any man fear
competition,--competition either with his fellow-countrymen or with
anybody else on earth?

It is part of the indictment against the protective policy of the United
States that it has weakened and not enhanced the vigor of our people.
American manufacturers who know that they can make better things than are
made elsewhere in the world, that they can sell them cheaper in foreign
markets than they are sold in these very markets of domestic manufacture,
are afraid,--afraid to venture out into the great world on their own
merits and their own skill. Think of it, a nation full of genius and yet
paralyzed by timidity! The timidity of the business men of America is to
me nothing less than amazing. They are tied to the apron strings of the
government at Washington. They go about to seek favors. They say: "For
pity's sake, don't expose us to the weather of the world; put some
homelike cover over us. Protect us. See to it that foreign men don't come
in and match their brains with ours." And, as if to enhance this
peculiarity of ours, the strongest men amongst us get the biggest favors;
the men of peculiar genius for organizing industries, the men who could
run the industries of any country, are the men who are most strongly
intrenched behind the highest rates in the schedules of the tariff. They
are so timid morally, furthermore, that they dare not stand up before the
American people, but conceal these favors in the verbiage of the tariff
schedule itself,--in "jokers." Ah! but it is a bitter joke when men who
seek favors are so afraid of the best judgment of their fellow-citizens
that they dare not avow what they take.

Happily, the general revival of conscience in this country has not been
confined to those who were consciously fighting special privilege. The
awakening of conscience has extended to those who were _enjoying_ special
privileges, and I thank God that the business men of this country are
beginning to see our economic organization in its true light, as a
deadening aristocracy of privilege from which they themselves must escape.
The small men of this country are not deluded, and not all of the big
business men of this country are deluded. Some men who have been led into
wrong practices, who have been led into the practices of monopoly, because
that seemed to be the drift and inevitable method of supremacy, are just
as ready as we are to turn about and adopt the process of freedom. For
American hearts beat in a lot of these men, just as they beat under our
jackets. They will be as glad to be free as we shall be to set them free.
And then the splendid force which has lent itself to things that hurt us
will lend itself to things that benefit us.

And we,--we who are not great captains of industry or business,--shall do
them more good than we do now, even in a material way. If you have to be
subservient, you are not even making the rich fellows as rich as they
might be, because you are not adding your originative force to the
extraordinary production of wealth in America. America is as rich, not as
Wall Street, not as the financial centres in Chicago and St. Louis and San
Francisco; it is as rich as the people that make those centres rich. And
if those people hesitate in their enterprise, cower in the face of power,
hesitate to originate designs of their own, then the very fountains which
make these places abound in wealth are dried up at the source. By setting
the little men of America free, you are not damaging the giants.

It may be that certain things will happen, for monopoly in this country is
carrying a body of water such as men ought not to be asked to carry. When
by regulated competition,--that is to say, fair competition, competition
that fights fair,--they are put upon their mettle, they will have to
economize, and they cannot economize unless they get rid of that water. I
do not know how to squeeze the water out, but they will get rid of it, if
you will put them to the necessity. They will have to get rid of it, or
those of us who don't carry tanks will outrun them in the race. Put all
the business of America upon the footing of economy and efficiency, and
then let the race be to the strongest and the swiftest.

Our program is a program of prosperity; a program of prosperity that is to
be a little more pervasive than the present prosperity,--and pervasive
prosperity is more fruitful than that which is narrow and restrictive. I
congratulate the monopolies of the United States that they are not going
to have their way, because, quite contrary to their own theory, the fact
is that the people are wiser than they are. The people of the United
States understand the United States as these gentlemen do not, and if they
will only give us leave, we will not only make them rich, but we will make
them happy. Because, then, their conscience will have less to carry. I
have lived in a state that was owned by a series of corporations. They
handed it about. It was at one time owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad;
then it was owned by the Public Service Corporation. It was owned by the
Public Service Corporation when I was admitted, and that corporation has
been resentful ever since that I interfered with its tenancy. But I really
did not see any reason why the people should give up their own residence
to so small a body of men to monopolize; and, therefore, when I asked them
for their title deeds and they couldn't produce them, and there was no
court except the court of public opinion to resort to, they moved out. Now
they eat out of our hands; and they are not losing flesh either. They are
making just as much money as they made before, only they are making it in
a more respectable way. They are making it without the constant assistance
of the legislature of the State of New Jersey. They are making it in the
normal way, by supplying the people of New Jersey with the service in the
way of transportation and gas and water that they really need. I do not
believe that there are any thoughtful officials of the Public Service
Corporation of New Jersey that now seriously regret the change that has
come about. We liberated government in my state, and it is an interesting
fact that we have not suffered one moment in prosperity.

       *       *       *       *       *

What we propose, therefore, in this program of freedom, is a program of
general advantage. Almost every monopoly that has resisted dissolution has
resisted the real interests of its own stockholders. Monopoly always
checks development, weighs down natural prosperity, pulls against natural
advance.

Take but such an everyday thing as a useful invention and the putting of
it at the service of men. You know how prolific the American mind has been
in invention; how much civilization has been advanced by the steamboat,
the cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping-machine, the typewriter,
the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, have you
had occasion to learn, that there is no hospitality for invention
nowadays? There is no encouragement for you to set your wits at work to
improve the telephone, or the camera, or some piece of machinery, or some
mechanical process; you are not invited to find a shorter and cheaper way
to make things or to perfect them, or to invent better things to take
their place. There is too much money invested in old machinery; too much
money has been spent advertising the old camera; the telephone plants, as
they are, cost too much to permit their being superseded by something
better. Wherever there is monopoly, not only is there no incentive to
improve, but, improvement being costly in that it "scraps" old machinery
and destroys the value of old products, there is a positive motive against
improvement. The instinct of monopoly is against novelty, the tendency of
monopoly is to keep in use the old thing, made in the old way; its
disposition is to "standardize" everything. Standardization may be all
very well,--but suppose everything had been standardized thirty years
ago,--we should still be writing by hand, by gas-light, we should be
without the inestimable aid of the telephone (sometimes, I admit, it is a
nuisance), without the automobile, without wireless telegraphy.
Personally, I could have managed to plod along without the aeroplane, and
I could have been happy even without moving-pictures.

Of course, I am not saying that all invention has been stopped by the
growth of trusts, but I think it is perfectly clear that invention in many
fields has been discouraged, that inventors have been prevented from
reaping the full fruits of their ingenuity and industry, and that mankind
has been deprived of many comforts and conveniences, as well as of the
opportunity of buying at lower prices.

The damper put on the inventive genius of America by the trusts operates
in half a dozen ways: The first thing discovered by the genius whose
device extends into a field controlled by a trust is that he can't get
capital to make and market his invention. If you want money to build your
plant and advertise your product and employ your agents and make a market
for it, where are you going to get it? The minute you apply for money or
credit, this proposition is put to you by the banks: "This invention will
interfere with the established processes and the market control of certain
great industries. We are already financing those industries, their
securities are in our hands; we will consult them."

It may be, as a result of that consultation, you will be informed that it
is too bad, but it will be impossible to "accommodate" you. It may be you
will receive a suggestion that if you care to make certain arrangements
with the trust, you will be permitted to manufacture. It may be you will
receive an offer to buy your patent, the offer being a poor consolation
dole. It may be that your invention, even if purchased, will never be
heard of again.

That last method of dealing with an invention, by the way, is a
particularly vicious misuse of the patent laws, which ought not to allow
property in an idea which is never intended to be realized. One of the
reforms waiting to be undertaken is a revision of our patent laws.

In any event, if the trust doesn't want you to manufacture your
invention, you will not be allowed to, unless you have money of your own
and are willing to risk it fighting the monopolistic trust with its vast
resources. I am generalizing the statement, but I could particularize it.
I could tell you instances where exactly that thing happened. By the
combination of great industries, manufactured products are not only being
standardized, but they are too often being kept at a single point of
development and efficiency. The increase of the power to produce in
proportion to the cost of production is not studied in America as it used
to be studied, because if you don't have to improve your processes in
order to excel a competitor, if you are human you aren't going to improve
your processes; and if you can prevent the competitor from coming into the
field, then you can sit at your leisure, and, behind this wall of
protection which prevents the brains of any foreigner competing with you,
you can rest at your ease for a whole generation.

Can any one who reflects on merely this attitude of the trusts toward
invention fail to understand how substantial, how actual, how great will
be the effect of the release of the genius of our people to originate,
improve, and perfect the instruments and circumstances of our lives? Who
can say what patents now lying, unrealized, in secret drawers and
pigeonholes, will come to light, or what new inventions will astonish and
bless us, when freedom is restored?

Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the
people shall be called into the service of business? when newcomers with
new ideas, new entries with new enthusiasms, independent men, shall be
welcomed? when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming, not
employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful, business,
where their best energies shall be inspired by the knowledge that they are
their own masters, with the paths of the world open before them? Have you
no desire to see the markets opened to all? to see credit available in due
proportion to every man of character and serious purpose who can use it
safely and to advantage? to see business disentangled from its unholy
alliance with politics? to see raw material released from the control of
monopolists, and transportation facilities equalized for all? and every
avenue of commercial and industrial activity levelled for the feet of all
who would tread it? Surely, you must feel the inspiration of such a new
dawn of liberty!

       *       *       *       *       *

There is the great policy of conservation, for example; and I do not
conceive of conservation in any narrow sense. There are forests to
conserve, there are great water powers to conserve, there are mines whose
wealth should be deemed exhaustible, not inexhaustible, and whose
resources should be safeguarded and preserved for future generations. But
there is much more. There are the lives and energies of the people to be
physically safeguarded.

You know what has been the embarrassment about conservation. The federal
government has not dared relax its hold, because, not _bona fide_
settlers, not men bent upon the legitimate development of great states,
but men bent upon getting into their own exclusive control great mineral,
forest, and water resources, have stood at the ear of the government and
attempted to dictate its policy. And the government of the United States
has not dared relax its somewhat rigid policy because of the fear that
these forces would be stronger than the forces of individual communities
and of the public interest. What we are now in dread of is that this
situation will be made permanent. Why is it that Alaska has lagged in her
development? Why is it that there are great mountains of coal piled up in
the shipping places on the coast of Alaska which the government at
Washington will not permit to be sold? It is because the government is not
sure that it has followed all the intricate threads of intrigue by which
small bodies of men have tried to get exclusive control of the coal fields
of Alaska. The government stands itself suspicious of the forces by which
it is surrounded.

The trouble about conservation is that the government of the United States
hasn't any policy at present. It is simply marking time. It is simply
standing still. Reservation is not conservation. Simply to say, "We are
not going to do anything about the forests," when the country needs to use
the forests, is not a practicable program at all. To say that the people
of the great State of Washington can't buy coal out of the Alaskan coal
fields doesn't settle the question. You have got to have that coal sooner
or later. And if you are so afraid of the Guggenheims and all the rest of
them that you can't make up your mind what your policies are going to be
about those coal fields, how long are we going to wait for the government
to throw off its fear? There can't be a working program until there is a
free government. The day when the government is free to set about a policy
of positive conservation, as distinguished from mere negative reservation,
will be an emancipation day of no small importance for the development of
the country.

But the question of conservation is a very much bigger question than the
conservation of our natural resources; because in summing up our natural
resources there is one great natural resource which underlies them all,
and seems to underlie them so deeply that we sometimes overlook it. I mean
the people themselves.

What would our forests be worth without vigorous and intelligent men to
make use of them? Why should we conserve our natural resources, unless we
can by the magic of industry transmute them into the wealth of the world?
What transmutes them into that wealth, if not the skill and the touch of
the men who go daily to their toil and who constitute the great body of
the American people? What I am interested in is having the government of
the United States more concerned about human rights than about property
rights. Property is an instrument of humanity; humanity isn't an
instrument of property. And yet when you see some men riding their great
industries as if they were driving a car of juggernaut, not looking to see
what multitudes prostrate themselves before the car and lose their lives
in the crushing effect of their industry, you wonder how long men are
going to be permitted to think more of their machinery than they think of
their men. Did you never think of it,--men are cheap, and machinery is
dear; many a superintendent is dismissed for overdriving a delicate
machine, who wouldn't be dismissed for overdriving an overtaxed man. You
can discard your man and replace him; there are others ready to come into
his place; but you can't without great cost discard your machine and put a
new one in its place. You are less apt, therefore, to look upon your men
as the essential vital foundation part of your whole business. It is time
that property, as compared with humanity, should take second place, not
first place. We must see to it that there is no over-crowding, that there
is no bad sanitation, that there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable
diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, that there is every
precaution against accident, that women are not driven to impossible
tasks, nor children permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be
spent. The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved; men must be
preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the
programs of industry merely. What is the use of having industry, if we
perish in producing it? If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should
we eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the
crowd trample us sooner and be done with it? I tell you that there is
beginning to beat in this nation a great pulse of irresistible sympathy
which is going to transform the processes of government amongst us. The
strength of America is proportioned only to the health, the energy, the
hope, the elasticity, the buoyancy of the American people.

Is not that the greatest thought that you can have of freedom,--the
thought of it as a gift that shall release men and women from all that
pulls them back from being their best and from doing their best, that
shall liberate their energy to its fullest limit, free their aspirations
till no bounds confine them, and fill their spirits with the jubilance of
realizable hope?



XII

THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES


No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of America must each
time make a fresh appeal to our imaginations. For centuries, indeed from
the beginning, the face of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the
routes of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east. The
Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, suddenly, the conquest of
Constantinople by the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe had
either to face about or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea
at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was
twice as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had expected,
the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent. In that part of
the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its
history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization;
here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.

Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to excite the emotion of
all who consider its strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful
histories of the earth might be contrived without the imagination daring
to conceive such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until the
fulness of time had come for a new start in civilization. A mere sea
captain's ambition to trace a new trade route gave way to a moral
adventure for humanity. The race was to found a new order here on this
delectable land, which no man approached without receiving, as the old
voyagers relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers
and murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. The hemisphere lay
waiting to be touched with life,--life from the old centres of living,
surely, but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weariness, so as to be
fit for the virgin purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the
imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel which once only
in all history could be vouchsafed.

One other thing only compares with it; only one other thing touches the
springs of emotion as does the picture of the ships of Columbus drawing
near the bright shores,--and that is the thought of the choke in the
throat of the immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at
the land where he has been taught to believe he in his turn shall find an
earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the heartaches of the
old life, and enter into the fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has
not every ship that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes
of generation after generation of the oppressed of other lands? How always
have men's hearts beat as they saw the coast of America rise to their
view! How it has always seemed to them that the dweller there would at
last be rid of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which
had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there realize the full
fruition of his sense of honest manhood, would there be one of a great
body of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive one another, but
seeking to accomplish the general good!

What was in the writings of the men who founded America,--to serve the
selfish interests of America? Do you find that in their writings? No; to
serve the cause of humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up
their standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon of
encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men came thronging to
these shores with an expectancy that never existed before, with a
confidence they never dared feel before, and found here for generations
together a haven of peace, of opportunity, of equality.

God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs we may recover
the standards and repeat the achievements of that heroic age!

For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it was. Our relations
one with another have been profoundly modified by the new agencies of
rapid communication and transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate
life, widen communities, fuse interests, and complicate all the processes
of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new
whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned
to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has
become a somewhat different matter. It cannot,--eternal principle that it
is,--it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps
it is only revealing its deeper meaning.

       *       *       *       *       *

What is liberty?

I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose
that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that
I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every
time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and
the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several
parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them
all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with
absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment
with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is
let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully
and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.

What it liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you
mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction
is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a
boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we
mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how
perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her
sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and
stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how
instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once
more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and
human activities and human energies.

Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals
and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those
institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than
ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the
thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind
what makes all the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; there are many
more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is
harder to keep everything adjusted,--and harder to find out where the
trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.

You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in
those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our
government was that the best government consisted in as little governing
as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still
intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual
activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to
free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day
he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great
confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let
him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he
has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the
assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that
he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful
interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be
no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the
trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program
of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative
merely.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we preserving freedom
in this land of ours, the hope of all the earth?

Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to which the
fathers consecrated it,--have we maintained them, realizing them, as each
generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man
is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear
aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated,
are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new
things and of not having done them?

The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a fair way of
failure,--tragic failure. And we stand in danger of utter failure yet
except we fulfil speedily the determination we have reached, to deal with
the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don't deceive
yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great interests which now
dominate our development. They are so great that it is almost an open
question whether the government of the United States can dominate them or
not. Go one step further, make their organized power permanent, and it may
be too late to turn back. The roads diverge at the point where we stand.
They stretch their vistas out to regions where they are very far separated
from one another; at the end of one is the old tiresome scene of
government tied up with special interests; and at the other shines the
liberating light of individual initiative, of individual liberty, of
individual freedom, the light of untrammeled enterprise. I believe that
that light shines out of the heavens itself that God has created. I
believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no
salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters.
Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by
trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of
enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of
the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there
are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United
States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether
we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough,
to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven't
had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance,
in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the
recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our
delegated authority.

I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs and of the
trusts, you are discussing the very lives of yourselves and your children.
I believe that I am preaching the very cause of some of the gentlemen whom
I am opposing when I preach the cause of free industry in the United
States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that bears the
inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted to gird it
entirely nature will take her revenge and the tree will die.

I do not believe that America is securely great because she has great men
in her now. America is great in proportion as she can make sure of having
great men in the next generation. She is rich in her unborn children;
rich, that is to say, if those unborn children see the sun in a day of
opportunity, see the sun when they are free to exercise their energies as
they will. If they open their eyes in a land where there is no special
privilege, then we shall come into a new era of American greatness and
American liberty; but if they open their eyes in a country where they must
be employees or nothing, if they open their eyes in a land of merely
regulated monopoly, where all the conditions of industry are determined by
small groups of men, then they will see an America such as the founders of
this Republic would have wept to think of. The only hope is in the release
of the forces which philanthropic trust presidents want to monopolize.
Only the emancipation, the freeing and heartening of the vital energies of
all the people will redeem us. In all that I may have to do in public
affairs in the United States I am going to think of towns such as I have
seen in Indiana, towns of the old American pattern, that own and operate
their own industries, hopefully and happily. My thought is going to be
bent upon the multiplication of towns of that kind and the prevention of
the concentration of industry in this country in such a fashion and upon
such a scale that towns that own themselves will be impossible. You know
what the vitality of America consists of. Its vitality does not lie in New
York, nor in Chicago; it will not be sapped by anything that happens in
St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the
enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their
factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the
borders of the town; in the wealth which they extract from nature and
originate for themselves through the inventive genius characteristic of
all free American communities.

That is the wealth of America, and if America discourages the locality,
the community, the self-contained town, she will kill the nation. A nation
is as rich as her free communities; she is not as rich as her capital city
or her metropolis. The amount of money in Wall Street is no indication of
the wealth of the American people. That indication can be found only in
the fertility of the American mind and the productivity of American
industry everywhere throughout the United States. If America were not rich
and fertile, there would be no money in Wall Street. If Americans were not
vital and able to take care of themselves, the great money exchanges would
break down. The welfare, the very existence of the nation, rests at last
upon the great mass of the people; its prosperity depends at last upon the
spirit in which they go about their work in their several communities
throughout the broad land. In proportion as her towns and her
country-sides are happy and hopeful will America realize the high
ambitions which have marked her in the eyes of all the world.

The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the men and women who
do the daily work in our mines and factories, on our railroads, in our
offices and ports of trade, on our farms and on the sea, is the underlying
necessity of all prosperity. There can be nothing wholesome unless their
life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they are contented.
Their physical welfare affects the soundness of the whole nation. How
would it suit the prosperity of the United States, how would it suit
business, to have a people that went every day sadly or sullenly to their
work? How would the future look to you if you felt that the aspiration had
gone out of most men, the confidence of success, the hope that they might
improve their condition? Do you not see that just so soon as the old
self-confidence of America, just so soon as her old boasted advantage of
individual liberty and opportunity, is taken away, all the energy of her
people begins to subside, to slacken, to grow loose and pulpy, without
fibre, and men simply cast about to see that the day does not end
disastrously with them?

So we must put heart into the people by taking the heartlessness out of
politics, business, and industry. We have got to make politics a thing in
which an honest man can take his part with satisfaction because he knows
that his opinion will count as much as the next man's, and that the boss
and the interests have been dethroned. Business we have got to untrammel,
abolishing tariff favors, and railroad discrimination, and credit denials,
and all forms of unjust handicaps against the little man. Industry we have
got to humanize,--not through the trusts,--but through the direct action
of law guaranteeing protection against dangers and compensation for
injuries, guaranteeing sanitary conditions, proper hours, the right to
organize, and all the other things which the conscience of the country
demands as the workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our
people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the
vision of the open gates of opportunity for all. We have got to set the
energy and the initiative of this great people absolutely free, so that
the future of America will be greater than the past, so that the pride of
America will grow with achievement, so that America will know as she
advances from generation to generation that each brood of her sons is
greater and more enlightened than that which preceded it, know that she is
fulfilling the promise that she has made to mankind.

Such is the vision of some of us who now come to assist in its
realization. For we Democrats would not have endured this long burden of
exile if we had not seen a vision. We could have traded; we could have got
into the game; we could have surrendered and made terms; we could have
played the rôle of patrons to the men who wanted to dominate the interests
of the country,--and here and there gentlemen who pretended to be of us
did make those arrangements. They couldn't stand privation. You never can
stand it unless you have within you some imperishable food upon which to
sustain life and courage, the food of those visions of the spirit where a
table is set before us laden with palatable fruits, the fruits of hope,
the fruits of imagination, those invisible things of the spirit which are
the only things upon which we can sustain ourselves through this weary
world without fainting. We have carried in our minds, after you had
thought you had obscured and blurred them, the ideals of those men who
first set their foot upon America, those little bands who came to make a
foothold in the wilderness, because the great teeming nations that they
had left behind them had forgotten what human liberty was, liberty of
thought, liberty of religion, liberty of residence, liberty of action.

Since their day the meaning of liberty has deepened. But it has not ceased
to be a fundamental demand of the human spirit, a fundamental necessity
for the life of the soul. And the day is at hand when it shall be realized
on this consecrated soil,--a New Freedom,--a Liberty widened and deepened
to match the broadened life of man in modern America, restoring to him in
very truth the control of his government, throwing wide all gates of
lawful enterprise, unfettering his energies, and warming the generous
impulses of his heart,--a process of release, emancipation, and
inspiration, full of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome as the airs
that filled the sails of the caravels of Columbus and gave the promise and
boast of magnificent Opportunity in which America _dare not fail_.



THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N.Y.





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