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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Freedom, by Woodrow Wilson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The New Freedom
+       A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People
+
+Author: Woodrow Wilson
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2005 [EBook #14811]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW FREEDOM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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 _Ecole_ 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 melee 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 role 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 proteges 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 proteges 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 role 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The New Freedom, by Woodrow Wilson
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