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The New Freedom

by Woodrow Wilson

Typed by Ben Collver

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Etext prepared by Ben Collver, collver@dnc.net

THE NEW FREEDOM

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

by WOODROW WILSON

THIS BOOK I dedicate, with all my heart, to every man or woman
who may derive from it, in however a small degree, the impulse
of unselfish public service

CONTENTS

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

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 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.

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 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 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
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 a
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 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 fine, 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 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 said, not an
individual, but a powerful group; and yet the workingman when
dealing with his employer is still, under out 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 hi
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 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 workingmen 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 what 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, 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 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 organize, 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 treasure 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 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,a nd 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 mountainsides 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 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 as 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 lights are
abundantly lighted. The city does not deceive itself into
supposing that great building is a unit from which the police
are to be kept out and the civic authority to be excluded, but
it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in
them, and control by 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 the top of a building or overtopping the
street, then the government of the city has the right to see
that the 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 swam
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 breath.

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
the 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 the
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 governments 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 machine of both parties are subsidized by the
same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either
directions."

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 lithe 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 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 racers
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 on 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 donothingism, 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 not 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 have 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 will
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 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 invention. 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 our 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 proceeded 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 our 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 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 to 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 systemize 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 outs." 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.

We, 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 tie.
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 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 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 in 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 people have stood outside and looked on at their
own government and that all they have had to determine in the
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 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 interests. I want to say, again and again, that my
arguments to 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 men who used to determine what New Jersey should do and
should not do did not exceed half a dozen, and they were always
the same men. These very men are, some of them, frank enough
to admit that New Jersey has finger 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 are 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
still don't believe they do. I believe they want to stand on
the firm foundations of law and right and take care of
themselves. I, for my part, don't want to 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 policy rests on 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 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 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 e 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 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 a 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 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 interest have
grown up. They have grown up by processes which at least,
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 process 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
cataloged 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 a 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 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 masters of finance, if only the masters of
finance are consulted.

That is what I mean when people say, "Bring the government back
to the people." I do not mean anything demagogic; I do not
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 feat
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 are in
the incomparable domain of the United States, are in 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 cannot 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 them 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 the
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 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 on 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
this 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 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 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 that audiences
made up of the "common people" quicker 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 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 possible 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 men, anything that blocks, discourages,
dismays the humble man, us 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 that 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. Now 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, or 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; not a body that
debates, -- not a parliament. Party conventions afford little
or not opportunity for discussion; platforms are privately
manufactures 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 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
skin 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 to
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 a
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 part was denounced unreasonable and the
other was lauded unreasonably. No part has ever deserved quite
the abuse that each part 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 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 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 placed
of discussion, such as the old took place in the town-meetings
to which everybody went and 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
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 develop 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 the 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
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 hew ill 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 in
trouble. I described what a man in the 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 the 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 eh 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 some countrymen are rustic is that they do not know
the opinion of the city; they are both hampered by their
limitations. I never heard 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 grand 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 pray God that something will bring into his
consciousness what is 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 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 on the understanding of one man, but to depend on
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 fell 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 sea to the far boarders 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 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 out part to clear the air, to being 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
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 round-about; 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 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 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
observations, 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 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
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, wile digging a hole, was
asked, "Pat, what are you doing, -- digging a hole?" And he
replied, "No, sir; I am digging the dirt and laving 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 the 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 in the complicity of business with the 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 the business enterprises, just because these
connections are known to exist. If the 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 on the 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
one of group of men avowedly responsible for the course of
legislation. The whole process of discussion, if any
discussion at all takes place, is in 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 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 businessmen 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 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; they 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 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 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 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 ever 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 the committee rooms. It is in the 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 exacted and has come into 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 ant the
workingmen, the consumers and the producers, of this country
want. It was not build 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 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 on 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 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, that something private is happening, and what 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 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
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. Its powers are
wholly derived from legislation. It possesses them for the
convenience of business at the suffrage 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 investments of whole communities. It
is a segment of the public; bears no analogy to a partnership
or to the process 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 out 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 in! The water's fine!" I winder 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 the 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, whenever
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 lobyists 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 wee 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; no, particularly, when
he has retired from public life, it is 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
wished 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 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. They demands have
gone far beyond what they dared ask for in the days if 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, to 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; is
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 protection, 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 the
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 it
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 productions
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 the 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 hot-houses 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: The 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
wittingly 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 day sin the week
for twelve hours a day, and in 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 fraud is falling away, and men are
beginning to see disclosed little groups of persons maintaining
a control over the dominant part 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 their 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 one 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
asked 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 our 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 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 par 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 if 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 not 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 out 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 in 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 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 the trusts are
inevitable. They don't say that big business is inevitable.
They don't say merely that that 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; simple 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 cooperation, is
inevitable, and, let me add, is probably desirable. But what
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 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 by
rivals and say: "Don't let's cut each other's throats; let's
combine the output, and thereby determine the prices: and
dominate and control the market." That is very natural. 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 businessman 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
unwieldliness. 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 everyone who comes into the
combination can carry one his business more efficiently than he
did before; the argument is: we will assign you as your share
in the pool twice, three times, four times, or give 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 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
manufacturers of iron and steel, but wherever, as in the field
of more advanced manufacturers 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 the 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 investment, 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 pygmy with a
round stone in a sling may come out and slay them.

For my part, I want the pygmy to have a chance to come out. And
I foresee a time when the pygmies 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 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
anytime, 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 sophisticated 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 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 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 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 the same 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 by 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 all 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 it 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 corporations 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 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 can beat organized labor; for they can sell
at 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 they make in the 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 a 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 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 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 the 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 curtain
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 have been 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 honestly 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, -- 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
something which I cannot scientifically describe, but its
molecules have become intimate with each other and have
practically united, whereas an amalgam has merely a physical
union created by pressure 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 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 heard 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 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, -- 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 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
thing 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, comfortable
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 it, -- 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 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
proposed 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
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
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 of 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 regulate it? Shall we
say that all 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 the
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 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 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 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
someday 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 lives 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 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 the master of the government of
the United States? It has a master now, -- those who in
combination 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 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 class 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 determined 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 I have no doubt been used, for all I know, in
perfect good faith. Here and there they 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,a nd 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 part 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 that trusts cared whether
women were sapped of their vitality or not? Have 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 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,a nd 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 out 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 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 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 form 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 the 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 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 part 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
kind 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
kind, 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
that which is called the Oregon System, a system by which he
has but 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. They day I arrived in Portland, a morning paper
happened to say, very ironically, that there were to
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,
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 whoa re 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 me 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 of 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 cooperation, 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 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 people are too busy or too lazy to bother
about voting at primary elections? True, sometimes people of a
state or community do let a 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 many 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, 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 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 the 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 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 have 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 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 are rarely needed 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 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 the
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 to the Constitution of the United States
and the constitutions of the states? They are the gentlemen
who sued 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 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 out 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 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 time 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 hath an indubitable,
inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform,
alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be
judged most conductive 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 very prominent in the affairs of the State who
again and again advocated with all earnestness that was in them
the thing 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 trying to win elections in order to get the support of
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 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 to 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 I meant what I said. Unless they had
believed in the Governor whom they had elected, unless they had
trusted him deeply 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 the 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 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 named 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 criticized the Governor of New
Jersey because he did not do certain things, -- for instance,
being 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 we 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 part 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 just 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 a
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
imposters. 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
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 and 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
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 read 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 a energy which in our generation has not been known.
It is for that reason that I feel free to criticize with the
utmost frankness these restrictions, and the means by which
they have been brought about. I do not criticize as one
without hope; in describing conditions which so hamper, impede,
and imprison, I am only describing the 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, 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
entrenched 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 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 to
turn about and adopt the process of freedom. For American
hears 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 of
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 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, 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 them
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 has 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 the 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 allowed 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 resource. 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 a 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 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
pigeon-holes, 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 disentangle 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 leveled
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 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? That transmutes them into
wealth, if not the skill and the touch of 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 care 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 a time that
property, as compared with humanity, should take second place,
not first place. We must see to it that there is no
overcrowding, there 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 take 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 experience.

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 fullness 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 chips
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 fulfillment 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 what constitutes liberty.
Suppose that I were building a great piece of powerful
machinery, and suppose that I should so awkwardly and
unskillfully 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
skillfully and carefully with the other parts of the great
structure.

What is 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 water 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 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 power
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 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 fulfill 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 our
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 that
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 a 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 the
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 countrysides 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 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 as soon as the old
self-confidence of America, just as 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,a nd 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 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 can never stand it unless you have within you some
imperishable food upon which to sustain life and courage, the
food of those visions and 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*.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The New Freedom