AN EQUAL CHANCE
The American people have evidently made up their minds that our natural
resources must be conserved. That is good, but it settles only half the
question. For whose benefit shall they be conserved--for the benefit of
the many, or for the use and profit of the few? The great conflict now
being fought will decide. There is no other question before us that
begins to be so important, or that will be so difficult to straddle, as
the great question between special interest and equal opportunity,
between the privileges of the few and the rights of the many, between
government by men for human welfare and government by money for profit,
between the men who stand for the Roosevelt policies and the men who
stand against them. This is the heart of the conservation problem
to-day.
The conservation issue is a moral issue. When a few men get possession
of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural
resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to
extort undue profits, as in the recent cases of the Sugar Trust and the
beef-packers, they injure the average man without good reason, and they
are guilty of a moral wrong. It does not matter whether the undue profit
comes through stifling competition by rebates or other crooked devices,
through corruption of public officials, or through seizing and
monopolizing resources which belong to the people. The result is always
the same--a toll levied on the cost of living through special privilege.
The income of the average family in the United States is less than $600
a year. To increase the cost of living to such a family beyond the
reasonable profits of legitimate business is wrong. It is not merely a
question of a few cents more a day for the necessaries of life, or of a
few cents less a day for wages. Far more is at stake--the health or
sickness of little babies, the education or ignorance of children,
virtue or vice in young daughters, honesty or criminality in young sons,
the working power of bread-winners, the integrity of families, the
provision for old age--in a word, the welfare and happiness or the
misery and degradation of the plain people are involved in the cost of
living.
To the special interest an unjust rise in the cost of living means
simply higher profit, but to those who pay it, that profit is measured
in schooling, warm clothing, a reserve to meet emergencies, a fair
chance to make the fight for comfort, decency, and right living.
I believe in our form of government and I believe in the Golden Rule.
But we must face the truth that monopoly of the sources of production
makes it impossible for vast numbers of men and women to earn a fair
living. Right here the conservation question touches the daily life of
the great body of our people, who pay the cost of special privilege. And
the price is heavy. That price may be the chance to save the boys from
the saloons and the corner gang, and the girls from worse, and to make
good citizens of them instead of bad; for an appalling proportion of the
tragedies of life spring directly from the lack of a little money.
Thousands of daughters of the poor fall into the hands of the
white-slave traders because their poverty leaves them without
protection. Thousands of families, as the Pittsburg survey has shown us,
lead lives of brutalizing overwork in return for the barest living. Is
it fair that these thousands of families should have less than they need
in order that a few families should have swollen fortunes at their
expense? Let him who dares deny that there is wickedness in grinding
the faces of the poor, or assert that these are not moral questions
which strike the very homes of our people. If these are not moral
questions, there are no moral questions.
The people of this country have lost vastly more than they can ever
regain by gifts of public property, forever and without charge, to men
who gave nothing in return. It is true that, we have made superb
material progress under this system, but it is not well for us to
rejoice too freely in the slices the special interests have given us
from the great loaf of the property of all the people.
The people of the United States have been the complacent victims of a
system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised
beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their
private lives were model citizens. But they have suffered from a curious
moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a
corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to
do for themselves. Fortunately for us all that delusion is passing
rapidly away.
President Hadley well said that "the fundamental division of powers in
the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand
and property-owners on the other." When property gets possession of the
voting power also, little is left for the people. That is why the unholy
alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous fact in our
political life. I believe the American people are tired of that
alliance. They are weary of politics for revenue only. It is time to
take business out of politics, and keep it out--time for the political
activity of this Nation to be aimed squarely at the welfare of all of
us, and squarely away from the excessive profits of a few of us.
A man is not bad because he is rich, nor good because he is poor. There
is no monopoly of virtue. I hold no brief for the poor against the rich
nor for the wage-earner against the capitalist. Exceptional capacity in
business, as in any other line of life, should meet with exceptional
reward. Rich men have served this country greatly. Washington was a rich
man. But it is very clear that excessive profits from the control of
natural resources, monopolized by a few, are not worth to this Nation
the tremendous price they cost us.
We have allowed the great corporations to occupy with their own men the
strategic points in business, in social, and in political life. It is
our fault more than theirs. We have allowed it when we could have
stopped it. Too often we have seemed to forget that a man in public life
can no more serve both the special interests and the people than he can
serve God and Mammon. There is no reason why the American people should
not take into their hands again the full political power which is theirs
by right, and which they exercised before the special interests began
to nullify the will of the majority. There are many men who believe, and
who will always believe, in the divine right of money to rule. With such
men argument, compromise, or conciliation is useless or worse. The only
thing to do with them is to fight them and beat them. It has been done,
and it can be done again.
It is the honorable distinction of the Forest Service that it has been
more constantly, more violently and more bitterly attacked by the
representatives of the special interests in recent years than any other
Government Bureau. These attacks have increased in violence and
bitterness just in proportion as the Service has offered effective
opposition to predatory wealth. The more successful the Forest Service
has been in preventing land-grabbing and the absorption of water power
by the special interests, the more ingenious, the more devious, and the
more dangerous these attacks have become. A favorite one is to assert
that the Forest Service, in its zeal for the public welfare, has played
ducks and drakes with the Acts of Congress. The fact is, on the
contrary, that the Service has had warrant of law for everything it has
done. Not once since it was created has any charge of illegality,
despite the most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever
led to reversal or reproof by either House of Congress or by any
Congressional Committee. Not once has the Forest Service been defeated
or reversed as to any vital legal principle underlying its work in any
court or administrative tribunal of last resort. It is the first duty of
a public officer to obey the law. But it is his second duty, and a close
second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good,
and not merely what the law directs or compels him to do. Unless the
public service is alive enough to serve the people with enthusiasm,
there is very little to be said for it.
Another, and unusually plausible, form of attack, is to demand that all
land not now bearing trees shall be thrown out of the National Forests.
For centuries forest fires have burned through the Western mountains,
and much land thus deforested is scattered throughout the National
Forests awaiting reforestation. This land is not valuable for
agriculture, and will contribute more to the general welfare under
forest than in any other way. To exclude it from the National Forests
would be no more reasonable than it would be in a city to remove from
taxation and municipal control every building lot not now covered by a
house. It would be no more reasonable than to condemn and take away from
our farmers every acre of land that did not bear a crop last year, or to
confiscate a man's winter overcoat because he was not wearing it in
July. A generation in the life of a nation is no longer than a season in
the life of a man. With a fair chance we can and will reclothe these
denuded mountains with forests, and we ask for that chance.
Still another attack, nearly successful two years ago, was an attempt
to prevent the Forest Service from telling the people, through the
press, what it is accomplishing for them, and how much this Nation needs
the forests. If the Forest Service can not tell what it is doing the
time will come when there will be nothing to tell. It is just as
necessary for the people to know what is being done to help them as to
know what is being done to hurt them. Publicity is the essential and
indispensable condition of clean and effective public service.
Since the Forest Service called public attention to the rapid absorption
of the water-power sites and the threatening growth of a great
water-power monopoly, the attacks upon it have increased with marked
rapidity. I anticipate that they will continue to do so. Still greater
opposition is promised in the near future. There is but one
protection--an awakened and determined public opinion. That is why I
tell the facts.