_Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-citizens_:
We are passing through a period of great commercial prosperity, and
such a period is as sure as adversity itself to bring mutterings of
discontent. At a time when most men prosper somewhat some men always
prosper greatly; and it is as true now as when the tower of Siloam
fell upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely to the
just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When the weather is good
for crops it is good for weeds. Moreover, not only do the wicked
flourish when the times are such that most men flourish, but, what is
worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy springs up in the breasts of
those who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, see others
no more deserving who do better.
Wise laws and fearless and upright administration of the laws can
give the opportunity for such prosperity as we see about us. But that
is all that they can do. When the conditions have been created which
make prosperity possible, then each individual man must achieve it for
himself by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence. If
when people wax fat they kick, as they have kicked since the days of
Jeshurun, they will speedily destroy their own prosperity. If they go
into wild speculation and lose their heads they have lost that which
no laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they insist upon
pulling down those who have profited most in the years of fatness,
they will bury themselves in the crash of the common disaster. It is
difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but
it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
The upshot of all this is that it is peculiarly incumbent upon us in
a time of such material well-being, both collectively as a nation and
individually as citizens, to show, each on his own account, that we
possess the qualities of prudence, self-knowledge, and self-restraint.
In our government we need above all things stability, fixity of
economic policy; while remembering that this fixity must not be
fossilization, that there must not be inability to shift our laws so
as to meet our shifting national needs. There are real and great evils
in our social and economic life, and these evils stand out in all
their ugly baldness in time of prosperity; for the wicked who prosper
are never a pleasant sight. There is every need of striving in all
possible ways, individually and collectively, by combinations among
ourselves and through the recognized governmental agencies, to cut out
those evils. All I ask is to be sure that we do not use the knife with
an ignorant zeal which would make it more dangerous to the patient
than to the disease.
One of the features of the tremendous industrial development of the
last generation has been the very great increase in private, and
especially in corporate, fortunes. We may like this or not, just as
we choose, but it is a fact nevertheless; and as far as we can see
it is an inevitable result of the working of the various causes,
prominent among them steam and electricity. Urban population has grown
in this country, as in all civilized countries, much faster than the
population as a whole during the last century. If it were not for
that Rhode Island could not to-day be the State she is. Rhode Island
has flourished as she has flourished because of the conditions which
have brought about the great increase in urban life. There is evil
in these conditions, but you can’t destroy it unless you destroy the
civilization they have brought about. Where men are gathered together
in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more
largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote
from one another. Many of us prefer the old conditions of life, under
which the average man lived more to himself and by himself, where the
average community was more self-dependent, and where even though the
standard of comfort was lower on the average, yet there was less of
the glaring inequality in worldly conditions which we now see about us
in our great cities. It is not true that the poor have grown poorer;
but some of the rich have grown so very much richer that, where
multitudes of men are herded together in a limited space, the contrast
strikes the onlooker as more violent than formerly. On the whole, our
people earn more and live better than ever before, and the progress
of which we are so proud could not have taken place had it not been
for the upbuilding of industrial centres, such as this in which I am
speaking.
But together with the good there has come a measure of evil. Life is
not so simple as it was; and surely, both for the individual and the
community, the simple life is normally the healthy life. There is not
in the great cities the feeling of brotherhood which there is still
in country localities; and the lines of social cleavage are far more
deeply marked.
For some of the evils which have attended upon the good of the
changed conditions we can at present see no complete remedy. For
others the remedy must come by the action of men themselves in their
private capacity, whether merely as individuals or by combination.
For yet others some remedy can be found in legislative and executive
action—national, State, or municipal. Much of the complaint against
combinations is entirely unwarranted. Under present day conditions it
is as necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is
to have organizations, unions, among wage-workers. We have a right to
ask in each case only this: that good, and not harm, shall follow.
Exactly as labor organizations, when managed intelligently and in a
spirit of justice and fair play, are of very great service not only
to the wage-workers, but to the whole community, as has been shown
again and again in the history of many such organizations; so wealth,
not merely individual, but corporate, when used aright is not merely
beneficial to the community as a whole, but is absolutely essential to
the upbuilding of such a series of communities as those whose citizens
I am now addressing. This is so obvious that it ought to be too trite
to mention, and yet it is necessary to mention it when we see some of
the attacks made upon wealth, as such.
Of course a great fortune if used wrongly is a menace to the
community. A man of great wealth who does not use that wealth decently
is, in a peculiar sense, a menace to the community, and so is the man
who does not use his intellect aright. Each talent—the talent for
making money, the talent for showing intellect at the bar, or in any
other way—if unaccompanied by character, makes the possessor a menace
to the community. But such a fact no more warrants us in attacking
wealth than it does in attacking intellect. Every man of power, by the
very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors;
but we can not afford to discourage the development of such men merely
because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends. If
we did so we should leave our history a blank, for we should have
no great statesmen, soldiers, merchants, no great men of arts, of
letters, of science. Doubtless on the average the most useful citizen
to the community as a whole is the man to whom has been granted what
the Psalmist asked for—neither poverty nor riches. But the great
captain of industry, the man of wealth, who, alone or in combination
with his fellows, drives through our great business enterprises, is a
factor without whom the civilization that we see round about us here
could not have been built up. Good, not harm, normally comes from the
upbuilding of such wealth. Probably the greatest harm done by vast
wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let
the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
But there is other harm; and it is evident that we should try to do
away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to speak
of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the
State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound
to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is
clearly need of supervision—need to possess the power of regulation
of these great corporations through the representatives of the
public—wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business
corporations become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for
work that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that there is no
need for such supervision. There is, and a sufficient warrant for it
is to be found in any one of the admitted evils appertaining to them.
We meet a peculiar difficulty under our system of government, because
of the division of governmental power between the Nation and the
States. When the industrial conditions were simple, very little
control was needed, and the difficulties of exercising such control
under our Constitution were not evident. Now the conditions are
complicated and we find it hard to frame national legislation which
shall be adequate; while as a matter of practical experience it has
been shown that the States either can not or will not exercise a
sufficient control to meet the needs of the case. Some of our States
have excellent laws—laws which it would be well indeed to have enacted
by the National Legislature. But the widespread differences in these
laws, even between adjacent States, and the uncertainty of the power
of enforcement, result practically in altogether insufficient control.
I believe that the nation must assume this power of control by
legislation; if necessary by constitutional amendment. The immediate
necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not
the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures,
the trusts shall owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign’s
orders may be enforced.
This is not the case with the ordinary so-called “trust” to-day; for
the trust nowadays is a large State corporation, which generally does
business in other States, often with a tendency toward monopoly.
Such a trust is an artificial creature not wholly responsible to
or controllable by any legislation, either by State or nation, and
not subject to the jurisdiction of any one court. Some governmental
sovereign must be given full power over these artificial, and very
powerful, corporate beings. In my judgment this sovereign must be the
national government. When it has been given full power, then this
full power can be used to control any evil influence, exactly as the
government is now using the power conferred upon it by the Sherman
anti-trust law.
Even when the power has been granted it would be most unwise to
exercise it too much, to begin by too stringent legislation. The
mechanism of modern business is as delicate and complicated as it
is vast, and nothing would be more productive of evil to all of us,
and especially to those least well off in this world’s goods, than
ignorant meddling with this mechanism—above all, meddling in a spirit
of class legislation or hatred or rancor. It is eminently necessary
that the power should be had, but it is just as necessary that it
should be exercised with wisdom and self-restraint. The first exercise
of that power should be the securing of publicity among all great
corporations doing an interstate business. The publicity, though
non-inquisitorial, should be real and thorough as to all important
facts with which the public has concern. Daylight is a powerful
discourager of evil. Such publicity would by itself tend to cure the
evils of which there is just complaint; it would show us if evils
existed, and where the evils are imaginary, and it would show us what
next ought to be done.
Above all, let us remember that our success in accomplishing anything
depends very much upon our not trying to accomplish everything.
Distrust whoever pretends to offer you a patent cure-all for every ill
of the body politic, just as you would a man who offers a medicine
which would cure every evil of your individual body. A medicine that
is recommended to cure both asthma and a broken leg is not good for
either. Mankind has moved slowly upward through the ages, sometimes a
little faster, sometimes a little slower, but rarely indeed by leaps
and bounds. At times a great crisis comes in which a great people,
perchance led by a great man, can at white heat strike some mighty
blow for the right—make a long stride in advance along the path of
justice and of orderly liberty. But normally we must be content if
each of us can do something—not all that we wish, but something—for
the advancement of those principles of righteousness which underlie
all real national greatness, all true civilization and freedom. I see
no promise of any immediate and complete solution of all the problems
we group together when we speak of the trust question. But we can
make a beginning in solving these problems, and a good beginning,
if only we approach the subject with a sufficiency of resolution,
of honesty, and of that hard common-sense which is one of the most
valuable, and not always one of the most common, assets in any
nation’s greatness. The existing laws will be fully enforced as they
stand on the statute books without regard to persons, and I think good
has already come from their enforcement. I think, furthermore, that
additional legislation should be had and can be had, which will enable
us to accomplish much more along the same lines. No man can promise a
perfect solution, at least in the immediate future. But something has
already been done, and much more can be done if our people temperately
and determinedly will that it shall be done.
In conclusion let me add one word. While we are not to be excused if
we fail to do whatever is possible through the agency of government,
we must keep ever in mind that no action of the government, no action
by combination among ourselves, can take the place of the individual
qualities to which in the long run every man must owe the success he
can make of life. There never has been devised, and there never will
be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the
exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites
of success—the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of
unflinching will. Such action can supplement those qualities but it
can not take their place. No action by the State can do more than
supplement the initiative of the individual; and ordinarily the action
of the State can do no more than to secure to each individual the
chance to show under as favorable conditions as possible the stuff
that there is in him.