THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
We are living at a time when political and social conditions are a bit
chaotic, and it is a little difficult to distinguish between the
symptoms that are ephemeral and those which are permanent. What we must
do is to try to make things better and to save from the past the things
which are good. It is often true that a movement that is excessive and
destructive in one way, ends by being the basis of great progress after
reaction from its excesses has left what is valuable in it.
Our American Revolution, which we are accustomed to regard as quite
important--and it was for us--did not really represent a great world
change such as was represented in the French Revolution. It grew out of
a very unwise, selfish colonial policy on the part of Great Britain. We
were right and wise in putting it through, and our ancestors
demonstrated great courage and great tenacity in fighting it. It
certainly gave us independence and an opportunity for expansion that we
should not otherwise have had. But the pap that we have been brought up
on with respect to the tremendous outrages which Great Britain
inflicted on us was sweetened a little bit. If you would see the other
side, read Trevelyan's "American Revolution." In this you will see that
while the right was certainly with us, we were not quite so much
outraged as it seemed in our earlier childhood studies. The American
Revolution did as much good for England as it did for us, because it
taught her proper colonial policy, and today the colonial policy of
Great Britain is one of the greatest instances of statesmanship in
history. In her dealing with Canada, with Australia and with the South
African Republic, she has given them such self-government that, far from
wishing to sever the bond with the mother country, they cherish it.
The French Revolution indicated a very much more important movement
among peoples. It developed awful excesses. The wild declarations and
extremes practiced by the Committee of Safety in the French Revolution
were revolting to any man affected by ordinary humane considerations and
had in fact a remarkable effect in strengthening conservatism in
England. Indeed, they caused the issue and the bitter personal quarrel
between the one-time warm associates, Burke and Fox. The natural result
of those excesses was to be expected. It took the shape of the man on
horseback. The imperial control of Napoleon led the French people into
a military waste of strength which has affected the French race even
down to the present time. Yet Napoleon, by building up his Code
Napoleon, and by spreading over Europe the idea that the people were the
basis of government, profoundly affected political conceptions and
conditions. There followed a reaction in the Holy Alliance, which was a
combination to maintain the Divine Right of Kings, and then the spirit
of the French Revolution reasserted itself in 1830. In fact from then on
until now the movement toward more and more popular government has gone
on continuously in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere. It is
spreading today even more widely than it ever did before, and every
country, even Russia, has to count the cost with respect to the will of
the people.
When I went through Russia after the Russian-Japanese War, I met one of
the leading diplomats of that country who greeted me with, "Well, how do
you like it?" "How do I like what?" I asked. "How do you like helping
Japan to lick Russia?" Those were the homely expressions that he used.
To which I replied, "We did not help Japan to lick Russia." "But," he
said, "you did in effect. Your people and your press sympathized and
they expressed the kindly sympathy that counts for so much at such a
time." "The government cannot control our people," I responded. "They
think for themselves and express themselves as they see fit. We cannot
control the press in our country, but we have observed all the laws of
neutrality with respect to the war, and if some of the people expressed
themselves in favor of Japan, it was only because they were in favor of
the under dog in the fight." "Why did you give up?" I inquired further;
"You were getting stronger and stronger." "Yes," he said, "we had to
fight at the end of a 5,000-mile, single-track railway, but handicapped
as we were, we got our forces out there ready to fight and we could have
gone in and beaten the Japanese." "Why didn't you?" I asked. "Why did
you make peace?" "The trouble is," he explained, "we were living on a
volcano at home. Our people were opposed to the war, and we did not go
on, lest the throne would be a forfeit." This is only an indication that
even in the country that is supposed to represent the most absolute of
empires, the people are manifesting a control. The Douma was given too
much power at first, so that universal suffrage was necessarily a
failure in the condition of the people at that time. But the Douma now
is gradually acquiring useful power and in the course of the next
twenty-five or fifty years Russia will probably have a popular
constitutional government. We have had democracy in this country for
one hundred and twenty-five years, or indeed for two hundred and
twenty-five years. It is now proposed to have more democracy to supply
the present defects of our existing democracy. This is one phase of the
present situation that I wish to discuss. Another is the spread of the
fraternal spirit, the desire of one to help another, the actual
improvement and increase in the brotherhood of man which we are seeing
in society, and a third is trades-unionism, its essence and what is to
be hoped for or feared from it.
If you will read a book like Chamberlain on "The Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century," especially the preface, which is written by a man
who uses a better style than Chamberlain, you will find that he attempts
to summarize the progress of the previous eighteen centuries as a
predicate for the strides of human civilization in the nineteenth. As he
minimizes the effect of one century and then another, you note how few
centuries, in his judgment, play any part in the onward march, and you
are discouraged as to what one man can do to help along any movement
that shall really be world-wide or permanent.
The effect is much the same upon your personal hope of accomplishing
some good in the world as when a professor of astronomy takes you over
to the observatory, lets you look through the telescope, tells you that
light takes something like eight minutes to come the 95,000,000 miles
from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a
pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there
are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that
the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them
centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are
such atoms and so unimportant in the general result, what's the use?"
Still if you study Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you
will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world
civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce
what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and
led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule
and the world is made up of them--at least it was in my college days.
Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible effort to
help along the general weal, and it is no excuse, because we cannot play
a large part, that we should play no part at all and should feel no
sense of responsibility for what we can do.
What then of conditions of civilization in our country in the last
half-century? The Civil War grew out of a great moral and social issue.
It was a moral issue on the part of the North and a social issue on the
part of the South. Material considerations were subordinated. After the
war we had a pretty hard time in getting over its immediate effects. The
panic of 1873, which prostrated all business, was the result of the
excesses of the war, the overissue of legal tender and the feverish,
unhealthy expansion that followed. In 1878, we resumed specie payments.
I presume no country in the world ever showed such an enormous expansion
and such material growth as ours between 1878 and 1907. It was shown in
the useful inventions. Steam had been invented before, but it was
increased in its uses, and electricity was made the tool of man. Now it
is easy to follow that kind of material expansion. We can count the
growth in wealth and trace the effect of it on the people, for they all
got into the chase for the dollar.
In the West, the pioneer spirit was so strong that they were glad to
have anything in the way of development at any cost. Counties would
issue railroad bonds to build railroads and would give the bonds to the
railroads. They would give franchises of all sorts and do everything
that they thought would help open the country. There was a most
substantial increase in the average income, and the average comfort,
especially in the bodily comfort, of everyone. Have you ever thought
that today the humblest workman has more bodily comfort in many ways
than Queen Elizabeth or even George III? We had learned the advantage of
combination in machinery and we adopted it in business.
This brought about great combinations of plant and capital which reduced
the cost of producing commodities necessary to man to a price never
conceived of before. I do not wish to depreciate the value or importance
of improvement in material comfort. When you hear a man denounce it, you
may know that either he is not a clear, calm thinker, or else he is a
demagogue. Material growth and material comfort are essential for the
development of mental and spiritual activities. The result of this
combination and material expansion, however, was to create great
corporations which began to get control of things. The same spirit of
combination entered into politics and we had machines and bosses which
lent their hand to, and furnished a complacent instrument for,
corporations. Time was when they ordered delegates in a convention with
the same degree of certainty that the order would be supplied, as they
did steel rails or any other commodity. That time has passed and why?
Because the danger of plutocracy forced itself on the people. Leaders
took it up and showed it to them; and in the last ten years we have had
a great movement to eliminate corporate and money control in politics.
Great statutes have been passed--the anti-trust law, the interstate
commerce law, the statutes against the use of contributions from
corporations in politics, the statutes requiring the showing of the
electoral expenses, have all been brought about in response to a popular
demand.
The people failed to scrutinize before, but now that they are aroused
and have taken matters in their own hands, they have brought about
reform. The fact that he is supported by bosses is now generally enough
to defeat a man, and the charge that he has a machine with him is enough
to interfere with his electoral success. Organization is necessary for
political success; even reformers find that out after they get into
politics, but today there is an unreasonable prejudice against it. The
great and good effect of the reform, however, is that corporations are
no longer in politics. Of course corruption is not all gone, but it is
largely stayed, and there is no longer any chance that corporations can
control as they did.
But the leviathan of the people cannot be aroused in this way and his
movement stopped at the median line. We must expect unwise excess.
Sincere reformers have reasoned that because we had the representative
form of government during this corrupt period, it is the representative
form of government which is responsible. Because we had courts during
the corrupt period, the courts are responsible for the corruption.
Therefore we must change the representative system by injecting more
democracy into it and we must change the courts by injecting more
democracy into them and require the people at an election to decide
cases instead of judges on the Bench. These are the excesses to which we
trend.
We are a pretty great people. We admit it. We have great confidence in
what we can do, and when we are set, neither an economic law drawn from
political science nor experience seems a very formidable objection. We
are a successful people in machinery, and so we take our analogy for
political reforms from machinery. We found that by uniting various
mechanical elements we could make machines which would do as much as one
hundred or one thousand men in the same time. So we think that if we are
only acute enough to devise a governmental machine which will work
without effort on the part of the people, we can sit at home while
elections run themselves so well that only what the good people desire
in political action will necessarily result. We want the equivalent of
what, in the slang of practical mechanics, we call a fool-proof machine,
because anybody can run it and no fool can interfere with its normal
operation. So these political reformers are hunting a
corrupt-politician-proof machine for government. It does not and cannot
exist. No government can exist which does not depend upon the activity,
the honesty and the intelligence of those who form it. The initiative,
the referendum and the recall have been urged and in many states
adopted, as a machine which no boss or corrupt politician can prevent
from producing honest, effective political results. They are expected to
reform everything and those who doubt their wisdom are, for the time
being, in the minds of many enthusiasts, public enemies.
The representative system, on the contrary, recognizes that government,
in the actual execution of governmental measures, and in the actual
detailed preparation of governmental measures, is an expert matter. To
attempt to devise and adopt detailed legislative measures to accomplish
the general purpose of the people through a mass vote at a popular
election is just as absurd as it would be for all those present at a
town meeting to say, "We will all of us now go out and build a bridge,
or we will use a theodolite." Thus to say that by injecting more
democracy you can cure the defects of our present democracy is to
express one of those epigrams that, like many of its kind, is either not
true at all or is only partly true and is even more deceptive than if
it were wholly untrue.
Take the power of appointment in executive work. You elect officers,
choosing men of character, intelligence, and experience for a few great
offices, and then what do you do under the Federal Constitution? You
turn over to the President the appointment of great officers because he
needs intelligence, knowledge and skill to make their selections.
Consider the system of general direct primaries in the selection of
judges. There is a ticket at the primaries on which something like
twenty or thirty lawyers run for the Supreme Bench. Some of them go
around and tell the electors how they will decide on questions after
they get in. The qualifications of most of them as lawyers and as men
are not known to the people. Some of them are prominent because they
have been in the headlines of newspapers as figuring in sensational
cases. Others have political prominence but no public experience to test
their judicial capacity. Do you think this method of selection by the
people would lead to the choice of a learned, skilled lawyer with that
experience, courage and fine judicial quality that are to make him a
great judge? Of course it would not. It has been my duty to select more
judges in a term of four years than any other President, and I have had
to look into and compare the results of selection of judicial
candidates by popular general primary and by convention, so that I know
what I am talking about when I say that the primary system has greatly
injured the average capacity of our elective judiciary.
Why should we not use common sense in matters of government just as we
use common sense in our own business? Why should we be afraid to tell
the people that they are not fitted to select high judicial officers?
They are not. You know you are not. You could not tell me who would be
good judges for Connecticut, or for any state in the Union where you
happen to live unless you went about and investigated the matter. If you
are put in a position of responsibility, you have sense enough to know
where to find out the facts and then to make the selection, but the
people lack that opportunity. So how is the question to be solved? By
electing a Chief Executive and charging him with the responsibility of
selecting competent men to act as judges. That is what is meant by the
short ballot.
Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a
platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or
inconsistency. They sometimes combine the short ballot with the
initiative, referendum and recall though they are utterly at variance.
The referendum is the submission of every issue to the people.
The short ballot, on the contrary, means putting up one or two men whose
names shall not encumber the ballot. Have you ever seen these ballots?
They are a yard long and a yard wide. They have a hundred and twenty
names on them and the people are expected to make a selection. They are
to make a selection of ten out of fifty or one hundred names. Why, it
would seem to be mathematically demonstrable that that is absurd. But
when some men get into politics and talk about the people, it seems as
if they had to abandon ordinary logic. I am just as much in favor of
popular government as anybody, but I am in favor of popular government
as a means to attain good government, not in order to go upon the stump
and say, "Vote for me because I am in favor of the people. The people
are all wise and never make a mistake."
Now what is the initiative? In practice, it means that if 5 per cent of
the electorate can get together and agree on a measure, they shall
compel all the rest of the electorate to vote as to whether it shall
become law or not. There is no opportunity for amendment, or for
discussion. The whole legislative program is put into one act to be
voted on by the people. Speakers will get up and claim that the
millennium will be brought about by some measure that they advocate.
Suppose it is voted in? It never has had the test of discussion and
amendment that every law ought to have. I am not complaining of the
movement that brings about this initiative and referendum, for that is
prompted by a desire to clinch the movement against corruption, on the
theory that you cannot corrupt the whole people and that the initiative
and referendum mean detailed and direct government by the whole people.
But the theory is erroneous. The whole people will not vote at an
election, much less at a primary. When the people are thus represented
at the polls by a small minority there is nothing that the politicians
will not be able to do with that minority when they get their hands in.
This is still a new movement, for which we have little precedent to
guide us, but we have seen politicians fit their methods to any form of
government. Their chance is always through the neglect to vote on the
part of the majority of the electorate and this new system calls out
fewer votes than ever.
Now what is the referendum? It is a reference of the thing proposed by
the initiative to the people who are to vote on it. These
reformers-for-politics-only are never content to acquire a majority of
the electorate vote for the adoption of the measure referred. They seem
to love the promotion of the power of the minority.
What answer do the people themselves give with reference to the wisdom
of the referendum? At many elections candidates run at the same time
that questions are referred to the people, and what is the usual result
of the vote? In Oregon, where they have tried it most, and where the
people are best trained, they do sometimes get as much as 70 per cent of
those who vote on candidates to vote on the referendum; but generally,
as in Colorado, the vote at the same election upon the referendum
measures is not more than 50 per cent--sometimes as low as 25 or 20 per
cent--of those who vote for candidates. Why, in New York they were
voting as to whether they should have a constitutional convention, and
how did the total referendum vote compare with the total electorate? It
was just one-sixth of that total.
They have tried it in Switzerland. We get a good many of these new
nostrums from that country. They said in Switzerland, "These men vote
for candidates, they shall vote on referendums." What was the result?
The electors went up to the polls and solemnly put in tickets. When they
opened the ballots, they were blanks. What does that mean? It means that
the people themselves believe that they do not know how to vote on
those issues, and that such issues ought to be left to the agents whom
they select as competent persons to discuss and pass upon them in
accordance with the general principles that they have laid down in party
platforms. In Oregon, at the last Presidential election, the people were
invited to vote on thirty-one statutes, long, complicated statutes, and
in order to inform them, a book of two hundred and fifty closely printed
pages was published to tell them what the statutes meant.
I ask you, my friends, you who are studious, you who are earnest men who
would like to be a part of the people in determining what their policy
should be, I ask you to search yourselves and confess whether you would
have the patience to go through that book of two hundred and fifty
closely printed pages to find out what those acts meant? You would be in
active business, you would go down to the polls and say, "What is up
today?" You would be told: "Here are thirty-one statutes. Here are two
hundred and fifty pages that we would like to have you read in order
that you may determine how you are to vote on them." You would not do
it.
There was once a Senator from Oregon named Jonathan Bourne, who
advocated all this system of more democracy. He served one term in the
Senate and then sent word back to his constituents that he was not
coming home at the time of the primary. He said that he was not on
trial, for a man who had worked as hard as he had for the people could
not be on trial. Instead, he said, it was the people of Oregon who were
on trial, to say whether they appreciated a service like his. They did
not stand the test, and he was defeated at the primary. Then he
concluded that after all he would have to forgive them and take pity on
their blindness. So he went out to Oregon and ran on another ticket to
give them the benefit of his service. But still they resisted the acid
test. He himself went to the polls to vote at this election where there
were thirty-one statutes to be approved or rejected. How many of the
thirty-one submitted to him do you suppose he voted for? The newspapers
reported him as admitting that he voted on just three, and the other
twenty-eight he left to fate. Now, gentlemen, is not that a
demonstration? Is not that a _reductio ad absurdum_ for this system of
pure and direct democracy?