is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account.
We speak of international law; but international law is something
wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital
difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for
the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to
obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience
as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as the
generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other
there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only
in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of
necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance
between it and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this
is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private
citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and
must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise
statesmen, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage
and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute
some other agency for force in the settlement of international
disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the
nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the
great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to
the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that
in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to
resent wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty
morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether
among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals
should be high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to
realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace
and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice
though the whole world came in arms against him.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two
republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship
between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere
and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to
us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the
history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar
power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength,
which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever
with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her
to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of
brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any
of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it
was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through
the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing
of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so
stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for
it. You have had a great past. I believe that you will have a great
future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation
which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names,
and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the
reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given name in order to achieve
some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the
history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The
rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the
rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and
the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a
bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn
be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the
apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the
tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all
that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of
“liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended
upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary
so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the
use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word
“order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is
despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed
by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private
corporation.
Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt
in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very
class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of
the second republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil
tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as
to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a
dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances
in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until
there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny
and all public order have disappeared together. The second empire in
France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows
how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government
as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered
it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did
not produce another violent reaction, but left the French republic
standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be
ruled by a king as by a mob.
Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much
people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their
unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at
Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a
century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or
sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of
acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name
of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other
was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the
direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and
cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when
those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All
forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.
We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching
and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the
men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin
gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger
from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore
be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social
problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought
lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved
democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle
course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We
shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar
middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist,
between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong
done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the
apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement
of the eighth commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”
First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stem exposure
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
a terror-struck defence of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
that we should wrest the control of the government out of the hands of
rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
put the control of the government into the hands of demagogues and
visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
would make no more difference that one was called individualism and the
other collectivism than it made in French history whether tyranny was
exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a committee
of national safety, or of a king.
The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical,
are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of
the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his
own devices he will make such an exhibition of brutal and selfish
greed as to utterly discredit the entire system of government by
individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will
he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by
the state that any abuses connected with the untrammelled control of
all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We
can not afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits.
It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual
initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that
we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our
complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the
functions of the state. It has been shown beyond power of refutation
that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction
of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” can
not be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see
that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy
buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted
and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may
be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private
monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as it would be
crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with
everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets
of the extreme Socialists.
In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very
reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they
combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing
with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own
which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade
the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential
both to the material and moral progress of the country that these
forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the
genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly
materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as
exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the
refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth.
What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an
English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr.
Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex
American character; it would have been marvellous if a stranger of his
slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to
put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately
after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):
“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left
wholly wanting. Little is done by the state. All is left to the
initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained
partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and
partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the
law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves
under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust
in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It
is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and
successful combinations to override the public interest. All such
corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears
almost a return to savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty
against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies,
nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than
horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to
oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to
ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be
bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion
should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon
corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious
as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members
in the legislative bodies--pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives,
pocket senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial
progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless
greed on one side and lawless brutality on the other--the outlook
frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or
imbittering these antagonisms--still more, on the fortune of the people
in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get
dollars is the one end of life--it depends whether the future of the
United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster.
It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may
become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will
furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”
Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to
recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as
a modern business condition the curious result will follow that all
power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average
man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the state took
absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big
corporations each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all
competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as
dependent upon it as if the government had assumed complete charge of
the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for
the government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more
unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple
truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness
in the business world are either insincere or blind to the facts when
they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and
individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism,
save in a very few able and powerful men who tend to become dictators
in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American
president tended to become a dictator in the political world.
Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the
state to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable
result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who
is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete
control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which
alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his
fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the
great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much
as it would be crushed out by state control. The very reason why we
object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative
and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the
reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control
in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an
antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total
lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business
world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be
the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.
There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially
the big corporations, in the industrial world in the interest of
our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and
therefore it must be administered by executive officers and not by
lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done the agitation to increase
out of all measure the share of the government in this work will
receive an enormous impetus. The movement for government control of the
great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than
a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty.
On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in
the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small
means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the
peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the
mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge, irresponsible
corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of government
agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the
streets who wishes liberty from police interference.
But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to learn,
and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is
not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one
end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very
unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as
objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of
the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots,”
and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against
a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what
in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation
enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal
arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same
thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other.
That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same
eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other
to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the
first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his
own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children and
those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom it is
his duty to care food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education,
a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements, and the
opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit them in
their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has reached
this point, which, of course, will vary greatly under different
conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become
immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically
right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it is emphatically the first duty
of each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously
phrased it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first
duty to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great
deal; and after the living has been earned getting dollars should come
far behind many other duties.
Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in
this country, where assault is made, not upon evil wherever found,
but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class.
The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is
everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is
quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with
raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an
exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper
whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn,
or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient
manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which
by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred
against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against
every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and
ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or
a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either
profligacy or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance.
This country can not afford to let its conscience grow warped and
twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions.
We must draw the line, not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We
must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether
he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the
man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done
in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence
among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and
greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.
* * * * *