A Radical View of a Radical Policy, as
Expressed by a Well-Known
Radical of Chicago.
Publicists are generally agreed as to the meaning of the great changes now
progressing in American political sentiment. The country, we are informed,
after wrestling successfully with the problems of the accumulation of
wealth, is ready to concern itself with the equitable distribution of what
has been accumulated. We are growing rich almost too fast. We produce such
vast quantities of everything needed by mankind that we hear of
"production outrunning consumption."
In this new condition Clarence S. Darrow, the well-known Chicago lawyer
and student of economics, sees the explanation of the growth of sentiment
favoring public ownership. Writing in the _International Quarterly_, he
takes advanced Radical ground as follows:
Public ownership sentiment has had a remarkable growth in
the United States during the last ten years. This sentiment
is one of the many manifestations of the deep conviction
that the present division of wealth is at once unjust and
absurd. All sorts of theories for the more equitable
distribution of wealth have found ready advocates on the
platform and in the press in every enlightened nation of the
world. However various the plans and schemes of social
change, it is beyond dispute that the tendency of all
nations has been toward a wider and completer collective
life. In every country in the world the people have been
constantly enlarging the functions and duties of the State,
and political organizations are more and more becoming
industrial institutions.
In Europe, municipal and even national ownership of public
utilities is no longer looked upon as radical or new, and
the rapid growth of these ideas abroad has had much to do
with sentiment in the United States.
The most casual student of social questions has likewise
seen the enormous fortunes that have been built up by the
private ownership of public utilities. The larger part of
all the stocks and bonds issued by public-service
corporations are based upon franchises and not on private
property. By this means the public is constantly and
systematically taxed upon its own property, and this vast
tax, in the shape of interest on bonds and dividends on
stock, is taken by a handful of exploiters and
stock-jobbers--who have thus contrived to build up private
fortunes from public wealth.