There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are
discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular
fact is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years
ago.
We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has
broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was
twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have
changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with
our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political
formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents
taken out of a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to
a past age which men have almost forgotten. Things which used to be put
into the party platforms of ten years ago would sound antiquated if put
into a platform now. We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social
organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness
and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that
the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the
convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has
grown infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon questions of
governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It
centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of society
itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development has
run so fast and so far along the lines sketched in the earlier day of
constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has
piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has
elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which
transcend the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the
world, that a new nation seems to have been created which the old formulas
do not fit or afford a vital interpretation of.
We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We have
come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we used to
do business,--when we do not carry on any of the operations of
manufacture, sale, transportation, or communication as men used to carry
them on. There is a sense in which in our day the individual has been
submerged. In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not
as partners in the old way in which they used to work, but generally as
employees,--in a higher or lower grade,--of great corporations. There was
a time when corporations played a very minor part in our business affairs,
but now they play the chief part, and most men are the servants of
corporations.
You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have
in no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of
the corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not
to do, you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders,
and you have oftentimes with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing
of things which you know are against the public interest. Your
individuality is swallowed up in the individuality and purpose of a great
organization.
It is true that, while most men are thus submerged in the corporation, a
few, a very few, are exalted to a power which as individuals they could
never have wielded. Through the great organizations of which they are the
heads, a few are enabled to play a part unprecedented by anything in
history in the control of the business operations of the country and in
the determination of the happiness of great numbers of people.
Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another
as individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church, and the
State, institutions which associated men in certain wide circles of
relationship. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work,
in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another.
To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great
impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men.
Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human
relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.
* * * * *
In this new age we find, for instance, that our laws with regard to the
relations of employer and employee are in many respects wholly antiquated
and impossible. They were framed for another age, which nobody now living
remembers, which is, indeed, so remote from our life that it would be
difficult for many of us to understand it if it were described to us. The
employer is now generally a corporation or a huge company of some kind;
the employee is one of hundreds or of thousands brought together, not by
individual masters whom they know and with whom they have personal
relations, but by agents of one sort or another. Workingmen are marshaled
in great numbers for the performance of a multitude of particular tasks
under a common discipline. They generally use dangerous and powerful
machinery, over whose repair and renewal they have no control. New rules
must be devised with regard to their obligations and their rights, their
obligations to their employers and their responsibilities to one another.
Rules must be devised for their protection, for their compensation when
injured, for their support when disabled.
There is something very new and very big and very complex about these new
relations of capital and labor. A new economic society has sprung up, and
we must effect a new set of adjustments. We must not pit power against
weakness. The employer is generally, in our day, as I have said, not an
individual, but a powerful group; and yet the workingman when dealing with
his employer is still, under our existing law, an individual.
Why is it that we have a labor question at all? It is for the simple and
very sufficient reason that the laboring man and the employer are not
intimate associates now as they used to be in time past. Most of our laws
were formed in the age when employer and employees knew each other, knew
each other's characters, were associates with each other, dealt with each
other as man with man. That is no longer the case. You not only do not
come into personal contact with the men who have the supreme command in
those corporations, but it would be out of the question for you to do it.
Our modern corporations employ thousands, and in some instances hundreds
of thousands, of men. The only persons whom you see or deal with are local
superintendents or local representatives of a vast organization, which is
not like anything that the workingmen of the time in which our laws were
framed knew anything about. A little group of workingmen, seeing their
employer every day, dealing with him in a personal way, is one thing, and
the modern body of labor engaged as employees of the huge enterprises that
spread all over the country, dealing with men of whom they can form no
personal conception, is another thing. A very different thing. You never
saw a corporation, any more than you ever saw a government. Many a
workingman to-day never saw the body of men who are conducting the
industry in which he is employed. And they never saw him. What they know
about him is written in ledgers and books and letters, in the
correspondence of the office, in the reports of the superintendents. He is
a long way off from them.
So what we have to discuss is, not wrongs which individuals intentionally
do,--I do not believe there are a great many of those,--but the wrongs of
a system. I want to record my protest against any discussion of this
matter which would seem to indicate that there are bodies of our
fellow-citizens who are trying to grind us down and do us injustice. There
are some men of that sort. I don't know how they sleep o' nights, but
there are men of that kind. Thank God, they are not numerous. The truth
is, we are all caught in a great economic system which is heartless. The
modern corporation is not engaged in business as an individual. When we
deal with it, we deal with an impersonal element, an immaterial piece of
society. A modern corporation is a means of co-operation in the conduct of
an enterprise which is so big that no one man can conduct it, and which
the resources of no one man are sufficient to finance. A company is
formed; that company puts out a prospectus; the promoters expect to raise
a certain fund as capital stock. Well, how are they going to raise it?
They are going to raise it from the public in general, some of whom will
buy their stock. The moment that begins, there is formed--what? A joint
stock corporation. Men begin to pool their earnings, little piles, big
piles. A certain number of men are elected by the stockholders to be
directors, and these directors elect a president. This president is the
head of the undertaking, and the directors are its managers.
Now, do the workingmen employed by that stock corporation deal with that
president and those directors? Not at all. Does the public deal with that
president and that board of directors? It does not. Can anybody bring them
to account? It is next to impossible to do so. If you undertake it you
will find it a game of hide and seek, with the objects of your search
taking refuge now behind the tree of their individual personality, now
behind that of their corporate irresponsibility.
And do our laws take note of this curious state of things? Do they even
attempt to distinguish between a man's act as a corporation director and
as an individual? They do not. Our laws still deal with us on the basis of
the old system. The law is still living in the dead past which we have
left behind. This is evident, for instance, with regard to the matter of
employers' liability for workingmen's injuries. Suppose that a
superintendent wants a workman to use a certain piece of machinery which
it is not safe for him to use, and that the workman is injured by that
piece of machinery. Some of our courts have held that the superintendent
is a fellow-servant, or, as the law states it, a fellow-employee, and
that, therefore, the man cannot recover damages for his injury. The
superintendent who probably engaged the man is not his employer. Who is
his employer? And whose negligence could conceivably come in there? The
board of directors did not tell the employee to use that piece of
machinery; and the president of the corporation did not tell him to use
that piece of machinery. And so forth. Don't you see by that theory that a
man never can get redress for negligence on the part of the employer? When
I hear judges reason upon the analogy of the relationships that used to
exist between workmen and their employers a generation ago, I wonder if
they have not opened their eyes to the modern world. You know, we have a
right to expect that judges will have their eyes open, even though the law
which they administer hasn't awakened.
Yet that is but a single small detail illustrative of the difficulties we
are in because we have not adjusted the law to the facts of the new order.
* * * * *
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me
privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of
commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so
watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better
not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.
They know that America is not a place of which it can be said, as it used
to be, that a man may choose his own calling and pursue it just as far as
his abilities enable him to pursue it; because to-day, if he enters
certain fields, there are organizations which will use means against him
that will prevent his building up a business which they do not want to
have built up; organizations that will see to it that the ground is cut
from under him and the markets shut against him. For if he begins to sell
to certain retail dealers, to any retail dealers, the monopoly will refuse
to sell to those dealers, and those dealers, afraid, will not buy the new
man's wares.
And this is the country which has lifted to the admiration of the world
its ideals of absolutely free opportunity, where no man is supposed to be
under any limitation except the limitations of his character and of his
mind; where there is supposed to be no distinction of class, no
distinction of blood, no distinction of social status, but where men win
or lose on their merits.
I lay it very close to my own conscience as a public man whether we can
any longer stand at our doors and welcome all newcomers upon those terms.
American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is
not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get
into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow.
Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from
crushing the weak. That is the reason, and because the strong have crushed
the weak the strong dominate the industry and the economic life of this
country. No man can deny that the lines of endeavor have more and more
narrowed and stiffened; no man who knows anything about the development of
industry in this country can have failed to observe that the larger kinds
of credit are more and more difficult to obtain, unless you obtain them
upon the terms of uniting your efforts with those who already control the
industries of the country; and nobody can fail to observe that any man
who tries to set himself up in competition with any process of manufacture
which has been taken under the control of large combinations of capital
will presently find himself either squeezed out or obliged to sell and
allow himself to be absorbed.
There is a great deal that needs reconstruction in the United States. I
should like to take a census of the business men,--I mean the rank and
file of the business men,--as to whether they think that business
conditions in this country, or rather whether the organization of business
in this country, is satisfactory or not. I know what they would say if
they dared. If they could vote secretly they would vote overwhelmingly
that the present organization of business was meant for the big fellows
and was not meant for the little fellows; that it was meant for those who
are at the top and was meant to exclude those who are at the bottom; that
it was meant to shut out beginners, to prevent new entries in the race, to
prevent the building up of competitive enterprises that would interfere
with the monopolies which the great trusts have built up.
What this country needs above everything else is a body of laws which will
look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already
made. Because the men who are already made are not going to live
indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to leave sons as able
and as honest as they are.
The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new
enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted workingman makes
his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes, that
presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope and
character,--that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the
processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity. Its
members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms me is that they
are not _originating_ prosperity. No country can afford to have its
prosperity originated by a small controlling class. The treasury of
America does not lie in the brains of the small body of men now in
control of the great enterprises that have been concentrated under the
direction of a very small number of persons. The treasury of America lies
in those ambitions, those energies, that cannot be restricted to a special
favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the
originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every
country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks
of those already famous and powerful and in control.
There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which
enables a small number of men who control the government to get favors
from the government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from equal
business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of control that
will presently dominate every industry in the country, and so make men
forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when America was
to be seen in every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces
on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the
mountain-sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and eager men were
everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not looking to a distant
city to find out what they might do, but looking about among their
neighbors, finding credit according to their character, not according to
their connections, finding credit in proportion to what was known to be in
them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held that
were approved where they were not known. In order to start an enterprise
now, you have to be authenticated, in a perfectly impersonal way, not
according to yourself, but according to what you own that somebody else
approves of your owning. You cannot begin such an enterprise as those that
have made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded
in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that freedom?
That is dependence, not freedom.
We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that
all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform, and
say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal
of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with,
except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government
was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the
idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. But we are coming now to realize
that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old
conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions
under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for
us to live.
Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that every
family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family had its own
little premises, that every family was separated in its life from every
other family. That is no longer the case in our great cities. Families
live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors; they are piled
layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of our crowded districts,
and not only are they piled layer upon layer, but they are associated room
by room, so that there is in every room, sometimes, in our congested
districts, a separate family. In some foreign countries they have made
much more progress than we in handling these things. In the city of
Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of the model cities of the world),
they have made up their minds that the entries and the hallways of great
tenements are public streets. Therefore, the policeman goes up the
stairway, and patrols the corridors; the lighting department of the city
sees to it that the halls are abundantly lighted. The city does not
deceive itself into supposing that that great building is a unit from
which the police are to keep out and the civic authority to be excluded,
but it says: "These are public highways, and light is needed in them, and
control by the authority of the city."
I liken that to our great modern industrial enterprises. A corporation is
very like a large tenement house; it isn't the premises of a single
commercial family; it is just as much a public affair as a tenement house
is a network of public highways.
When you offer the securities of a great corporation to anybody who wishes
to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the inspection of
everybody who wants to purchase. There must, to follow out the figure of
the tenement house, be lights along the corridors, there must be police
patrolling the openings, there must be inspection wherever it is known
that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises. If
we believe that fraud lies in wait for us, we must have the means of
determining whether our suspicions are well founded or not. Similarly, the
treatment of labor by the great corporations is not what it was in
Jefferson's time. Whenever bodies of men employ bodies of men, it ceases
to be a private relationship. So that when courts hold that workingmen
cannot peaceably dissuade other workingmen from taking employment, as was
held in a notable case in New Jersey, they simply show that their minds
and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.
Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to come
into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along dark
corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the bowels of
the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole nation, and when
it came about that no individual owned these mines, that they were owned
by great stock companies, then all the old analogies absolutely collapsed
and it became the right of the government to go down into these mines to
see whether human beings were properly treated in them or not; to see
whether accidents were properly safeguarded against; to see whether modern
economical methods of using these inestimable riches of the earth were
followed or were not followed. If somebody puts a derrick improperly
secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the
government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so
secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the
heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise, in these great beehives where
in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the
government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may
be, to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something
to breathe.
These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find
many more things out of joint.
* * * * *
One of the most alarming phenomena of the time,--or rather it would be
alarming if the nation had not awakened to it and shown its determination
to control it,--one of the most significant signs of the new social era is
the degree to which government has become associated with business. I
speak, for the moment, of the control over the government exercised by Big
Business. Behind the whole subject, of course, is the truth that, in the
new order, government and business must be associated closely. But that
association is at present of a nature absolutely intolerable; the
precedence is wrong, the association is upside down. Our government has
been for the past few years under the control of heads of great allied
corporations with special interests. It has not controlled these interests
and assigned them a proper place in the whole system of business; it has
submitted itself to their control. As a result, there have grown up
vicious systems and schemes of governmental favoritism (the most obvious
being the extravagant tariff), far-reaching in effect upon the whole
fabric of life, touching to his injury every inhabitant of the land,
laying unfair and impossible handicaps upon competitors, imposing taxes in
every direction, stifling everywhere the free spirit of American
enterprise.
Now this has come about naturally; as we go on we shall see how very
naturally. It is no use denouncing anybody, or anything, except human
nature. Nevertheless, it is an intolerable thing that the government of
the republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should
have been captured by interests which are special and not general. In the
train of this capture follow the troops of scandals, wrongs, indecencies,
with which our politics swarm.
There are cities in America of whose government we are ashamed. There are
cities everywhere, in every part of the land, in which we feel that, not
the interests of the public, but the interests of special privileges, of
selfish men, are served; where contracts take precedence over public
interest. Not only in big cities is this the case. Have you not noticed
the growth of socialistic sentiment in the smaller towns? Not many months
ago I stopped at a little town in Nebraska, and while my train lingered I
met on the platform a very engaging young fellow dressed in overalls who
introduced himself to me as the mayor of the town, and added that he was
a Socialist. I said, "What does that mean? Does that mean that this town
is socialistic?" "No, sir," he said; "I have not deceived myself; the vote
by which I was elected was about 20 per cent. socialistic and 80 per cent.
protest." It was protest against the treachery to the people of those who
led both the other parties of that town.
All over the Union people are coming to feel that they have no control
over the course of affairs. I live in one of the greatest States in the
union, which was at one time in slavery. Until two years ago we had
witnessed with increasing concern the growth in New Jersey of a spirit of
almost cynical despair. Men said: "We vote; we are offered the platform we
want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely
nothing." So they began to ask: "What is the use of voting? We know that
the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and
therefore it is useless to turn in either direction."
This is not confined to some of the state governments and those of some of
the towns and cities. We know that something intervenes between the
people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at
Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.
Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?
Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see
reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.
There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence. She boasted
that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular government; but now
she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are at work forces which
she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.
Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who
did not care for the nation, could put this whole country into a flame?
Don't you know that this country from one end to the other believes that
something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without
conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way. Follow me!"--and lead
in paths of destruction!
The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.
I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little
of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to say, as
if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every
age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change
than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for
change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as
in this in which we are taking part.
The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over,
in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of
its very elements; is questioning its oldest practices as freely as its
newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it
stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which
only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous co-operation can
hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct
economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political
society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification
in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or
more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic
and political practice.
We stand in the presence of a revolution,--not a bloody revolution;
America is not given to the spilling of blood,--but a silent revolution,
whereby America will insist upon recovering in practice those ideals which
she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to the
general interest and not to special interests.
We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative
statesmanship as no age has done since that great age in which we set up
the government under which we live, that government which was the
admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it
which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our
institutions and preach revolution against them. I do not fear revolution.
I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its self-possession.
Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came when we put aside the
crude government of the Confederation and created the great Federal Union
which governs individuals, not States, and which has been these hundred
and thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some radical changes we must
make in our law and practice. Some reconstructions we must push forward,
which a new age and new circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all
in calm and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots.
I do not speak of these things in apprehension, because all is open and
above-board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret. The
whole stupendous program must be publicly planned and canvassed. Good
temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful
and unselfish men, the habit of co-operation and of compromise which has
been bred in us by long years of free government, in which reason rather
than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and
universal debate, will enable us to win through to still another great age
without violence.