In that sage and veracious chronicle, "Alice Through the Looking-Glass,"
it is recounted how, on a noteworthy occasion, the little heroine is
seized by the Red Chess Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They
run until both of them are out of breath; then they stop, and Alice looks
around her and says, "Why, we are just where we were when we started!"
"Oh, yes," says the Red Queen; "you have to run twice as fast as that to
get anywhere else."
That is a parable of progress. The laws of this country have not kept up
with the change of economic circumstances in this country; they have not
kept up with the change of political circumstances; and therefore we are
not even where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we
are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions,
before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this
great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And
we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in
order to get anywhere else.
I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason,
because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the
economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as
other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts
of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will
always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your
laws to the facts, so much the worse for the laws, not for the facts,
because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which
runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the
will-o'-the-wisps of imaginative projects.
Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is
in a situation to which we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are still
meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily
adjusted to business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust
them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we must; there is no choice.
If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is
damaged; because the law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the
expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered
the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted
interests as they have arisen and have changed toward one another.
Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The
system set up by our law and our usage doesn't work,--or at least it can't
be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure
of labor and pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has
got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests.
An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
There are serious things to do. Does any man doubt the great discontent
in this country? Does any man doubt that there are grounds and
justifications for discontent? Do we dare stand still? Within the past few
months we have witnessed (along with other strange political phenomena,
eloquently significant of popular uneasiness) on one side a doubling of
the Socialist vote and on the other the posting on dead walls and
hoardings all over the country of certain very attractive and diverting
bills warning citizens that it was "better to be safe than sorry" and
advising them to "let well enough alone." Apparently a good many citizens
doubted whether the situation they were advised to let alone was really
well enough, and concluded that they would take a chance of being sorry.
To me, these counsels of do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still
for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the hopeful,
energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise
enough to touch their own affairs without marring them, constitute the
most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans
are not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of
submission to the doctrine that prosperity is something that benevolent
magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their
self-reliance has been weakened, but not so utterly destroyed that you can
twit them about it. The American people are not naturally stand-patters.
Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.
There are, of course, Americans who have not yet heard that anything is
going on. The circus might come to town, have the big parade and go,
without their catching a sight of the camels or a note of the calliope.
There are people, even Americans, who never move themselves or know that
anything else is moving.
A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida "cracker," as they call a
certain ne'er-do-weel portion of the population down there, when passing
through the State in a train, asked some one to point out a "cracker" to
him. The man asked replied, "Well, if you see something off in the woods
that looks brown, like a stump, you will know it is either a stump or a
cracker; if it moves, it is a stump."
Now, movement has no virtue in itself. Change is not worth while for its
own sake. I am not one of those who love variety for its own sake. If a
thing is good to-day, I should like to have it stay that way to-morrow.
Most of our calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way
they are. For example, if, when you got up this morning, you had forgotten
how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which
you do almost automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would
have to find out what you did yesterday. I am told by the psychologists
that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am
to-day, and that, therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able
to tally to-day with yesterday. If they do not tally, then I am confused;
I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell
me my name and where I came from.
I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am
not one of those who wish to change for the mere sake of variety. The only
men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who
filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect to-day,
and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that
will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which
will blot out all recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is
improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not like it,
then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to
justify the change.
It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient
distinction,--between mere change and improvement. Yet there is a class of
mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose
conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something,--it
mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the
energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life
does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in
going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The
direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.
All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going,
and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how
fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that
we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those
things that in my boyhood days we called "treadmills,"--a treadmill being
a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule
was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even
other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of
noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out
some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.
Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends
tried dynamite. It moved,--in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.
A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was
a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of
business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the
point about such men is that they have been bribed--not in the ordinary
meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have
achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and
therefore they have been put under bonds to see that that existing order
of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the _status quo_.
It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the
administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make
the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as
possible. Not because their fathers lacked character or intelligence or
knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their
advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch
with the processes of life; they had forgotten what it was to begin; they
had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be
dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the
bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the
creative, formative and progressive forces of society.
Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word
comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the
thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men
through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They
thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were
tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the
larger spear. "There were giants in those days." Now all that has altered.
We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in
comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress,
development,--those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past
and press onward to something new.
But what is progress going to do with the past, and with the present? How
is it going to treat them? With ignominy, or respect? Should it break with
them altogether, or rise out of them, with its roots still deep in the
older time? What attitude shall progressives take toward the existing
order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the
laws, and the courts?
Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the
ancient foundations of our institutions justified in their fear? If they
are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is
indeed true that we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so
carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very slowly and
very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. We ought,
therefore, to ask ourselves, first of all, whether thought in this country
is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which
we shall change the whole direction of our development?
I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely
plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe
that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a
_tabula rasa_ upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a
new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You
must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old
garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven
into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture
and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve
the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.
* * * * *
One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a
university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from
all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary
by their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by
which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was
my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been
devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century.
His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of
anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his
thought the thing I had been waiting for. He called my attention to the
fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend
to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example,
after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all
thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian
Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody
is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development
and accommodation to environment.
Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution
of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian
Theory. You have only to read the papers of _The Federalist_ to see that
fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of
the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the
organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,--how
by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their
orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and
the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.
They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its
modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had
any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a
Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had
copied Newton's description of the mechanism of the heavens.
The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true
scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,--the best way of
their age,--those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of
Nature,"--and then by way of afterthought,--"and of Nature's God." And
they constructed a government as they would have constructed an
orrery,--to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a
variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of
gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the
efficacy of "checks and balances."
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a
living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under
the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It
is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its
functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its
organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary,
its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response
to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of
purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men,
with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of
specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is
indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government
without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact,
whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political
constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a
living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must
develop.
All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when
"development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is
recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
* * * * *
Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of
Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell
against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom
that is going on to-day.
The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day.
It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms
into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for
the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the
circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written. It is an
eminently practical document, meant for the use of practical men; not a
thesis for philosophers, but a whip for tyrants; not a theory of
government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it into the
questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of
the sires who acted in response to its challenge.
What form does the contest between tyranny and freedom take to-day? What
is the special form of tyranny we now fight? How does it endanger the
rights of the people, and what do we mean to do in order to make our
contest against it effectual? What are to be the items of our new
declaration of independence?
By tyranny, as we now fight it, we mean control of the law, of legislation
and adjudication, by organizations which do not represent the people, by
means which are private and selfish. We mean, specifically, the conduct of
our affairs and the shaping of our legislation in the interest of special
bodies of capital and those who organize their use. We mean the alliance,
for this purpose, of political machines with selfish business. We mean the
exploitation of the people by legal and political means. We have seen many
of our governments under these influences cease to be representative
governments, cease to be governments representative of the people, and
become governments representative of special interests, controlled by
machines, which in their turn are not controlled by the people.
Sometimes, when I think of the growth of our economic system, it seems to
me as if, leaving our law just about where it was before any of the modern
inventions or developments took place, we had simply at haphazard extended
the family residence, added an office here and a workroom there, and a new
set of sleeping rooms there, built up higher on our foundations, and put
out little lean-tos on the side, until we have a structure that has no
character whatever. Now, the problem is to continue to live in the house
and yet change it.
Well, we are architects in our time, and our architects are also
engineers. We don't have to stop using a railroad terminal because a new
station is being built. We don't have to stop any of the processes of our
lives because we are rearranging the structures in which we conduct those
processes. What we have to undertake is to systematize the foundations of
the house, then to thread all the old parts of the structure with the
steel which will be laced together in modern fashion, accommodated to all
the modern knowledge of structural strength and elasticity, and then
slowly change the partitions, relay the walls, let in the light through
new apertures, improve the ventilation; until finally, a generation or two
from now, the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family
in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed,
where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected,
co-ordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature, not afraid of
any artificial storm, any imitation of thunder and lightning, knowing that
the foundations go down to the bedrock of principle, and knowing that
whenever they please they can change that plan again and accommodate it as
they please to the altering necessities of their lives.
But there are a great many men who don't like the idea. Some wit recently
said, in view of the fact that most of our American architects are trained
in a certain _École_ in Paris, that all American architecture in recent
years was either bizarre or "Beaux Arts." I think that our economic
architecture is decidedly bizarre; and I am afraid that there is a good
deal to learn about matters other than architecture from the same source
from which our architects have learned a great many things. I don't mean
the School of Fine Arts at Paris, but the experience of France; for from
the other side of the water men can now hold up against us the reproach
that we have not adjusted our lives to modern conditions to the same
extent that they have adjusted theirs. I was very much interested in some
of the reasons given by our friends across the Canadian border for being
very shy about the reciprocity arrangements. They said: "We are not sure
whither these arrangements will lead, and we don't care to associate too
closely with the economic conditions of the United States until those
conditions are as modern as ours." And when I resented it, and asked for
particulars, I had, in regard to many matters, to retire from the debate.
Because I found that they had adjusted their regulations of economic
development to conditions we had not yet found a way to meet in the United
States.
Well, we have started now at all events. The procession is under way. The
stand-patter doesn't know there is a procession. He is asleep in the back
part of his house. He doesn't know that the road is resounding with the
tramp of men going to the front. And when he wakes up, the country will be
empty. He will be deserted, and he will wonder what has happened. Nothing
has happened. The world has been going on. The world has a habit of going
on. The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won't go with it.
The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the
stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is
going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we
are good company; why doesn't he come along? We are not going to do him
any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the
slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the
whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each
other's faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have
to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about
with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at
last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind. We had said to all the
world, "America was created to break every kind of monopoly, and to set
men free, upon a footing of equality, upon a footing of opportunity, to
match their brains and their energies," and now we have proved that we
meant it.