No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of America must each
time make a fresh appeal to our imaginations. For centuries, indeed from
the beginning, the face of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the
routes of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east. The
Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, suddenly, the conquest of
Constantinople by the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe had
either to face about or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea
at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was
twice as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had expected,
the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent. In that part of
the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its
history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization;
here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.
Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to excite the emotion of
all who consider its strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful
histories of the earth might be contrived without the imagination daring
to conceive such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until the
fulness of time had come for a new start in civilization. A mere sea
captain's ambition to trace a new trade route gave way to a moral
adventure for humanity. The race was to found a new order here on this
delectable land, which no man approached without receiving, as the old
voyagers relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers
and murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. The hemisphere lay
waiting to be touched with life,--life from the old centres of living,
surely, but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weariness, so as to be
fit for the virgin purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the
imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel which once only
in all history could be vouchsafed.
One other thing only compares with it; only one other thing touches the
springs of emotion as does the picture of the ships of Columbus drawing
near the bright shores,--and that is the thought of the choke in the
throat of the immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at
the land where he has been taught to believe he in his turn shall find an
earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the heartaches of the
old life, and enter into the fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has
not every ship that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes
of generation after generation of the oppressed of other lands? How always
have men's hearts beat as they saw the coast of America rise to their
view! How it has always seemed to them that the dweller there would at
last be rid of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which
had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there realize the full
fruition of his sense of honest manhood, would there be one of a great
body of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive one another, but
seeking to accomplish the general good!
What was in the writings of the men who founded America,--to serve the
selfish interests of America? Do you find that in their writings? No; to
serve the cause of humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up
their standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon of
encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men came thronging to
these shores with an expectancy that never existed before, with a
confidence they never dared feel before, and found here for generations
together a haven of peace, of opportunity, of equality.
God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs we may recover
the standards and repeat the achievements of that heroic age!
For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it was. Our relations
one with another have been profoundly modified by the new agencies of
rapid communication and transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate
life, widen communities, fuse interests, and complicate all the processes
of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new
whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned
to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has
become a somewhat different matter. It cannot,--eternal principle that it
is,--it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps
it is only revealing its deeper meaning.
* * * * *
What is liberty?
I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose
that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that
I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every
time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and
the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several
parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them
all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with
absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment
with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is
let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully
and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.
What it liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you
mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction
is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a
boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we
mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how
perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her
sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and
stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how
instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once
more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and
human activities and human energies.
Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals
and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those
institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than
ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the
thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind
what makes all the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; there are many
more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is
harder to keep everything adjusted,--and harder to find out where the
trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.
You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in
those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our
government was that the best government consisted in as little governing
as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still
intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual
activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to
free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day
he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great
confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let
him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he
has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the
assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that
he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful
interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be
no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the
trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program
of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative
merely.
* * * * *
Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we preserving freedom
in this land of ours, the hope of all the earth?
Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to which the
fathers consecrated it,--have we maintained them, realizing them, as each
generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man
is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear
aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated,
are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new
things and of not having done them?
The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a fair way of
failure,--tragic failure. And we stand in danger of utter failure yet
except we fulfil speedily the determination we have reached, to deal with
the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don't deceive
yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great interests which now
dominate our development. They are so great that it is almost an open
question whether the government of the United States can dominate them or
not. Go one step further, make their organized power permanent, and it may
be too late to turn back. The roads diverge at the point where we stand.
They stretch their vistas out to regions where they are very far separated
from one another; at the end of one is the old tiresome scene of
government tied up with special interests; and at the other shines the
liberating light of individual initiative, of individual liberty, of
individual freedom, the light of untrammeled enterprise. I believe that
that light shines out of the heavens itself that God has created. I
believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no
salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters.
Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by
trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of
enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of
the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there
are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United
States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether
we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough,
to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven't
had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance,
in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the
recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our
delegated authority.
I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs and of the
trusts, you are discussing the very lives of yourselves and your children.
I believe that I am preaching the very cause of some of the gentlemen whom
I am opposing when I preach the cause of free industry in the United
States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that bears the
inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted to gird it
entirely nature will take her revenge and the tree will die.
I do not believe that America is securely great because she has great men
in her now. America is great in proportion as she can make sure of having
great men in the next generation. She is rich in her unborn children;
rich, that is to say, if those unborn children see the sun in a day of
opportunity, see the sun when they are free to exercise their energies as
they will. If they open their eyes in a land where there is no special
privilege, then we shall come into a new era of American greatness and
American liberty; but if they open their eyes in a country where they must
be employees or nothing, if they open their eyes in a land of merely
regulated monopoly, where all the conditions of industry are determined by
small groups of men, then they will see an America such as the founders of
this Republic would have wept to think of. The only hope is in the release
of the forces which philanthropic trust presidents want to monopolize.
Only the emancipation, the freeing and heartening of the vital energies of
all the people will redeem us. In all that I may have to do in public
affairs in the United States I am going to think of towns such as I have
seen in Indiana, towns of the old American pattern, that own and operate
their own industries, hopefully and happily. My thought is going to be
bent upon the multiplication of towns of that kind and the prevention of
the concentration of industry in this country in such a fashion and upon
such a scale that towns that own themselves will be impossible. You know
what the vitality of America consists of. Its vitality does not lie in New
York, nor in Chicago; it will not be sapped by anything that happens in
St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the
enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their
factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the
borders of the town; in the wealth which they extract from nature and
originate for themselves through the inventive genius characteristic of
all free American communities.
That is the wealth of America, and if America discourages the locality,
the community, the self-contained town, she will kill the nation. A nation
is as rich as her free communities; she is not as rich as her capital city
or her metropolis. The amount of money in Wall Street is no indication of
the wealth of the American people. That indication can be found only in
the fertility of the American mind and the productivity of American
industry everywhere throughout the United States. If America were not rich
and fertile, there would be no money in Wall Street. If Americans were not
vital and able to take care of themselves, the great money exchanges would
break down. The welfare, the very existence of the nation, rests at last
upon the great mass of the people; its prosperity depends at last upon the
spirit in which they go about their work in their several communities
throughout the broad land. In proportion as her towns and her
country-sides are happy and hopeful will America realize the high
ambitions which have marked her in the eyes of all the world.
The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the men and women who
do the daily work in our mines and factories, on our railroads, in our
offices and ports of trade, on our farms and on the sea, is the underlying
necessity of all prosperity. There can be nothing wholesome unless their
life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they are contented.
Their physical welfare affects the soundness of the whole nation. How
would it suit the prosperity of the United States, how would it suit
business, to have a people that went every day sadly or sullenly to their
work? How would the future look to you if you felt that the aspiration had
gone out of most men, the confidence of success, the hope that they might
improve their condition? Do you not see that just so soon as the old
self-confidence of America, just so soon as her old boasted advantage of
individual liberty and opportunity, is taken away, all the energy of her
people begins to subside, to slacken, to grow loose and pulpy, without
fibre, and men simply cast about to see that the day does not end
disastrously with them?
So we must put heart into the people by taking the heartlessness out of
politics, business, and industry. We have got to make politics a thing in
which an honest man can take his part with satisfaction because he knows
that his opinion will count as much as the next man's, and that the boss
and the interests have been dethroned. Business we have got to untrammel,
abolishing tariff favors, and railroad discrimination, and credit denials,
and all forms of unjust handicaps against the little man. Industry we have
got to humanize,--not through the trusts,--but through the direct action
of law guaranteeing protection against dangers and compensation for
injuries, guaranteeing sanitary conditions, proper hours, the right to
organize, and all the other things which the conscience of the country
demands as the workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our
people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the
vision of the open gates of opportunity for all. We have got to set the
energy and the initiative of this great people absolutely free, so that
the future of America will be greater than the past, so that the pride of
America will grow with achievement, so that America will know as she
advances from generation to generation that each brood of her sons is
greater and more enlightened than that which preceded it, know that she is
fulfilling the promise that she has made to mankind.
Such is the vision of some of us who now come to assist in its
realization. For we Democrats would not have endured this long burden of
exile if we had not seen a vision. We could have traded; we could have got
into the game; we could have surrendered and made terms; we could have
played the rôle of patrons to the men who wanted to dominate the interests
of the country,--and here and there gentlemen who pretended to be of us
did make those arrangements. They couldn't stand privation. You never can
stand it unless you have within you some imperishable food upon which to
sustain life and courage, the food of those visions of the spirit where a
table is set before us laden with palatable fruits, the fruits of hope,
the fruits of imagination, those invisible things of the spirit which are
the only things upon which we can sustain ourselves through this weary
world without fainting. We have carried in our minds, after you had
thought you had obscured and blurred them, the ideals of those men who
first set their foot upon America, those little bands who came to make a
foothold in the wilderness, because the great teeming nations that they
had left behind them had forgotten what human liberty was, liberty of
thought, liberty of religion, liberty of residence, liberty of action.
Since their day the meaning of liberty has deepened. But it has not ceased
to be a fundamental demand of the human spirit, a fundamental necessity
for the life of the soul. And the day is at hand when it shall be realized
on this consecrated soil,--a New Freedom,--a Liberty widened and deepened
to match the broadened life of man in modern America, restoring to him in
very truth the control of his government, throwing wide all gates of
lawful enterprise, unfettering his energies, and warming the generous
impulses of his heart,--a process of release, emancipation, and
inspiration, full of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome as the airs
that filled the sails of the caravels of Columbus and gave the promise and
boast of magnificent Opportunity in which America _dare not fail_.