Social problems -- United States; United States -- Politics and government; United States -- Social conditions
thoroughgoing governmental control as will absolutely safeguard every
right of the public. Moreover, one of the most sinister manifestations
of great corporate wealth during recent years has been its tendency to
interfere and dominate in politics.
It is not merely that we want to see the game played fairly. We also
want to see the rules changed, so that there shall be both less
opportunity and less temptation to cheat, and less chance for some few
people to gain a profit to which either they are not entitled at all, or
else which is so enormous as to be greatly in excess of what they
deserve, even though their services have been great. We wish to do away
with the profit that comes from the illegitimate exercise of cunning and
craft. We also wish to secure a measurable equality of opportunity, a
measurable equality of reward for services of similar value. To do all
this, two mutually supplementary movements are necessary. On the one
hand, there must be—I think there now is—a genuine and permanent moral
awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration
really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the
social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to
purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent.
We pride ourselves upon being a practical people, and therefore we
should not be merely empirical in seeking to bring about results. We
must set the end in view as the goal; and then, instead of making a
fetish of some particular kind of means, we should adopt whatever
honorable means will best accomplish the end. In so far as unrestricted
individual liberty brings the best results, we should encourage it. But
when a point is reached where this complete lack of restriction on
individual liberty fails to achieve the best results, then, on behalf of
the whole people, we should exercise the collective power of the people,
through the State Legislatures in matters of purely local concern, and
through the National Legislature when the purpose is so big that only
National action can achieve it. There are good people who, being
discontented with present-day conditions, think that these conditions
can be cured by a return to what they call the “principles of the
fathers.” In so far as we have departed from the standards of lofty
integrity in public and private life to which the greatest men among the
founders of the Republic adhered, why, of course, we should return to
these principles. We must always remember that no system of legislation
can accomplish anything unless back of it we have the right type of
National character; unless we have ideals to which our practice
measurably conforms. But to go back to the governmental theories of a
hundred years ago would accomplish nothing whatever; for it was under
the conditions of unrestricted individualism and freedom from Government
interference, countenanced by those theories, that the trusts grew up,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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