Social problems -- United States; United States -- Politics and government; United States -- Social conditions
In this country, nowadays, capital has a National and not a State use.
The great corporations which are managed and largely owned in the older
States are those which are most in evidence in developing and using the
mines and water powers and forests of the new Territories and new
States, from Alaska to Arizona. I have been genuinely amused during the
past two months at having arguments presented to me on behalf of certain
rich men from New York and Ohio, for instance, as to why Colorado and
other Rocky Mountain States should manage their own water power sites.
Now I am sure that those men, according to their lights, are good
citizens; but, naturally enough, their special interest obscures their
sense of the public need; and as their object is to escape efficient
control, they clamor to be put under the State instead of under the
Nation. If we are foolish enough to grant their requests, we shall have
ourselves to blame when we wake up to find that we have permitted
another privilege to intrench itself, and another portion of what should
be kept for the public good to be turned over to individuals for
purposes of private enrichment.
Our people have for many years proceeded upon the assumption that the
Nation controls the public land. The coal should be kept for the people,
and those who mine it should pay part of the profit back to the people.
Remember also that many of the men who protest loudly against effective
National action would be the first to turn round and protest against the
State action if such action in its turn became effective, and would then
unhesitatingly invoke the law to show that the State had no
Constitutional power to act. I am a strong believer in efficient
National action; and if there is one thing which I abhor more than
another, it is the creation by legislative, by executive, or by judicial
action of a neutral ground in which neither the State nor the Nation has
power, and which can serve as a place of refuge for the lawless man, and
especially for the lawless man of great wealth, who can hire the best
legal counsel to advise him how to keep his abiding-place equally
distant from the uncertain frontier of both State and National power.
Let me illustrate what I mean by a reference to two concrete cases. The
first is the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Knight
Sugar Trust case. This was really a decision rendering it exceedingly
difficult for the people to devise any method of controlling and
regulating the business use of great capital in inter-State commerce. It
was a decision nominally against National rights, but really against
popular rights, against the democratic principle of government by the
people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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