Social sciences; United States -- Politics and government -- 1909-1913
First and foremost we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound
ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient
reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stern exposure
of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked
man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved
in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to
prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into
a terror-struck defense of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon
those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above
all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone
homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin
because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no
crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and
unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential
that we should wrest the control of the Government out of the hands of
rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of
their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means
adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern
business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because
of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors
in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to
put the control of the Government into the hands of demagogues and
visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing
thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with,
as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny
of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant
people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of
big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it
would make no more difference that one was called individualism, and
the other collectivism, than it made in French history whether tyranny
was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a
Committee of National Safety, or of a King.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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