United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
We have already been provident in this great matter and supplied
ourselves with the instrumentalities of prompt adjustment. We have
created, in the Federal Trade Commission, a means of inquiry and of
accommodation in the field of commerce which ought both to cooerdinate
the enterprises of our traders and manufacturers and to remove the
barriers of misunderstanding and of a too technical interpretation of
the law. In the new Tariff Commission we have added another
instrumentality of observation and adjustment which promises to be
immediately serviceable. The Trade Commission substitutes counsel and
accommodation for the harsher processes of legal restraint, and the
Tariff Commission ought to substitute facts for prejudices and theories.
Our exporters have for some time had the advantage of working in the new
light thrown upon foreign markets and opportunities of trade by the
intelligent inquiries and activities of the Bureau of Foreign and
Domestic Commerce which the Democratic Congress so wisely created in
1912. The Tariff Commission completes the machinery by which we shall be
enabled to open up our legislative policy to the facts as they develop.
We can no longer indulge our traditional provincialism. We are to play a
leading part in the world drama whether we wish it or not. We shall
lend, not borrow; act for ourselves, not imitate or follow; organize and
initiate, not peep about merely to see where we may get in.
We have already formulated and agreed upon a policy of law which will
explicitly remove the ban now supposed to rest upon cooeperation amongst
our exporters in seeking and securing their proper place in the markets
of the world. The field will be free, the instrumentalities at hand. It
will only remain for the masters of enterprise amongst us to act in
energetic concert, and for the Government of the United States to insist
upon the maintenance throughout the world of those conditions of
fairness and of even-handed justice in the commercial dealings of the
nations with one another upon which, after all, in the last analysis,
the peace and ordered life of the world must ultimately depend.
At home also we must see to it that the men who plan and develop and
direct our business enterprises shall enjoy definite and settled
conditions of law, a policy accommodated to the freest progress. We have
set the just and necessary limits. We have put all kinds of unfair
competition under the ban and penalty of the law. We have barred
monopoly. These fatal and ugly things being excluded, we must now
quicken action and facilitate enterprise by every just means within our
choice. There will be peace in the business world, and, with peace,
revived confidence and life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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