Proceedings of the New York Historical Association [1906]New York State Historical Association. Meeting
History
Proceedings of the New York Historical Association [1906]
New York State Historical Association. Meeting
New York (State) -- History -- Periodicals; New York State Historical Association -- Periodicals
The reaction, if there be one, is moral and spiritual, rather than
political. The American people have been densely absorbed in the
material development of our wonderful country. The task has been a huge
one. So far as it has been completed, it has been magnificently done.
If we have seemed to worship the Golden Calf, we may find in due time
how unsatisfying wealth-gathering is. If at present the consumer seems
to be throttled by the trust-magnate, on one hand, and the labor-trust
on the other, each monopoly working to the common purpose of keeping up
prices to be paid by the consumer, the remedy is in his own hands. It
is not in riot, revolution, anarchy, by frenzied declamations against
those who are doing only what nine-tenths of the human kind would do for
themselves, if opportunity were afforded; but by using the power which
free government gives to the people, and correcting the evils by what
Gladstone called "the resources of civilization." Out of the roar and
brawl of the times will come a sharp examination into the system of laws
which permit the accumulation of stupendous fortunes by the "cornering"
of a commodity which human necessities require; by shrewd manipulations
of tariff, patent, corporation and transportation laws, and by other
anti-social agencies. The people, the consumers, create all the
legislatures, appoint all the judges, execute all the laws. The fortunes
of the rich exist because the people so allow. "A breath can make them,
and a breath has made," All the creature-comforts, all culture-conquests
have been evolved by the people. It is not by a reversion to Asiatic
paternalism, or by the assumption of all industrial agencies by the
State, which is the present aim of Socialism, or by a retreat into
aboriginal lawlessness and intense selfishness--which Anarchism would
result in--that social relief will come.
The American people will work these problems out and will work them out
right. "The glory of the sum of things" does not come with a flash.
There are always remedial agencies actively at work. They have saved
civilization again and again, when the economic order seemed about to
break down, when effete governments have fallen in cataclysms which have
almost wrecked the social fabric; when mankind seemed to be wandering in
a wilderness of ignorance, doubt and despair. Human nature is a tough,
elastic, expansive article. If common sense is a product of the ages,
so is what is termed "the corporate morality" of the race. Everything
makes for what Burke said he loved, "a manly, moral, regulated liberty."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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