The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a people — John Shaqi
The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a peopleWilson, Woodrow
History
The new freedom : $b a call for the emancipation of the generous energies of a people
Wilson, Woodrow
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
When you offer the securities of a great corporation to anybody who wishes
to purchase them, you must open that corporation to the inspection of
everybody who wants to purchase. There must, to follow out the figure of
the tenement house, be lights along the corridors, there must be police
patrolling the openings, there must be inspection wherever it is known
that men may be deceived with regard to the contents of the premises. If
we believe that fraud lies in wait for us, we must have the means of
determining whether our suspicions are well founded or not. Similarly, the
treatment of labor by the great corporations is not what it was in
Jefferson's time. Whenever bodies of men employ bodies of men, it ceases
to be a private relationship. So that when courts hold that workingmen
cannot peaceably dissuade other workingmen from taking employment, as was
held in a notable case in New Jersey, they simply show that their minds
and understandings are lingering in an age which has passed away. This
dealing of great bodies of men with other bodies of men is a matter of
public scrutiny, and should be a matter of public regulation.
Similarly, it was no business of the law in the time of Jefferson to come
into my house and see how I kept house. But when my house, when my
so-called private property, became a great mine, and men went along dark
corridors amidst every kind of danger in order to dig out of the bowels of
the earth things necessary for the industries of a whole nation, and when
it came about that no individual owned these mines, that they were owned
by great stock companies, then all the old analogies absolutely collapsed
and it became the right of the government to go down into these mines to
see whether human beings were properly treated in them or not; to see
whether accidents were properly safeguarded against; to see whether modern
economical methods of using these inestimable riches of the earth were
followed or were not followed. If somebody puts a derrick improperly
secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the
government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so
secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the
heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise, in these great beehives where
in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the
government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may
be, to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something
to breathe.
These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find
many more things out of joint.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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