The Survey, Volume 30, Number 1, April 5, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 1, April 5, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
President Wilson voices this new feeling best.
"Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government
may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health
of the nation, the health of its men and its women and its
children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence.
This no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice,
not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality of
opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if
men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their
very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social
processes which they cannot alter, control, or singly cope with.
Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or
damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep
sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and
laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are
powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the
very business of justice and legal efficiency.
"These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the
others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected,
fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This
is the high enterprise of the new day; to lift everything that
concerns our life as a nation to the light that shines from the
hearth-fire of every man's conscience and vision of the right. It
is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is
inconceivable that we should do it in ignorance of the facts as
they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall
deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified,
not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon;
and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit
of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and
knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of
excursions whither they cannot tell. Justice, and only justice,
shall always be our motto.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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