Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate BiographyThayer, William Roscoe
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography
Thayer, William Roscoe
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
So it fell out that before the end of the nineteenth century a
great gulf was opening between Labor and Capital. Now a community
can thrive only when all its classes feel that they have COMMON
interests; but since American Labor was largely composed of
foreigners, it acquired a double antagonism to Capital. It had
not only the supposed natural antagonism of employee to employer,
but also the further cause of misunderstanding, and hostility
even, which came from the foreignness of its members. Another
ominous condition arose. The United States ceased to be the Land
of Promise, where any hard-working and thrifty man could better
himself and even become rich. The gates of Opportunity were
closing. The free lands, which the Nation offered to any one who
would cultivate them, had mostly been taken up; the immigrant who
had been a laborer in Europe, was a laborer here. Moreover, the
political conditions in Europe often added to the burdens and
irritation caused by the industrial conditions there. And the
immigrant in coming to America brought with him all his
grievances, political not less than industrial. He was too
ignorant to discriminate; he could only feel. Anarchy and
Nihilism, which were his natural reaction against his despotic
oppressors in Germany and Russia, he went on cultivating here,
where, by the simple process of naturalization, he became
politically his own despot in a year or two.
But, of course, the very core of the feud which threatens to
disrupt modern civilization was the discovery that, in any final
adjustment, the POLITICAL did not suffice. What availed it for
the Taborer and the capitalist to be equal at the polls, for the
vote of one to count as much as the vote of the other, if the two
men were actually worlds apart in their social and industrial
lives? Equality must seem to the laborer a cruel deception and a
sham unless it results in equality in the distribution of wealth
and of opportunity. How this is to be attained I have never seen
satisfactorily stated; but the impossibility of realizing their
dreams, or the blank folly of doting on them, has never prevented
men from striving to obtain them. From this has resulted the
frantic pursuit, during a century and a quarter, of all sorts of
projects from Babuvism to Bolshevism, which, if they could not
install Utopia overnight, were at least calculated to destroy
Civilization as it is. The common feature of the propagandists of
all these doctrines seems to be the throwing-over of the Past;
not merely of the proved evils and inadequacies of the Past, but
of our conception of right and wrong, of morals, of human
relations, and of our duty towards the Eternal, which, having
sprung out of the Past, must be jettisoned in a fury of contempt.
In short, the destroyers of Society (writhing under the
immemorial sting of injustice, which they believed was wholly
caused by their privileged fellows, and not even in part inherent
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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