Prophetic Voices About America

THE tone and spirit of American writing about America is much better than it used to be. As our foreign critics have ceased to be supercilious, we ourselves, it would seem, have ceased to be vainglorious. Here beside me are some half-dozen volumes of essays, lectures, and studies, all by Americans, all about the Republic, all fresh from the press.¹ In not one of them does the Eagle scream. Not one of the writers even claims that our great experiment of democracy is yet proved successful. None of them, it is true, are really pessimistic. A note of discouragement here and there is the worst one finds. But all acknowledge frankly the disappointments in our past, all face candidly the perplexities of our present; only one claims with confidence to have penetrated the clouds that shut out the future.

The writers are for the most part men entitled to a respectful attention. One is of the small group from which, in all human probability, we shall choose the next President. Another, his colleague in the cabinet, many of us would pronounce the best mind in the government, if not in our entire public life. Of the two, Secretary Root shows, I think, much the better literary instinct. Considered merely as serious prose about great topics, his addresses invite comparison with the writings of English rather than American public men, of whom so very few make a good appearance in print. Now and then, there is a kind of quiet depth of meaning in his sentences that actually reminds one a little of Lincoln. Secretary Taft has not such a gift; but he achieves a detachment, an air of thoughtful, disinterested concern about public affairs, as of an honest, well-bred gentleman, which one too often misses in the utterances of even our highest public officials.

Two presidents and two professors of universities maintain the usual large proportion of academic contribution to this as to all other topics about which books can be written. As it happens, both Secretary Taft and Secretary Root have taken occasion to point out the limitations of the academic point of view concerning affairs. According to the former, it has too great “certainty and severity; ” and Secretary Root, while setting the highest value on the public schools as opening the door to opportunity and service, admits a doubt “whether the higher academic education contributes much to capacity for political usefulness.” But the presidents of our greater universities become perforce men of affairs, however academic their ideals and training may be. President Butler seems in far greater danger of error from oratorical fervor and rhetorical facility than from any timid preciseness of scholarship. President Hadley has more of the academic quality in his style, and what may be a bit of New England acerbity as well; but his point of view is almost irreverently practical, common-sense, contemporaneous. And even to the mere professor, the mere scholar, however we may bow and smile him out of court when he begins to philosophize, we must concede a certain competency for investigations of facts, such as Professor Reinsch has made in his study of American legislatures, and such as constitutes the main part of Professor Smith’s study of the Constitution.

The last writer of our group, Mr. Upton Sinclair, is a socialist; he is also, it must be confessed, a decidedly sensational novelist. But in the company of two statesmen and four academic dignitaries we may venture, perhaps, to let him also say his say.

It is but just, indeed, that he or some other socialist should have a word; for hardly one of the others is content to leave socialism entirely alone. So much, at least, the socialist propaganda has accomplished ; conservative publicists, however they may reprobate it, do not treat it as negligible. Nor is their reprobation so strongly tinctured as it once was with contempt. Secretary Taft is, it is true, contemptuous of the mere “parlor socialist,” for whom, in fact, he reserves his most scornful word; but he will not deny sympathy to the socialistic impulse of men who have really suffered under our present economic arrangements. President Butler concedes to the propaganda both sincerity and ability, and is content with the refutation, effective perhaps, but rather worn, that socialism is an illogical attempt “to overcome man’s individual imperfections by adding them together.” Secretary Root ends a remarkable sentence, descriptive of the dangers which beset on either side the true course of popular government, by contrasting “the dreams of Utopia, to be realized by changing everything,” with “the reverence for the past that is horrified by changing anything; ” and later on, summing up the grounds of hopefulness, he takes comfort in the diminishing proportion of avowed socialists in the American labor unions.

On the whole, what is most striking in nearly all these animadversions on the Republic is the entirely serious way in which the writers address themselves, not perhaps to socialism itself, but to that aspect of American life which is most provocative of socialistic remonstrance. Were a socialist to read them all together, as I have done, he might well be tempted to quote them Kipling: —

For all have much to say of liberty. But it is a far cry from the kind of defense of liberty which they offer to the old defiances of kings and aristocracies with which we Americans began. Here is not a word, in fact, concerning tyranny of the old-fashioned sort. On the contrary, here is more than one vigorous assertion of the utter distinction, the contrast and incompatibility, indeed, between liberty and equality. Secretary Root’s declaration has been celebrated journalistically as extraordinary and as courageous. “After many years of struggle for the right of equality,” he remarks, “there is some reason to think that mankind is now entering upon a struggle for the right of inequality.” The phrasing is uncommonly good, but the contention is far from extraordinary, the commitment would hardly seem bold if the speaker were not a public man and an office-holder. On the contrary, this is the main thesis of President Butler in more than one of his papers, and he keeps iterating it as if he were discontent because he cannot find words violent enough to arouse us all to its axiomatic truth and its vital importance. Clearness on this point, he urges, is the essential distinction between a true and a false conception of democracy. “We must put behind us the fundamental fallacy that equality is demanded by justice. The contrary is the case. Justice demands inequality as a condition of liberty and as a means of rewarding each according to his merits and deserts.” And again: " The corner-stone of democracy is natural inequality, its ideal the selection of the most fit.”

The thought tempts to epigrammatic over-emphasis in the statement; and no doubt we Americans have often fallen into a slipshod neglect of such distinctions among ideals which, not long ago, we were disposed to consider peculiarly our own. To emphasize this particular distinction, even to over-emphasize it, may be a good way to get rid of whatever there may still be left in us of the old hazy bigotry. But are we not again befooling ourselves if we fancy the distinction a discovery, or if we try to make it broader and harder and faster than in truth it is ? President Butler, for instance, takes too little pains to point out that the equality he is contemning is equality of economic condition, not of privilege. He does not pause long enough to consider fully the claim that the denial of equality of industrial opportunity may utterly defeat that very ideal of liberty which he holds up to us as the essential and the summum bonum of democracy. On this point, his oratorical approach to the problem leaves him — and even Secretary Root may be a little open to the same criticism — decidedly at a disadvantage as compared with the least distinguished of our group.

Professor Smith’s deliberate account of the founding of our government — mainly a searching out of the old intrenchments of privilege in the Constitution — has led him on to a more careful qualification of his statements. The American doctrine of liberty, he points out, had its origin in economic conditions quite unlike those of to-day. It was in fact based on the assumption of equality of economic opportunity; and under the old industrial system of apprenticeship and private initiative, before the days of machinery and corporations, a practical equality of opportunity did in fact exist. If, therefore, as socialists claim, and as we all know to be in great measure true, the coming in of machinery and the concentration of capital in a few hands have destroyed equality of industrial opportunity, the principle of liberty would seem to be in need of a new application.

And Professor Smith thus works his way to what seems the most valuable generalization I have found in any of these writers. When the masses were economically independent and substantially equal, he argues, the aristocracy, the powerful few, — dominant politically in America as everywhere else at the time of our beginnings, — could maintain their place and power only by keeping hold of political privilege and making the state all-powerful. The doctrine of laissez-faire was, accordingly, the right creed of the masses at that time, — the time, that is to say, of Rousseau and Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson. They did not need the help of the state to protect themselves economically; on the contrary, they had good reason to fear that the state, considered as a merely political machine, over which they had little control, might be used by the aristocracy to deprive them of their economic independence. To-day, the situation is reversed. With the gradual attainment of universal suffrage the people have got control of the state; but meanwhile they have been losing control of the means and appliances of industry, they have been losing their economic independence. The parties to the old controversy have accordingly changed sides. It is the wealthy and privileged few who now cry, “ Laissez faire!” It is the unprivileged many who desire more and more governmental interference with industry. What was once the radical platform is become the conservative, and what was once the conservative is become the radical.

It is a generalization which I think many sincerely liberal minds, opposed to privilege, but confirmed in the habit of associating privilege with the entire theory of a strong and paternal government, may come to welcome. It is firmer ground, one feels, than the footing of Secretary Taft when, before an audience of Yale undergraduates, he tries to explain how experience has modified the rigidity of the laissez-faire notions which he imbibed when he himself was a Yale undergraduate and his father a member of the cabinet. “I think these principles,” the secretary explains, “are still orthodox and still sound, if only the application of them is not carried to such an extreme as really to interfere with the public welfare.” The longer one looks at the explanation, the more clearly one perceives that laissez-faire doctrines are true precisely so far as they are true, — and the more strongly one is reminded of the classical advice of the Hon. Preserved Doe, in “ The Biglow Papers,” —

One can’t help wondering if Professor William Graham Sumner was in that audience; for it seems probable that Secretary Taft had in mind not so much the newer questions of government control of the great corporations as a very old question, over which the battle of laissez-faire has been fought many times before. When the issue is on the tariff, it is still the unfavored many who possess that war-cry, still the favored few who importune government for help. Two years ago, Secretary Taft spoke in a way to indicate that he held clear views about protectionism, and did not fear to express them. That he should now, both in this little book and in more recent utterances, give forth an uncertain sound on that issue, must prove a grave disappointment to many who have accounted themselves his wellwishers, to all who have been led to regard him as of the school of courage and candor in public life.

And here, too, if I mistake not, lies the plainest falling-short of the present administration in the eyes of its more disinterested supporters. Six years ago, President McKinley, “regular” Republican though he was, and while parties could demand regularity far more imperiously than they can to-day, said at Buffalo, in his last public speech, —

“The period of exclusiveness is past The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good will and kindly trade relations will prevent reprisals. Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the times, measures of retaliation are not.”

Theodore Roosevelt, who entered public life a tariff reformer, and who so long remained, and measurably still remains, the hope of independent and manly men inside and outside his party, solemnly promised, while McKinley lay unburied, to endeavor to carry out his policies. For six years we have waited in vain for President Roosevelt to affirm or to controvert the last and on the whole the most important announcement of policy President McKinley ever made. He has never moved in that matter, nor has he ever explained why he does not move. And now, as his administration approaches its end, the man whom he would have us take for his successor will go no farther than to declare for tariff revision —after the election! That of course means, after the election of a Republican President and Congress. It means, therefore, revision by a House of Representatives under the control of Speaker Cannon, and a Senate under the guidance of Senator Aldrich. Will the American people be content to vote upon the issue in that form ?

Mid-ocean should be a good place for broad and placid views of human affairs, and I happen to be waiting at sea. But it happens also that I find on board ship an illustration of the actual working of our present tariff laws which well-nigh counteracts the sea’s great soothing. Down in the hold are several thousand tons of American steel billets. They will be sold in England cheaper than they can be bought in America Nor is this an exceptional incident; such cargoes are the rule. The last time we discussed the tariff, protectionists did not predict and did not defend this process of “dumping.” Since then, writers like Mr. Edward Stanwood have, I believe, accepted it as an outcome of extreme protectionism, and defended it as a relief to an occasionally glutted home market. But has any one ever defended such juggling with the laws of trade as a regular practice? Certain it is that the American electorate has never approved it. Probably the mass of voters do not yet understand that our protected manufacturers are actually making a profit on goods sold in England cheaper than at home, and in competition for the home market of those very foreigners against whom we are taxed to protect them. The voters have not, in fact, had a chance to consider at all this new phase of our tariff policy.

For that, however, we cannot blame the party in power. The opposition has had all along, of course, the right to bring the question before the people, and every general election for the past ten years or more has presented an opportunity. But this weapon of attack has lain unused in the Democratic arsenal. Meanwhile Mr. Bryan (not to be outdone, are we to suppose, in astuteness by the other side?) proposes to make government ownership of the railways the issue — but also, after the election! The tariff is again, as it would have been in 1900 or in 1904, but even more plainly, the best fighting ground of the opposition. It is to be remembered that, as a matter of simple fact, they have never lost when they have forced and kept that issue before the people. But the opposition, apparently, has no memory. Failing a new leadership, which must mean a new leader, Democratic stupidity bids fair, once again, to equal or surpass the measure of Republican culpability.

Does this heat seem political — even partisan ? But so much is pertinent, I think, to the line of discussion which all these writers follow. For all turn, in some fashion, to the endless theme of privilege, to the still unsolved problem of economic justice as an ideal of the state. With nearly all, this is the main theme — and in what sincere and disinterested writing about affairs is it not the main theme ? I think, as I have said, that it is superficial, almost archaic, to write as if the last word were said about democracy when one has set liberty over against equality. But neither is that eagerness wisdom which, rushing to attack the newer positions of privilege, such as are challenged in our more recent legislation for the hampering of trusts by fuller control of railroads and other means of transportation, raises the siege of an older stronghold. Essentially the same power and process which manipulates railroads to the ends of monopoly — a concentration of the selfishness of wealth — piled up, and to the same end, that extraordinary tariff wall which now, while it shuts out the foreign producer, lest he lower prices among us, leaves our own manufacturers free to serve free-trade England far more cheaply than they will serve their countrymen at home.

But it is well, of course, to take account broadly of all the aspects of privilege in the Republic, to consider candidly all the advantages which wealth, by an utterly unexampled facility in aggregation and combination, has contrived to win. Wealth is not, it is true, the only form of privilege in America. There is the privilege of race, to go no further; but none of our writers is dealing with the case of the negro, the red man, the Asiatic. Moreover, the problems of that class, although vastly momentous and unspeakably difficult, are yet of a range something less than universal; they are also, I am persuaded, of an at least relatively diminished and diminishing importance. The struggle for ideals, for justice, is in the main and usually either a fight with overweening wealth or a leashing and beating back from anarchy of the discontents and envies that spring from real or comparative poverty. Of course, therefore, the struggle in America is but part of a universal contention, and is distinct and peculiar only by reason of our democratic and federal form, and whatever else there is in our life to set us apart from other modern peoples.

Perhaps it should be accounted one of the peculiarities of our case that wealth cannot here, as in older countries, grace and ingratiate itself with claims of blood, with high traditions of conduct, with the records and memorials of historic sacrifices and heroisms. If we must admit that there is nowhere else so great a mass of wealth, so easily combined, to be reckoned with, at any rate it must also be said that nowhere else does wealth thrust itself so crudely before the vision. Nowhere else does so little of sentiment or reverence help to fight its battles. Nowhere else is its predaceousness so plainly greed.

The consideration is not negligible. England is to-day, as we all know, in many respects quite as democratic as America; but whereas, even before our independence was achieved, and even in aristocratic Virginia, Jefferson could strike down the entire system of entails, it survives to this day in the mother country. Because the English people hold in real honor the great families whose names are forever associated with noble passages in their history, the greater part of the land of England cannot be bought, but passes on, generation after generation, from eldest son to eldest son, no matter how improvident its possessors. That the system works a continuing hardship to farmers whom it prevents from becoming landowners is patent. That we have been so long exempt from it is a true instance of our exceptional freehandedness in the struggle for that reasonable equality of opportunity which I think we must account essential to the attainment of the substance of liberty.

Why, then, has wealth so great weight and power in our system ? Taking it for granted, of course, that greed will in America forever play upon whatever weaknesses of universal human nature it elsewhere suborns, what, if any, are the more peculiar means which it may here make use of ? In what concrete ways does it successfully combat our American ideals of liberty and independence, fair play, justice ? To be more specific, what is the fault or weakness in this our American plan of government? Is it possible to strike one’s finger on the spot ? Or is the sickness general, spreading throughout all our veins and members ?

This, it would seem, must be, of necessity, the main present inquiry about the Republic. It is true, as one of our writers is at much pains to show, that we began by deliberately granting to privilege what was thought a firm footing in our fundamental law, national and state; that our founders, for the most part, held this to be wisdom, and the only way to ensure us stability. But their theory is long since abandoned, and the particular fortifications of privilege which they erected — such as property qualifications for the suffrage and for office — are nearly all long since swept away. Such dominance as wealth has now in our system may be regarded as a new kind of dominance, and exercised by a new kind — or degree— of wealth.

Where, then, is the breach ? Nothing is more interesting, in the comparison of our several writers’ views, than the almost unanimity of their answers to this question, so far as they definitely consider it. The executive in our system has, they seem to agree, justified all the reasonable hopes of the founders. In state and nation alike, the chief executive is, as a rule, a fairly true representative of the people’s interests, at any rate of the people’s will. The old fears that he would turn usurper, and suborn courts and legislatures to his ambition, have proved quite mistaken. Now and then a governor, less often a president (Andrew Jackson is almost the sole instance), has been, for a little while, successfully imperious. But the executive department has not in the long run gained in power at the expense of the others. On the contrary, it has had much ado to hold its own. Quite as rare are the instances of proved corruption or faithlessness. Nor have the courts either unduly enlarged their function or betrayed their trust. It is with the legislatures that fault is found.

It is the legislatures, and particularly the national Congress, which have proved most rapacious of power and shown the strongest disposition to encroach upon the powers of other departments. “Ever since the Civil War,” President Butler declares, “Congress has steadily invaded the province of the President.”It has likewise, as he and President Hadley point out, thrust itself into the province of the courts; but in the nature of things this invasion could not go so far as in the case of the executive.

Secretary Taft puts it with his habitual mildness. So far from the Executive’s usurping legislative functions, “the tendency,” he remarks, “is exactly the other way. The danger that the Executive will ever exceed his authority is much less than the danger that the legislature will exceed its jurisdiction.” And he points out that, since the legislature holds the purse strings, the President is always “a petitioner at the door of Congress for the means to carry on the government.”

President Hadley is not given to mildness, particularly with legislatures. “The legislature,” he says, “not only fails of its primary purpose in making the right kind of laws, but perverts its secondary purpose by exercising the wrong kind of checks upon the administration. A representative can exact a price for his support of the administration in a matter of public interest, and the more the public interest is concerned in the passage of the measure, the higher the price he can charge.” And both he and Professor Reinsch dwell upon the tendency of all our legislatures to multiply laws on every subject that can be thought within their jurisdiction; a tendency which has forced the courts, although at first inclined to be timid, to a freer and freer exercise of their right to pronounce statutes unconstitutional, and which has led the states to impose, by constitutional conventions, countless new limitations upon the activity of their law-makers.

President Butler goes back to Madison for a rather cautious prediction of what has happened. He would have done better to take this striking prophecy of Gouverneur Morris, in a letter to a correspondent who asked a question about the Constitution: —

“That instrument was written by the fingers which write this letter. Having rejected redundant and equivocal terms, I believed it to be as clear as our language would permit; excepting, nevertheless, a part of what relates to the judiciary. But, after all, what does it signify that men should have a written Constitution, containing unequivocal provisions and limitations ? The legislative lion will not be entangled in the meshes of a logical net. The legislature will always make the power which it wishes to exercise, unless it be so organized as to contain within itself the sufficient check. Attempts to restrain it from outrage, by other means, will only render it more outrageous. Having sworn to exercise the powers granted, according to their true intent and meaning, they will, when they feel a desire to go farther, avoid the shame if not the guilt of perjury, by swearing the true intent and meaning to be, according to their comprehension, that which suits their purpose.” ²

And it is the legislatures which have proved most pliable to the demands of privilege, of wealth. On this point there is no dissent. “It is to the committee rooms and the floors of the legislatures,” President Butler declares, “that private interests go for help or protection. There responsibility is so divided, there secrecy is so easy, that measures demanded by the people are done to death, despite the urging of national and state executives. As matters stand to-day, states and syndicates have senators, districts and local interests have representatives, but the whole people of the United States have only the President to speak for them, and to do their will.” Secretary Taft is again the mildest. All he will say is, “I do not mean to deny that at times private and special interests do, in fact, exercise an influence to the extent of defeating needed legislation.” But he agrees with the others that the chief reason for this, as for the general failure of the legislatures to be rightly representative, lies in the control which particular states and other electoral districts exercise over members. “Particularism” is, I suppose, our only word for this phenomenon. Professor Reinsch lays much stress upon it, but President Hadley has given it the most attention and goes at the greatest length into the analysis of it and the setting forth of its consequences.

The upshot of his analysis is that, with comparatively rare exceptions, the old theory that every legislator represents the whole country or the whole state, as the case may be, is practically abandoned. The theory now would seem to be that it is enough if each merely looks after the interests of his own district. Nowhere in the legislatures is there clearly placed any responsibility for the welfare of the entire body politic, and nowhere (since we have not the English device of a responsible cabinet) is the responsibility clearly placed for the entire body of legislation enacted by a particular congress or general assembly of a state.

By two steps, President Hadley reaches the practical outcome. “If a man is chosen president to govern the country as a whole, and if a number of men are sent to Congress to see that the country is not governed as a whole, but with a view to the interests of the separate parts, there is a perpetual threat of a deadlock.” That means, according to the writer’s conviction, — which is not, however, fully announced in this book, — the failure of representative government. The second step is logical, if surprising. “But the country must be governed, and somebody must be found to do it. The President may not do it. That stands in the Constitution. Congress may not. That also stands in the Constitution. The only man left to do it under present conditions is the party boss. If a man gets the power to control nominations both for the executive and the legislature, he can furnish government of the kind he wants, either good or bad.”

Here, no doubt, is an instance of the academical too great “certainty and severity ” of reasoning about affairs. An overstrained major premise is made to yield an inference at once too broad and too precise. In practice, the instinct of compromise is far too strong, and compromise too potent a resource, to permit of anything like a constant and complete deadlock between legislature and executive. Both yield much, and together they so often contrive, without other help, to carry on the government, that the boss is neither omnipresent nor, when he exists, omnipotent. Nevertheless, one does recognize the physiognomy thus so candidly traced as a kind of composite portrait of representative government in America.

We shall not easily agree upon any statement of the extent of the evil. Sincere men will vary all the way from Secretary Taft’s mere acknowledgment that there is something the matter to the journalese of Mr. Lincoln Steffens, — “government of the people, by the rascals, for the rich.” But the evil stands confessed, proved, explained, — and few of us would deny that it is of great enough proportions to make us all ashamed. Naturally, it is the socialist of our group who is disposed to make the most of it. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine how he could make any more of it than he does. “The process culminated,”he tells us, “at the beginning of the present decade, when ‘ big business ' was in practically undisputed possession of both the major parties, of Congress and the Presidency, and of the governments in every town, city, and state in America.”

I think that we should not take Mr. Sinclair as a fair representative of the socialist thought of our time. Certainly, he does not appear to good advantage in comparison with the writers with whom I am here associating him. When we turn from almost any one of them to him, his rhetoric seems cheap, and much of his reasoning irritatingly ad captandum. Irritating also is his loose, irresponsible handling of matters of fact, his positive assertion of things quite incapable of proof, — as when he states that Roosevelt got a second term in 1904 only by the death of Senator Hanna, — and such outbursts of undisciplined feeling as his heaping of rather vulgar epithets upon the German Emperor. But his book may perhaps serve at least to indicate the socialistic view of the most recent phases of our political and economic life.

His main contention is that practically all the ills which we now endure as a community — not the political ills only but the economic and the social as well — are the outcome, and the perfectly logical outcome, of the régime of competition, under which a few private individuals have at last gained possession of all the means of production. The subversion of government is but one phase of the racking and squeezing which society must continue to endure so long as capital, omnipotent, shall continue to demand profits.

This, of course, is not new. Nor is there anything new in his remedy — the extinction of private ownership of capital and the taking over by the community of all the machinery and other appliances of industry. Nor yet does it seem a new thing to be told that we are come to a crisis, and that the “revolution ” is at hand. It provokes a kind of smile, indeed, to remember how many times society has been told that it was passing through a “transitional stage,” how constantly “the present crisis” has been discovered. And not by socialists only; it would almost seem that men cannot write earnestly, with feeling, about society, without discovering a crisis. But Mr. Sinclair contrives to give some novelty to his contention. One of his chief devices is a curious parallel between the present “present crisis” and that other crisis of the fifties out of which came the revolution that overthrew slavery; and his journalistic instinct is keen enough to furnish forth the parallel with incidents which make it readable. The revolution is to come within a year after the presidential election of 1912. (The author admitted that it might come this past summer — the book was written in the spring — but he is entitled to the credit of having clearly preferred the later date.) To Secretary Taft, as president from 1908 to 1912, President Buchanan’s rôle of “the last figurehead ” is assigned, while the parts of other leading actors in the earlier crisis — Webster, Clay, Sumner, John Brown, and the rest — go to various living celebrities ranging in quality from former President Cleveland to Mr. Jack London. Lincoln, we may be sure, is not neglected. He will find his counterpart as an emancipator in Mr. W. R. Hearst, of the New York Journal and various other newspapers.³ Even the method and process of the revolution are quite frankly revealed; Mr. Sinclair is not a secret conspirator, but, as he announces in his preface, “a scientist and a prophet.”

If one were compelled, with no prompt ing of personal grievance, to choose between this and even the most conserva tive, the most placid view of the Republic to be found in any of these writers, it is hard to see how one could hesitate. Such hurried reasoning, so suffused with feeling, can only prevail, one would think, with minds already filled with such a wish for change as will readily father the thought of revolution. But there are quieter socialists than Mr. Sinclair, who make their way by more careful steps to revolutionary views of society; and there are men with no bent whatever towards socialism who feel much as he does about the competitive system in its present phase and its effects in our American life.

All the writers of our group, indeed, go so far as to admit that we must deal henceforth with conditions and with forces which our founders did not and could not contemplate; that our system must therefore, if it is to endure, withstand a new kind of strain, perhaps discharge new functions. “Our political system has proved successful under simple conditions,” says Secretary Root. “It still remains to be seen how it will stand the strain of the vast complication of life upon which we are now entering.”

Does the admission mean that we must introduce into it any new principle or principles ? That Lowell was wrong, and really begged the question, when he said that the Republic will survive so long as it shall adhere to the principles of the founders ? That is the drift of much writing and speaking nowadays. It is one form, apparently, of the reaction which takes place in many minds when they find they must give over the comfortable assumption that all the great constitutional questions are settled, that no problem of free government can prove really troublesome to people who have already attained civil and religious liberty, the ballot, the public school.

It is not, however, the view of Secretary Root, who of all the conservatives of our group makes the most systematic attempt at a forecast of the future. On the contrary, he is clear that we shall need no new principles whatever, but only “the adaptation of the same old principles of law with which our fathers were familiar.” True, the Secretary confesses that he regards optimism as the plain duty of every citizen and pessimism as “ criminal weakness; ” but his quiet recital of what he considers favorable signs for the future of free government in America is quite without the objectionable quality one finds in Mr. Sinclair’s prophesying.

Secretary Root looks to tendency, rather than achievement; and he is hopeful, not because he finds our public life as it should be, but because he does find it — undeniably lamentable as are some of its aspects — measurably better than it has been. He enumerates our gains. We have vastly improved our civil service; the several extensions of the merit system have deprived the spoilsmen, the office-brokers, of the greater part of their stock-in-trade. We have won for both life and property far greater security than they had at the time of our beginnings. We manage our benevolent institutions better and better. We have raised the standard for nearly all elective officials; an Aaron Burr, for instance, could hardly be chosen nowadays to the vice-presidency. We have been so far successful in the long fight against corruption that the scandals of President Grant’s time — the Credit Mobilier fraud, the peculations of Belknap, Secretary of War, the Whiskey Ring, the Tweed Ring, — have to-day no counterparts. We have gradually developed a public opinion which would utterly condemn practices that were quite common a century ago, such as the use of lotteries to secure money for seminaries of learning. We have begun to mulct railroads for granting rebates to favored shippers, and to prosecute great capitalists for manipulating railroad and other corporations to their own interests, — offenses which long went unpunished. We have similarly begun to take account of the thefts of our public lands. We have done much, by the Australian ballot and other measures of reform, to prevent corrupt practices at elections.

These gains are real and substantial; this there is no denying. But are they enough ? Are they enough to offset the positive reasons for discontent enumerated by Mr. Sinclair and by abler writers ? Are they enough, if we adhere to Secretary Root’s own point of view, and consider only tendency, direction, to offset such a list as might be made of the respects in which we have lost rather than gained ?

For we must observe that Mr. Root says nothing of that. He does not strike a balance, or show us the other side of the picture. Yet he would hardly deny that something discouraging may be said on this very point of tendency, of direction, which he emphasizes. Socialists may be wrong when they tell us the poor have been growing poorer, but they are not wrong when they tell us that the rich are growing richer. Neither are those writers wrong, on the other hand, who point out that the new organization of industry into prodigious trusts, real as may be its economies, tends to stifle the enterprise of individuals and to deprive us altogether of a certain noble and loving quality in work, as precious to the workman as it is invaluable and inimitable in his product. Nor are they entirely wrong who find in the labor unions a well-nigh equal tendency to destroy the premium which an elder régime put upon the industry and the competence of the individual laborer. Nor yet are they wrong who hold that these tendencies away from excellence in industry work their way also into the life of the state.

It is a question of gains and losses, therefore, not of gains alone. We cannot reckon upon any saving inertia in the Republic which will always incline it towards justice and righteousness, save as the wicked and selfish among us may divert it to their evil ends. On the contrary, the labor of reform keeps still its Sisyphean character; the stone that patriots toil so hard to roll upward will always, once they remove their shoulders, slip back down hill again.

Perhaps we have not yet, we Americans, fully considered how long humanity has been at this endless task; how many shoulders have been at the stone; how many times it has gone painfully upward; how many times, how suddenly, over what anguish and despair and shame, it has rolled downward. Were we always to keep in mind the entire past of representative government and of democracy, we should often, I doubt not, tremble at the thought of the vastness of our audacity. We should wish, perhaps, that we had willed to try our experiment on a smaller scale; that we had waved back the millions of Europe’s baffled and beaten who have thronged across the Atlantic to our shores; that the other millions left behind would not still look to us so wistfully, as though we were condemned to bear the burden of the whole world’s hope in democracy.

This might well be one’s mood as one considered it all, — but not if one considered it at sea.

How inevitably, if one thinks long of the state, the old figure of the ship recurs! And how surely, if in thought or in fact one looks out upon the ocean, and forward to the prow, rising and falling, and backward to the vessel’s foaming wake, and upward to the bridge, one’s mood grows firmer, more heroical! How surely, also, when one is at sea, do human affairs, with all their bewildering intricacy, sink away into that right perspective which permits the mind to dwell resolvedly upon the elementary, the elemental things! There, no willful optimism can blot out the dreary vision of human selfishness, as tireless and hungry as the waves; of human folly, as restless and as inconsequent; of human misery, as widespread and as ceaseless. But neither can any coward awe obscure the shining truth that over all the ocean’s moods — its mists and storms, no less than its tranquillities — the ship is victor. And the mind, guided by that thought, rests upon the primal, saving facts of human courage, wisdom, hope unconquerable, — even as he who walks the bridge and finds the ship her course is fearless, knowing that he has always the compass and the sextant, the sun, the stars.