The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson

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I want you to read a passage from the Virginia Bill of Rights, that
immortal document which has been a model for declarations of liberty
throughout the rest of the continent:

That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the
people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all
times amenable to them.

That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit,
protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all
the various modes and forms of government, that is the best which is
capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and
is most effectually secured against the danger of mal-administration;
and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to
these purposes, a majority of the community bath an indubitable,
inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it,
in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.

I have heard that read a score of times on the Fourth of July, but I never
heard it read where actual measures were being debated. No man who
understands the principles upon which this Republic was founded has the
slightest dread of the gentle,--though very effective,--measures by which
the people are again resuming control of their own affairs.

* * * * *

Nor need any lover of liberty be anxious concerning the outcome of the
struggle upon which we are now embarked. The victory is certain, and the
battle is not going to be an especially sanguinary one. It is hardly going
to be worth the name of a battle. Let me tell the story of the
emancipation of one State,--New Jersey:

It has surprised the people of the United States to find New Jersey at the
front in enterprises of reform. I, who have lived in New Jersey the
greater part of my mature life, know that there is no state in the Union
which, so far as the hearts and intelligence of its people are concerned,
has more earnestly desired reform than has New Jersey. There are men who
have been prominent in the affairs of the State who again and again
advocated with all the earnestness that was in them the things that we
have at last been able to do. There are men in New Jersey who have spent
some of the best energies of their lives in trying to win elections in
order to get the support of the citizens of New Jersey for programs of
reform.

The people had voted for such things very often before the autumn of 1910,
but the interesting thing is that nothing had happened. They were
demanding the benefit of remedial measures such as had been passed in
every progressive state of the Union, measures which had proved not only
that they did not upset the life of the communities to which they were
applied but that they quickened every force and bettered every condition
in those communities. But the people of New Jersey could not get them, and
there had come upon them a certain pessimistic despair. I used to meet men
who shrugged their shoulders and said: "What difference does it make how
we vote? Nothing ever results from our votes." The force that is behind
the new party that has recently been formed, the so-called "Progressive
Party," is a force of discontent with the old parties of the United
States. It is the feeling that men have gone into blind alleys often
enough, and that somehow there must be found an open road through which
men may pass to some purpose.

In the year 1910 there came a day when the people of New Jersey took heart
to believe that something could be accomplished. I had no merit as a
candidate for Governor, except that I said what I really thought, and the
compliment that the people paid me was in believing that I meant what I
said. Unless they had believed in the Governor whom they then elected,
unless they had trusted him deeply and altogether, he could have done
absolutely nothing. The force of the public men of a nation lies in the
faith and the backing of the people of the country, rather than in any
gifts of their own. In proportion as you trust them, in proportion as you
back them up, in proportion as you lend them your strength, are they
strong. The things that have happened in New Jersey since 1910 have
happened because the seed was planted in this fine fertile soil of
confidence, of trust, of renewed hope.

The moment the forces in New Jersey that had resisted reform realized that
the people were backing new men who meant what they had said, they
realized that they dare not resist them. It was not the personal force of
the new officials; it was the moral strength of their backing that
accomplished the extraordinary result.

And what was accomplished? Mere justice to classes that had not been
treated justly before.

Every schoolboy in the State of New Jersey, if he cared to look into the
matter, could comprehend the fact that the laws applying to laboring-men
with respect of compensation when they were hurt in their various
employments had originated at a time when society was organized very
differently from the way in which it is organized now, and that because
the law had not been changed, the courts were obliged to go blindly on
administering laws which were cruelly unsuitable to existing conditions,
so that it was practically impossible for the workingmen of New Jersey to
get justice from the courts; the legislature of the commonwealth had not
come to their assistance with the necessary legislation. Nobody seriously
debated the circumstances; everybody knew that the law was antiquated and
impossible; everybody knew that justice waited to be done. Very well,
then, why wasn't it done?

There was another thing that we wanted to do: We wanted to regulate our
public service corporations so that we could get the proper service from
them, and on reasonable terms. That had been done elsewhere, and where it
had been done it had proved just as much for the benefit of the
corporations themselves as for the benefit of the people. Of course it was
somewhat difficult to convince the corporations. It happened that one of
the men who knew the least about the subject was the president of the
Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. I have heard speeches from that
gentleman that exhibited a total lack of acquaintance with the
circumstances of our times. I have never known ignorance so complete in
its detail; and, being a man of force and ignorance, he naturally set all
his energy to resist the things that he did not comprehend.

I am not interested in questioning the motives of men in such positions. I
am only sorry that they don't know more. If they would only join the
procession they would find themselves benefited by the healthful exercise,
which, for one thing, would renew within them the capacity to learn which
I hope they possessed when they were younger. We were not trying to do
anything novel in New Jersey in regulating the Public Service Corporation;
we were simply trying to adopt there a tested measure of public justice.
We adopted it. Has anybody gone bankrupt since? Does anybody now doubt
that it was just as much for the benefit of the Public Service Corporation
as for the people of the State?

Then there was another thing that we modestly desired: We wanted fair
elections; we did not want candidates to buy themselves into office. That
seemed reasonable. So we adopted a law, unique in one particular, namely:
that if you bought an office, you didn't get it. I admit that that is
contrary to all commercial principles, but I think it is pretty good
political doctrine. It is all very well to put a man in jail for buying an
office, but it is very much better, besides putting him in jail, to show
him that if he has paid out a single dollar for that office, he does not
get it, though a huge majority voted for him. We reversed the laws of
trade; when you buy something in politics in New Jersey, you do not get
it. It seemed to us that that was the best way to discourage improper
political argument. If your money does not produce the goods, then you are
not tempted to spend your money.

We adopted a Corrupt Practices Act, the reasonable foundation of which no
man could question, and an Election Act, which every man predicted was not
going to work, but which did work,--to the emancipation of the voters of
New Jersey.

All these things are now commonplaces with us. We like the laws that we
have passed, and no man ventures to suggest any material change in them.
Why didn't we get them long ago? What hindered us? Why, because we had a
closed government; not an open government. It did not belong to us. It was
managed by little groups of men whose names we knew, but whom somehow we
didn't seem able to dislodge. When we elected men pledged to dislodge
them, they only went into partnership with them. Apparently what was
necessary was to call in an amateur who knew so little about the game that
he supposed that he was expected to do what he had promised to do.

There are gentlemen who have criticised the Governor of New Jersey because
he did not do certain things,--for instance, bring a lot of indictments.
The Governor of New Jersey does not think it necessary to defend himself;
but he would like to call attention to a very interesting thing that
happened in his State: When the people had taken over control of the
government, a curious change was wrought in the souls of a great many men;
a sudden moral awakening took place, and we simply could not find
culprits against whom to bring indictments; it was like a Sunday school,
the way they obeyed the laws.

* * * * *

So I say, there is nothing very difficult about resuming our own
government. There is nothing to appall us when we make up our minds to set
about the task. "The way to resume is to resume," said Horace Greeley,
once, when the country was frightened at a prospect which turned out to be
not in the least frightful; it was at the moment of the resumption of
specie payments for Treasury notes. The Treasury simply resumed,--there
was not a ripple of danger or excitement when the day of resumption came
around.

It will be precisely so when the people resume control of their own
government. The men who conduct the political machines are a small
fraction of the party they pretend to represent, and the men who exercise
corrupt influences upon them are only a small fraction of the business men
of the country. What we are banded together to fight is not a party, is
not a great body of citizens; we have to fight only little coteries,
groups of men here and there, a few men, who subsist by deceiving us and
cannot subsist a moment after they cease to deceive us.

I had occasion to test the power of such a group in the State of New
Jersey, and I had the satisfaction of discovering that I had been right in
supposing that they did not possess any power at all. It looked as if they
were entrenched in a fortress; it looked as if the embrasures of the
fortress showed the muzzles of guns; but, as I told my good
fellow-citizens, all they had to do was to press a little upon it and they
would find that the fortress was a mere cardboard fabric; that it was a
piece of stage property; that just so soon as the audience got ready to
look behind the scenes they would learn that the army which had been
marching and counter-marching in such terrifying array consisted of a
single company that had gone in one wing and around and out at the other
wing, and could have thus marched in procession for twenty-four hours. You
only need about twenty-four men to do the trick. These men are impostors.
They are powerful only in proportion as we are susceptible to absurd fear
of them. Their capital is our ignorance and our credulity.

To-day we are seeing something that some of us have waited all of our
lives to see. We are witnessing a rising of the country. We are seeing a
whole people stand up and decline any longer to be imposed upon. The day
has come when men are saying to each other: "It doesn't make a
peppercorn's difference to me what party I have voted with. I am going to
pick out the men I want and the policies I want, and let the label take
care of itself. I do not find any great difference between my table of
contents and the table of contents of those who have voted with the other
party, and who, like me, are very much dissatisfied with the way in which
their party has rewarded their faithfulness. They want the same things
that I want, and I don't know of anything under God's heaven to prevent
our getting together. We want the same things, we have the same faith in
the old traditions of the American people, and we have made up our minds
that we are going to have now at last the reality instead of the shadow."

We Americans have been too long satisfied with merely going through the
motions of government. We have been having a mock game. We have been going
to the polls and saying: "This is the act of a sovereign people, but we
won't be the sovereign yet; we will postpone that; we will wait until
another time. The managers are still shifting the scenes; we are not ready
for the real thing yet."

My proposal is that we stop going through the mimic play; that we get out
and translate the ideals of American politics into action; so that every
man, when he goes to the polls on election day, will feel the thrill of
executing an actual judgment, as he takes again into his own hands the
great matters which have been too long left to men deputized by their own
choice, and seriously sets about carrying into accomplishment his own
purposes.

XI

THE EMANCIPATION OF BUSINESS

In the readjustments that are about to be undertaken in this country not
one single legitimate or honest arrangement is going to be disturbed; but
every impediment to business is going to be removed, every illegitimate
kind of control is going to be destroyed. Every man who wants an
opportunity and has the energy to seize it, is going to be given a chance.
All that we are going to ask the gentlemen who now enjoy monopolistic
advantages to do is to match their brains against the brains of those who
will then compete with them. The brains, the energy, of the rest of us are
to be set free to go into the game,--that is all. There is to be a general
release of the capital, the enterprise, of millions of people, a general
opening of the doors of opportunity. With what a spring of determination,
with what a shout of jubilance, will the people rise to their
emancipation!

I am one of those who believe that we have had such restrictions upon the
prosperity of this country that we have not yet come into our own, and
that by removing those restrictions we shall set free an energy which in
our generation has not been known. It is for that reason that I feel free
to criticise with the utmost frankness these restrictions, and the means
by which they have been brought about. I do not criticise as one without
hope; in describing conditions which so hamper, impede, and imprison, I am
only describing conditions from which we are going to escape into a
contrasting age. I believe that this is a time when there should be
unqualified frankness. One of the distressing circumstances of our day is
this: I cannot tell you how many men of business, how many important men
of business, have communicated their real opinions about the situation in
the United States to me privately and confidentially. They are afraid of
somebody. They are afraid to make their real opinions known publicly;
they tell them to me behind their hand. That is very distressing. That
means that we are not masters of our own opinions, except when we vote,
and even then we are careful to vote very privately indeed.

It is alarming that this should be the case. Why should any man in free
America be afraid of any other man? Or why should any man fear
competition,--competition either with his fellow-countrymen or with
anybody else on earth?

It is part of the indictment against the protective policy of the United
States that it has weakened and not enhanced the vigor of our people.
American manufacturers who know that they can make better things than are
made elsewhere in the world, that they can sell them cheaper in foreign
markets than they are sold in these very markets of domestic manufacture,
are afraid,--afraid to venture out into the great world on their own
merits and their own skill. Think of it, a nation full of genius and yet
paralyzed by timidity! The timidity of the business men of America is to
me nothing less than amazing. They are tied to the apron strings of the
government at Washington. They go about to seek favors. They say: "For
pity's sake, don't expose us to the weather of the world; put some
homelike cover over us. Protect us. See to it that foreign men don't come
in and match their brains with ours." And, as if to enhance this
peculiarity of ours, the strongest men amongst us get the biggest favors;
the men of peculiar genius for organizing industries, the men who could
run the industries of any country, are the men who are most strongly
intrenched behind the highest rates in the schedules of the tariff. They
are so timid morally, furthermore, that they dare not stand up before the
American people, but conceal these favors in the verbiage of the tariff
schedule itself,--in "jokers." Ah! but it is a bitter joke when men who
seek favors are so afraid of the best judgment of their fellow-citizens
that they dare not avow what they take.

Happily, the general revival of conscience in this country has not been
confined to those who were consciously fighting special privilege. The
awakening of conscience has extended to those who were _enjoying_ special
privileges, and I thank God that the business men of this country are
beginning to see our economic organization in its true light, as a
deadening aristocracy of privilege from which they themselves must escape.
The small men of this country are not deluded, and not all of the big
business men of this country are deluded. Some men who have been led into
wrong practices, who have been led into the practices of monopoly, because
that seemed to be the drift and inevitable method of supremacy, are just
as ready as we are to turn about and adopt the process of freedom. For
American hearts beat in a lot of these men, just as they beat under our
jackets. They will be as glad to be free as we shall be to set them free.
And then the splendid force which has lent itself to things that hurt us
will lend itself to things that benefit us.

And we,--we who are not great captains of industry or business,--shall do
them more good than we do now, even in a material way. If you have to be
subservient, you are not even making the rich fellows as rich as they
might be, because you are not adding your originative force to the
extraordinary production of wealth in America. America is as rich, not as
Wall Street, not as the financial centres in Chicago and St. Louis and San
Francisco; it is as rich as the people that make those centres rich. And
if those people hesitate in their enterprise, cower in the face of power,
hesitate to originate designs of their own, then the very fountains which
make these places abound in wealth are dried up at the source. By setting
the little men of America free, you are not damaging the giants.

It may be that certain things will happen, for monopoly in this country is
carrying a body of water such as men ought not to be asked to carry. When
by regulated competition,--that is to say, fair competition, competition
that fights fair,--they are put upon their mettle, they will have to
economize, and they cannot economize unless they get rid of that water. I
do not know how to squeeze the water out, but they will get rid of it, if
you will put them to the necessity. They will have to get rid of it, or
those of us who don't carry tanks will outrun them in the race. Put all
the business of America upon the footing of economy and efficiency, and
then let the race be to the strongest and the swiftest.

Our program is a program of prosperity; a program of prosperity that is to
be a little more pervasive than the present prosperity,--and pervasive
prosperity is more fruitful than that which is narrow and restrictive. I
congratulate the monopolies of the United States that they are not going
to have their way, because, quite contrary to their own theory, the fact
is that the people are wiser than they are. The people of the United
States understand the United States as these gentlemen do not, and if they
will only give us leave, we will not only make them rich, but we will make
them happy. Because, then, their conscience will have less to carry. I
have lived in a state that was owned by a series of corporations. They
handed it about. It was at one time owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad;
then it was owned by the Public Service Corporation. It was owned by the
Public Service Corporation when I was admitted, and that corporation has
been resentful ever since that I interfered with its tenancy. But I really
did not see any reason why the people should give up their own residence
to so small a body of men to monopolize; and, therefore, when I asked them
for their title deeds and they couldn't produce them, and there was no
court except the court of public opinion to resort to, they moved out. Now
they eat out of our hands; and they are not losing flesh either. They are
making just as much money as they made before, only they are making it in
a more respectable way. They are making it without the constant assistance
of the legislature of the State of New Jersey. They are making it in the
normal way, by supplying the people of New Jersey with the service in the
way of transportation and gas and water that they really need. I do not
believe that there are any thoughtful officials of the Public Service
Corporation of New Jersey that now seriously regret the change that has
come about. We liberated government in my state, and it is an interesting
fact that we have not suffered one moment in prosperity.

* * * * *

What we propose, therefore, in this program of freedom, is a program of
general advantage. Almost every monopoly that has resisted dissolution has
resisted the real interests of its own stockholders. Monopoly always
checks development, weighs down natural prosperity, pulls against natural
advance.

Take but such an everyday thing as a useful invention and the putting of
it at the service of men. You know how prolific the American mind has been
in invention; how much civilization has been advanced by the steamboat,
the cotton-gin, the sewing-machine, the reaping-machine, the typewriter,
the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph. Do you know, have you
had occasion to learn, that there is no hospitality for invention
nowadays? There is no encouragement for you to set your wits at work to
improve the telephone, or the camera, or some piece of machinery, or some
mechanical process; you are not invited to find a shorter and cheaper way
to make things or to perfect them, or to invent better things to take
their place. There is too much money invested in old machinery; too much
money has been spent advertising the old camera; the telephone plants, as
they are, cost too much to permit their being superseded by something
better. Wherever there is monopoly, not only is there no incentive to
improve, but, improvement being costly in that it "scraps" old machinery
and destroys the value of old products, there is a positive motive against
improvement. The instinct of monopoly is against novelty, the tendency of
monopoly is to keep in use the old thing, made in the old way; its
disposition is to "standardize" everything. Standardization may be all
very well,--but suppose everything had been standardized thirty years
ago,--we should still be writing by hand, by gas-light, we should be
without the inestimable aid of the telephone (sometimes, I admit, it is a
nuisance), without the automobile, without wireless telegraphy.
Personally, I could have managed to plod along without the aeroplane, and
I could have been happy even without moving-pictures.

Of course, I am not saying that all invention has been stopped by the
growth of trusts, but I think it is perfectly clear that invention in many
fields has been discouraged, that inventors have been prevented from
reaping the full fruits of their ingenuity and industry, and that mankind
has been deprived of many comforts and conveniences, as well as of the
opportunity of buying at lower prices.

The damper put on the inventive genius of America by the trusts operates
in half a dozen ways: The first thing discovered by the genius whose
device extends into a field controlled by a trust is that he can't get
capital to make and market his invention. If you want money to build your
plant and advertise your product and employ your agents and make a market
for it, where are you going to get it? The minute you apply for money or
credit, this proposition is put to you by the banks: "This invention will
interfere with the established processes and the market control of certain
great industries. We are already financing those industries, their
securities are in our hands; we will consult them."

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