The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson

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It may be, as a result of that consultation, you will be informed that it
is too bad, but it will be impossible to "accommodate" you. It may be you
will receive a suggestion that if you care to make certain arrangements
with the trust, you will be permitted to manufacture. It may be you will
receive an offer to buy your patent, the offer being a poor consolation
dole. It may be that your invention, even if purchased, will never be
heard of again.

That last method of dealing with an invention, by the way, is a
particularly vicious misuse of the patent laws, which ought not to allow
property in an idea which is never intended to be realized. One of the
reforms waiting to be undertaken is a revision of our patent laws.

In any event, if the trust doesn't want you to manufacture your
invention, you will not be allowed to, unless you have money of your own
and are willing to risk it fighting the monopolistic trust with its vast
resources. I am generalizing the statement, but I could particularize it.
I could tell you instances where exactly that thing happened. By the
combination of great industries, manufactured products are not only being
standardized, but they are too often being kept at a single point of
development and efficiency. The increase of the power to produce in
proportion to the cost of production is not studied in America as it used
to be studied, because if you don't have to improve your processes in
order to excel a competitor, if you are human you aren't going to improve
your processes; and if you can prevent the competitor from coming into the
field, then you can sit at your leisure, and, behind this wall of
protection which prevents the brains of any foreigner competing with you,
you can rest at your ease for a whole generation.

Can any one who reflects on merely this attitude of the trusts toward
invention fail to understand how substantial, how actual, how great will
be the effect of the release of the genius of our people to originate,
improve, and perfect the instruments and circumstances of our lives? Who
can say what patents now lying, unrealized, in secret drawers and
pigeonholes, will come to light, or what new inventions will astonish and
bless us, when freedom is restored?

Are you not eager for the time when the genius and initiative of all the
people shall be called into the service of business? when newcomers with
new ideas, new entries with new enthusiasms, independent men, shall be
welcomed? when your sons shall be able to look forward to becoming, not
employees, but heads of some small, it may be, but hopeful, business,
where their best energies shall be inspired by the knowledge that they are
their own masters, with the paths of the world open before them? Have you
no desire to see the markets opened to all? to see credit available in due
proportion to every man of character and serious purpose who can use it
safely and to advantage? to see business disentangled from its unholy
alliance with politics? to see raw material released from the control of
monopolists, and transportation facilities equalized for all? and every
avenue of commercial and industrial activity levelled for the feet of all
who would tread it? Surely, you must feel the inspiration of such a new
dawn of liberty!

* * * * *

There is the great policy of conservation, for example; and I do not
conceive of conservation in any narrow sense. There are forests to
conserve, there are great water powers to conserve, there are mines whose
wealth should be deemed exhaustible, not inexhaustible, and whose
resources should be safeguarded and preserved for future generations. But
there is much more. There are the lives and energies of the people to be
physically safeguarded.

You know what has been the embarrassment about conservation. The federal
government has not dared relax its hold, because, not _bona fide_
settlers, not men bent upon the legitimate development of great states,
but men bent upon getting into their own exclusive control great mineral,
forest, and water resources, have stood at the ear of the government and
attempted to dictate its policy. And the government of the United States
has not dared relax its somewhat rigid policy because of the fear that
these forces would be stronger than the forces of individual communities
and of the public interest. What we are now in dread of is that this
situation will be made permanent. Why is it that Alaska has lagged in her
development? Why is it that there are great mountains of coal piled up in
the shipping places on the coast of Alaska which the government at
Washington will not permit to be sold? It is because the government is not
sure that it has followed all the intricate threads of intrigue by which
small bodies of men have tried to get exclusive control of the coal fields
of Alaska. The government stands itself suspicious of the forces by which
it is surrounded.

The trouble about conservation is that the government of the United States
hasn't any policy at present. It is simply marking time. It is simply
standing still. Reservation is not conservation. Simply to say, "We are
not going to do anything about the forests," when the country needs to use
the forests, is not a practicable program at all. To say that the people
of the great State of Washington can't buy coal out of the Alaskan coal
fields doesn't settle the question. You have got to have that coal sooner
or later. And if you are so afraid of the Guggenheims and all the rest of
them that you can't make up your mind what your policies are going to be
about those coal fields, how long are we going to wait for the government
to throw off its fear? There can't be a working program until there is a
free government. The day when the government is free to set about a policy
of positive conservation, as distinguished from mere negative reservation,
will be an emancipation day of no small importance for the development of
the country.

But the question of conservation is a very much bigger question than the
conservation of our natural resources; because in summing up our natural
resources there is one great natural resource which underlies them all,
and seems to underlie them so deeply that we sometimes overlook it. I mean
the people themselves.

What would our forests be worth without vigorous and intelligent men to
make use of them? Why should we conserve our natural resources, unless we
can by the magic of industry transmute them into the wealth of the world?
What transmutes them into that wealth, if not the skill and the touch of
the men who go daily to their toil and who constitute the great body of
the American people? What I am interested in is having the government of
the United States more concerned about human rights than about property
rights. Property is an instrument of humanity; humanity isn't an
instrument of property. And yet when you see some men riding their great
industries as if they were driving a car of juggernaut, not looking to see
what multitudes prostrate themselves before the car and lose their lives
in the crushing effect of their industry, you wonder how long men are
going to be permitted to think more of their machinery than they think of
their men. Did you never think of it,--men are cheap, and machinery is
dear; many a superintendent is dismissed for overdriving a delicate
machine, who wouldn't be dismissed for overdriving an overtaxed man. You
can discard your man and replace him; there are others ready to come into
his place; but you can't without great cost discard your machine and put a
new one in its place. You are less apt, therefore, to look upon your men
as the essential vital foundation part of your whole business. It is time
that property, as compared with humanity, should take second place, not
first place. We must see to it that there is no over-crowding, that there
is no bad sanitation, that there is no unnecessary spread of avoidable
diseases, that the purity of food is safeguarded, that there is every
precaution against accident, that women are not driven to impossible
tasks, nor children permitted to spend their energy before it is fit to be
spent. The hope and elasticity of the race must be preserved; men must be
preserved according to their individual needs, and not according to the
programs of industry merely. What is the use of having industry, if we
perish in producing it? If we die in trying to feed ourselves, why should
we eat? If we die trying to get a foothold in the crowd, why not let the
crowd trample us sooner and be done with it? I tell you that there is
beginning to beat in this nation a great pulse of irresistible sympathy
which is going to transform the processes of government amongst us. The
strength of America is proportioned only to the health, the energy, the
hope, the elasticity, the buoyancy of the American people.

Is not that the greatest thought that you can have of freedom,--the
thought of it as a gift that shall release men and women from all that
pulls them back from being their best and from doing their best, that
shall liberate their energy to its fullest limit, free their aspirations
till no bounds confine them, and fill their spirits with the jubilance of
realizable hope?

XII

THE LIBERATION OF A PEOPLE'S VITAL ENERGIES

No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of America must each
time make a fresh appeal to our imaginations. For centuries, indeed from
the beginning, the face of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the
routes of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east. The
Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, suddenly, the conquest of
Constantinople by the Turk closed the route to the Orient. Europe had
either to face about or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea
at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was
twice as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had expected,
the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent. In that part of
the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its
history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization;
here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.

Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to excite the emotion of
all who consider its strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful
histories of the earth might be contrived without the imagination daring
to conceive such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until the
fulness of time had come for a new start in civilization. A mere sea
captain's ambition to trace a new trade route gave way to a moral
adventure for humanity. The race was to found a new order here on this
delectable land, which no man approached without receiving, as the old
voyagers relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers
and murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. The hemisphere lay
waiting to be touched with life,--life from the old centres of living,
surely, but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weariness, so as to be
fit for the virgin purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the
imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel which once only
in all history could be vouchsafed.

One other thing only compares with it; only one other thing touches the
springs of emotion as does the picture of the ships of Columbus drawing
near the bright shores,--and that is the thought of the choke in the
throat of the immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at
the land where he has been taught to believe he in his turn shall find an
earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the heartaches of the
old life, and enter into the fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has
not every ship that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes
of generation after generation of the oppressed of other lands? How always
have men's hearts beat as they saw the coast of America rise to their
view! How it has always seemed to them that the dweller there would at
last be rid of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which
had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there realize the full
fruition of his sense of honest manhood, would there be one of a great
body of brothers, not seeking to defraud and deceive one another, but
seeking to accomplish the general good!

What was in the writings of the men who founded America,--to serve the
selfish interests of America? Do you find that in their writings? No; to
serve the cause of humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up
their standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon of
encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men came thronging to
these shores with an expectancy that never existed before, with a
confidence they never dared feel before, and found here for generations
together a haven of peace, of opportunity, of equality.

God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs we may recover
the standards and repeat the achievements of that heroic age!

For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it was. Our relations
one with another have been profoundly modified by the new agencies of
rapid communication and transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate
life, widen communities, fuse interests, and complicate all the processes
of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thousand new
whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become more subtle, and has learned
to wear the guise of mere industry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has
become a somewhat different matter. It cannot,--eternal principle that it
is,--it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new aspects. Perhaps
it is only revealing its deeper meaning.

* * * * *

What is liberty?

I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose
that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that
I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every
time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and
the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several
parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them
all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with
absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment
with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is
let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully
and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.

What it liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you
mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction
is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a
boat skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs," when we
mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how
perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her
sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and
stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how
instantly she is "in irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once
more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.

Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and
human activities and human energies.

Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals
and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those
institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate to-day than
ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the
thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat clearly in our mind
what makes all the trouble to-day. Life has become complex; there are many
more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is
harder to keep everything adjusted,--and harder to find out where the
trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.

You know that one of the interesting things that Mr. Jefferson said in
those early days of simplicity which marked the beginnings of our
government was that the best government consisted in as little governing
as possible. And there is still a sense in which that is true. It is still
intolerable for the government to interfere with our individual
activities except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order to
free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were living in our day
he would see what we see: that the individual is caught in a great
confused nexus of all sorts of complicated circumstances, and that to let
him alone is to leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he
has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must come to the
assistance of the individual. It must come to his assistance to see that
he gets fair play; that is all, but that is much. Without the watchful
interference, the resolute interference, of the government, there can be
no fair play between individuals and such powerful institutions as the
trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program
of a government of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative
merely.

* * * * *

Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we preserving freedom
in this land of ours, the hope of all the earth?

Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to which the
fathers consecrated it,--have we maintained them, realizing them, as each
generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man
is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear
aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated,
are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new
things and of not having done them?

The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a fair way of
failure,--tragic failure. And we stand in danger of utter failure yet
except we fulfil speedily the determination we have reached, to deal with
the new and subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don't deceive
yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great interests which now
dominate our development. They are so great that it is almost an open
question whether the government of the United States can dominate them or
not. Go one step further, make their organized power permanent, and it may
be too late to turn back. The roads diverge at the point where we stand.
They stretch their vistas out to regions where they are very far separated
from one another; at the end of one is the old tiresome scene of
government tied up with special interests; and at the other shines the
liberating light of individual initiative, of individual liberty, of
individual freedom, the light of untrammeled enterprise. I believe that
that light shines out of the heavens itself that God has created. I
believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine of life. There is no
salvation for men in the pitiful condescensions of industrial masters.
Guardians have no place in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by
trustees has no prospect of endurance. Monopoly means the atrophy of
enterprise. If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of
the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there
are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United
States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether
we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough,
to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven't
had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance,
in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the
recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our
delegated authority.

I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs and of the
trusts, you are discussing the very lives of yourselves and your children.
I believe that I am preaching the very cause of some of the gentlemen whom
I am opposing when I preach the cause of free industry in the United
States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that bears the
inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted to gird it
entirely nature will take her revenge and the tree will die.

I do not believe that America is securely great because she has great men
in her now. America is great in proportion as she can make sure of having
great men in the next generation. She is rich in her unborn children;
rich, that is to say, if those unborn children see the sun in a day of
opportunity, see the sun when they are free to exercise their energies as
they will. If they open their eyes in a land where there is no special
privilege, then we shall come into a new era of American greatness and
American liberty; but if they open their eyes in a country where they must
be employees or nothing, if they open their eyes in a land of merely
regulated monopoly, where all the conditions of industry are determined by
small groups of men, then they will see an America such as the founders of
this Republic would have wept to think of. The only hope is in the release
of the forces which philanthropic trust presidents want to monopolize.
Only the emancipation, the freeing and heartening of the vital energies of
all the people will redeem us. In all that I may have to do in public
affairs in the United States I am going to think of towns such as I have
seen in Indiana, towns of the old American pattern, that own and operate
their own industries, hopefully and happily. My thought is going to be
bent upon the multiplication of towns of that kind and the prevention of
the concentration of industry in this country in such a fashion and upon
such a scale that towns that own themselves will be impossible. You know
what the vitality of America consists of. Its vitality does not lie in New
York, nor in Chicago; it will not be sapped by anything that happens in
St. Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the energies, the
enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the efficiency of their
factories and in the richness of the fields that stretch beyond the
borders of the town; in the wealth which they extract from nature and
originate for themselves through the inventive genius characteristic of
all free American communities.

That is the wealth of America, and if America discourages the locality,
the community, the self-contained town, she will kill the nation. A nation
is as rich as her free communities; she is not as rich as her capital city
or her metropolis. The amount of money in Wall Street is no indication of
the wealth of the American people. That indication can be found only in
the fertility of the American mind and the productivity of American
industry everywhere throughout the United States. If America were not rich
and fertile, there would be no money in Wall Street. If Americans were not
vital and able to take care of themselves, the great money exchanges would
break down. The welfare, the very existence of the nation, rests at last
upon the great mass of the people; its prosperity depends at last upon the
spirit in which they go about their work in their several communities
throughout the broad land. In proportion as her towns and her
country-sides are happy and hopeful will America realize the high
ambitions which have marked her in the eyes of all the world.

The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the men and women who
do the daily work in our mines and factories, on our railroads, in our
offices and ports of trade, on our farms and on the sea, is the underlying
necessity of all prosperity. There can be nothing wholesome unless their
life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they are contented.
Their physical welfare affects the soundness of the whole nation. How
would it suit the prosperity of the United States, how would it suit
business, to have a people that went every day sadly or sullenly to their
work? How would the future look to you if you felt that the aspiration had
gone out of most men, the confidence of success, the hope that they might
improve their condition? Do you not see that just so soon as the old
self-confidence of America, just so soon as her old boasted advantage of
individual liberty and opportunity, is taken away, all the energy of her
people begins to subside, to slacken, to grow loose and pulpy, without
fibre, and men simply cast about to see that the day does not end
disastrously with them?

So we must put heart into the people by taking the heartlessness out of
politics, business, and industry. We have got to make politics a thing in
which an honest man can take his part with satisfaction because he knows
that his opinion will count as much as the next man's, and that the boss
and the interests have been dethroned. Business we have got to untrammel,
abolishing tariff favors, and railroad discrimination, and credit denials,
and all forms of unjust handicaps against the little man. Industry we have
got to humanize,--not through the trusts,--but through the direct action
of law guaranteeing protection against dangers and compensation for
injuries, guaranteeing sanitary conditions, proper hours, the right to
organize, and all the other things which the conscience of the country
demands as the workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our
people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the
vision of the open gates of opportunity for all. We have got to set the
energy and the initiative of this great people absolutely free, so that
the future of America will be greater than the past, so that the pride of
America will grow with achievement, so that America will know as she
advances from generation to generation that each brood of her sons is
greater and more enlightened than that which preceded it, know that she is
fulfilling the promise that she has made to mankind.

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