The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson
W >>
Woodrow Wilson >> The New Freedom
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13
These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new
world, struggling under old laws. As we go inspecting our lives to-day,
surveying this new scene of centralized and complex society, we shall find
many more things out of joint.
* * * * *
One of the most alarming phenomena of the time,--or rather it would be
alarming if the nation had not awakened to it and shown its determination
to control it,--one of the most significant signs of the new social era is
the degree to which government has become associated with business. I
speak, for the moment, of the control over the government exercised by Big
Business. Behind the whole subject, of course, is the truth that, in the
new order, government and business must be associated closely. But that
association is at present of a nature absolutely intolerable; the
precedence is wrong, the association is upside down. Our government has
been for the past few years under the control of heads of great allied
corporations with special interests. It has not controlled these interests
and assigned them a proper place in the whole system of business; it has
submitted itself to their control. As a result, there have grown up
vicious systems and schemes of governmental favoritism (the most obvious
being the extravagant tariff), far-reaching in effect upon the whole
fabric of life, touching to his injury every inhabitant of the land,
laying unfair and impossible handicaps upon competitors, imposing taxes in
every direction, stifling everywhere the free spirit of American
enterprise.
Now this has come about naturally; as we go on we shall see how very
naturally. It is no use denouncing anybody, or anything, except human
nature. Nevertheless, it is an intolerable thing that the government of
the republic should have got so far out of the hands of the people; should
have been captured by interests which are special and not general. In the
train of this capture follow the troops of scandals, wrongs, indecencies,
with which our politics swarm.
There are cities in America of whose government we are ashamed. There are
cities everywhere, in every part of the land, in which we feel that, not
the interests of the public, but the interests of special privileges, of
selfish men, are served; where contracts take precedence over public
interest. Not only in big cities is this the case. Have you not noticed
the growth of socialistic sentiment in the smaller towns? Not many months
ago I stopped at a little town in Nebraska, and while my train lingered I
met on the platform a very engaging young fellow dressed in overalls who
introduced himself to me as the mayor of the town, and added that he was
a Socialist. I said, "What does that mean? Does that mean that this town
is socialistic?" "No, sir," he said; "I have not deceived myself; the vote
by which I was elected was about 20 per cent. socialistic and 80 per cent.
protest." It was protest against the treachery to the people of those who
led both the other parties of that town.
All over the Union people are coming to feel that they have no control
over the course of affairs. I live in one of the greatest States in the
union, which was at one time in slavery. Until two years ago we had
witnessed with increasing concern the growth in New Jersey of a spirit of
almost cynical despair. Men said: "We vote; we are offered the platform we
want; we elect the men who stand on that platform, and we get absolutely
nothing." So they began to ask: "What is the use of voting? We know that
the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and
therefore it is useless to turn in either direction."
This is not confined to some of the state governments and those of some of
the towns and cities. We know that something intervenes between the
people of the United States and the control of their own affairs at
Washington. It is not the people who have been ruling there of late.
Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?
Because we are profoundly disturbed by the influences which we see
reigning in the determination of our public life and our public policy.
There was a time when America was blithe with self-confidence. She boasted
that she, and she alone, knew the processes of popular government; but now
she sees her sky overcast; she sees that there are at work forces which
she did not dream of in her hopeful youth.
Don't you know that some man with eloquent tongue, without conscience, who
did not care for the nation, could put this whole country into a flame?
Don't you know that this country from one end to the other believes that
something is wrong? What an opportunity it would be for some man without
conscience to spring up and say: "This is the way. Follow me!"--and lead
in paths of destruction!
The old order changeth--changeth under our very eyes, not quietly and
equably, but swiftly and with the noise and heat and tumult of
reconstruction.
I suppose that all struggle for law has been conscious, that very little
of it has been blind or merely instinctive. It is the fashion to say, as
if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every
age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change
than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for
change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as
in this in which we are taking part.
The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and
normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into
another, its natural heir and successor. Society is looking itself over,
in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of
its very elements; is questioning its oldest practices as freely as its
newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it
stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which
only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous co-operation can
hold back from becoming a revolution. We are in a temper to reconstruct
economic society, as we were once in a temper to reconstruct political
society, and political society may itself undergo a radical modification
in the process. I doubt if any age was ever more conscious of its task or
more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes in its economic
and political practice.
We stand in the presence of a revolution,--not a bloody revolution;
America is not given to the spilling of blood,--but a silent revolution,
whereby America will insist upon recovering in practice those ideals which
she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to the
general interest and not to special interests.
We are upon the eve of a great reconstruction. It calls for creative
statesmanship as no age has done since that great age in which we set up
the government under which we live, that government which was the
admiration of the world until it suffered wrongs to grow up under it
which have made many of our own compatriots question the freedom of our
institutions and preach revolution against them. I do not fear revolution.
I have unshaken faith in the power of America to keep its self-possession.
Revolution will come in peaceful guise, as it came when we put aside the
crude government of the Confederation and created the great Federal Union
which governs individuals, not States, and which has been these hundred
and thirty years our vehicle of progress. Some radical changes we must
make in our law and practice. Some reconstructions we must push forward,
which a new age and new circumstances impose upon us. But we can do it all
in calm and sober fashion, like statesmen and patriots.
I do not speak of these things in apprehension, because all is open and
above-board. This is not a day in which great forces rally in secret. The
whole stupendous program must be publicly planned and canvassed. Good
temper, the wisdom that comes of sober counsel, the energy of thoughtful
and unselfish men, the habit of co-operation and of compromise which has
been bred in us by long years of free government, in which reason rather
than passion has been made to prevail by the sheer virtue of candid and
universal debate, will enable us to win through to still another great age
without violence.
II
WHAT IS PROGRESS?
In that sage and veracious chronicle, "Alice Through the Looking-Glass,"
it is recounted how, on a noteworthy occasion, the little heroine is
seized by the Red Chess Queen, who races her off at a terrific pace. They
run until both of them are out of breath; then they stop, and Alice looks
around her and says, "Why, we are just where we were when we started!"
"Oh, yes," says the Red Queen; "you have to run twice as fast as that to
get anywhere else."
That is a parable of progress. The laws of this country have not kept up
with the change of economic circumstances in this country; they have not
kept up with the change of political circumstances; and therefore we are
not even where we were when we started. We shall have to run, not until we
are out of breath, but until we have caught up with our own conditions,
before we shall be where we were when we started; when we started this
great experiment which has been the hope and the beacon of the world. And
we should have to run twice as fast as any rational program I have seen in
order to get anywhere else.
I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason,
because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the
economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as
other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts
of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will
always have the better of the argument; because if you do not adjust your
laws to the facts, so much the worse for the laws, not for the facts,
because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which
runs ahead of the facts and beckons to it and makes it follow the
will-o'-the-wisps of imaginative projects.
Business is in a situation in America which it was never in before; it is
in a situation to which we have not adjusted our laws. Our laws are still
meant for business done by individuals; they have not been satisfactorily
adjusted to business done by great combinations, and we have got to adjust
them. I do not say we may or may not; I say we must; there is no choice.
If your laws do not fit your facts, the facts are not injured, the law is
damaged; because the law, unless I have studied it amiss, is the
expression of the facts in legal relationships. Laws have never altered
the facts; laws have always necessarily expressed the facts; adjusted
interests as they have arisen and have changed toward one another.
Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The
system set up by our law and our usage doesn't work,--or at least it can't
be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure
of labor and pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has
got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests.
An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.
There are serious things to do. Does any man doubt the great discontent
in this country? Does any man doubt that there are grounds and
justifications for discontent? Do we dare stand still? Within the past few
months we have witnessed (along with other strange political phenomena,
eloquently significant of popular uneasiness) on one side a doubling of
the Socialist vote and on the other the posting on dead walls and
hoardings all over the country of certain very attractive and diverting
bills warning citizens that it was "better to be safe than sorry" and
advising them to "let well enough alone." Apparently a good many citizens
doubted whether the situation they were advised to let alone was really
well enough, and concluded that they would take a chance of being sorry.
To me, these counsels of do-nothingism, these counsels of sitting still
for fear something would happen, these counsels addressed to the hopeful,
energetic people of the United States, telling them that they are not wise
enough to touch their own affairs without marring them, constitute the
most extraordinary argument of fatuous ignorance I ever heard. Americans
are not yet cowards. True, their self-reliance has been sapped by years of
submission to the doctrine that prosperity is something that benevolent
magnates provide for them with the aid of the government; their
self-reliance has been weakened, but not so utterly destroyed that you can
twit them about it. The American people are not naturally stand-patters.
Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.
There are, of course, Americans who have not yet heard that anything is
going on. The circus might come to town, have the big parade and go,
without their catching a sight of the camels or a note of the calliope.
There are people, even Americans, who never move themselves or know that
anything else is moving.
A friend of mine who had heard of the Florida "cracker," as they call a
certain ne'er-do-weel portion of the population down there, when passing
through the State in a train, asked some one to point out a "cracker" to
him. The man asked replied, "Well, if you see something off in the woods
that looks brown, like a stump, you will know it is either a stump or a
cracker; if it moves, it is a stump."
Now, movement has no virtue in itself. Change is not worth while for its
own sake. I am not one of those who love variety for its own sake. If a
thing is good to-day, I should like to have it stay that way to-morrow.
Most of our calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way
they are. For example, if, when you got up this morning, you had forgotten
how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which
you do almost automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would
have to find out what you did yesterday. I am told by the psychologists
that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am
to-day, and that, therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able
to tally to-day with yesterday. If they do not tally, then I am confused;
I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell
me my name and where I came from.
I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am
not one of those who wish to change for the mere sake of variety. The only
men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who
filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect to-day,
and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that
will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which
will blot out all recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is
improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not like it,
then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to
justify the change.
It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient
distinction,--between mere change and improvement. Yet there is a class of
mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose
conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something,--it
mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the
energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life
does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in
going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The
direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.
All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going,
and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how
fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that
we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those
things that in my boyhood days we called "treadmills,"--a treadmill being
a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule
was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even
other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of
noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out
some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.
Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends
tried dynamite. It moved,--in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.
A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was
a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of
business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the
point about such men is that they have been bribed--not in the ordinary
meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have
achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and
therefore they have been put under bonds to see that that existing order
of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the _status quo_.
It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the
administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make
the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as
possible. Not because their fathers lacked character or intelligence or
knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their
advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch
with the processes of life; they had forgotten what it was to begin; they
had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be
dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the
bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the
creative, formative and progressive forces of society.
Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word
comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the
thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men
through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They
thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were
tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the
larger spear. "There were giants in those days." Now all that has altered.
We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in
comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress,
development,--those are modern words. The modern idea is to leave the past
and press onward to something new.
But what is progress going to do with the past, and with the present? How
is it going to treat them? With ignominy, or respect? Should it break with
them altogether, or rise out of them, with its roots still deep in the
older time? What attitude shall progressives take toward the existing
order, toward those institutions of conservatism, the Constitution, the
laws, and the courts?
Are those thoughtful men who fear that we are now about to disturb the
ancient foundations of our institutions justified in their fear? If they
are, we ought to go very slowly about the processes of change. If it is
indeed true that we have grown tired of the institutions which we have so
carefully and sedulously built up, then we ought to go very slowly and
very carefully about the very dangerous task of altering them. We ought,
therefore, to ask ourselves, first of all, whether thought in this country
is tending to do anything by which we shall retrace our steps, or by which
we shall change the whole direction of our development?
I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely
plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. I believe
that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast; you cannot make a
_tabula rasa_ upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a
new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow. You
must knit the new into the old. You cannot put a new patch on an old
garment without ruining it; it must be not a patch, but something woven
into the old fabric, of practically the same pattern, of the same texture
and intention. If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve
the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.
* * * * *
One of the chief benefits I used to derive from being president of a
university was that I had the pleasure of entertaining thoughtful men from
all over the world. I cannot tell you how much has dropped into my granary
by their presence. I had been casting around in my mind for something by
which to draw several parts of my political thought together when it was
my good fortune to entertain a very interesting Scotsman who had been
devoting himself to the philosophical thought of the seventeenth century.
His talk was so engaging that it was delightful to hear him speak of
anything, and presently there came out of the unexpected region of his
thought the thing I had been waiting for. He called my attention to the
fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend
to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example,
after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all
thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian
Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody
is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of development
and accommodation to environment.
Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution
of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian
Theory. You have only to read the papers of _The Federalist_ to see that
fact written on every page. They speak of the "checks and balances" of
the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the
organization of the universe, and particularly of the solar system,--how
by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their
orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and
the President as a sort of imitation of the solar system.
They were only following the English Whigs, who gave Great Britain its
modern constitution. Not that those Englishmen analyzed the matter, or had
any theory about it; Englishmen care little for theories. It was a
Frenchman, Montesquieu, who pointed out to them how faithfully they had
copied Newton's description of the mechanism of the heavens.
The makers of our Federal Constitution read Montesquieu with true
scientific enthusiasm. They were scientists in their way,--the best way of
their age,--those fathers of the nation. Jefferson wrote of "the laws of
Nature,"--and then by way of afterthought,--"and of Nature's God." And
they constructed a government as they would have constructed an
orrery,--to display the laws of nature. Politics in their thought was a
variety of mechanics. The Constitution was founded on the law of
gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the
efficacy of "checks and balances."
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a
living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under
the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It
is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its
functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its
organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary,
its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response
to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of
purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men,
with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of
specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is
indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government
without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and
action. This is not theory, but fact, and displays its force as fact,
whatever theories may be thrown across its track. Living political
constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a
living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must
develop.
All that progressives ask or desire is permission--in an era when
"development," "evolution," is the scientific word--to interpret the
Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is
recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.
* * * * *
Some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of
Independence, signed in Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776. Their bosoms swell
against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom
that is going on to-day.
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13