Part 10

Now one of the great troubles—I am inclined to think much the greatest trouble—in any immediate handling of the question of the trusts comes from our system of government. Under this system it is difficult to say where the power is lodged to deal with these evils. Remember that I am not saying that even if we had all the power we could completely solve the trust question. If what we read in the papers is true, international trusts are now being planned. It is going to be very difficult for any set of laws on our part to deal completely with a problem which becomes international in its bearings. But a great deal can be done in various ways even now—a great deal is being done—and a great deal more can be done, if we see that the power is lodged somewhere to do it. On the whole, our system of government has worked marvelously well—the system of divided functions of government, of a scheme under which Maine, Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho, New York, Illinois, South Carolina, can all come together for certain purposes, and yet each be allowed to work out its salvation as it desires along certain other lines. On the whole, this has worked well; but in some respects it has worked ill. While I most firmly believe in fixity of policy, I do not believe that that policy should be fossilized, and when conditions change we must change our governmental methods to meet them. I believe with all my heart in the New England town meeting, but you can’t work the New England town meeting in Boston—it is too big. You must devise something else. If you look back in the history of Boston you will find that Boston was very reluctant to admit this particular truth for some time in the first decades of the nineteenth century. When this government was founded there were no great individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry were being carried on very much as they had been carried on in the days when Nineveh and Babylon stood in the Mesopotamian Valley. Sails, oars, wheels—these were the instruments of commerce. The pack train, the wagon train, the rowboat, the sailing craft—these were the methods of commerce. Everything has been revolutionized in the business world since then, and the progress of civilization from being a dribble has become a torrent. There was no particular need at that time of bothering as to whether the nation or the State had control of corporations. They were easy to control. Now, however, the exact reverse is the case. And remember when I say corporations I do not mean merely trusts technically so-called, merely combinations of corporations, or corporations under certain peculiar conditions. For instance, some time ago the Attorney-General took action against a certain trust. There was considerable discussion as to whether the trust aimed at would not seek to get out from under the law by becoming a single corporation. Now, I want laws that will enable us to deal with any evil no matter what shape it takes. I want to see the government able to get at it definitely, so that the action of the government can not be evaded by any turning within or without Federal or State statutes. At present we have really no efficient control over a big corporation which does business in more than one State. Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do with the State in which it is incorporated except to get incorporated; and all its business may be done in entirely different communities—communities which may object very much to the methods of incorporation in the State named. I do not believe that you can get any action by any State, I do not believe it practicable to get action by all the States that will give us satisfactory control of the trusts, of big corporations; and the result is at present that we have a great, powerful, artificial creation which has no creator to which it is responsible. The creator creates it and then it goes and operates somewhere else; and there is no interest on the part of the creator to deal with it. It does not do anything where the creator has power; it operates entirely outside of the creator’s jurisdiction.

It is of course a mere truism to say that the corporation is the creature of the State, that the State is sovereign. There should be a real and not a nominal sovereign, some one sovereign to which the corporation shall be really and not nominally responsible. At present if we pass laws nobody can tell whether they will amount to anything. That has two bad effects. In the first place, the corporation becomes indifferent to the law-making body; and in the next place, the law-making body gets into that most pernicious custom of passing a law not with reference to what will be done under it, but with reference to its effects upon the opinions of the voters. That is a bad thing. When any body of law-makers passes a law, not simply with reference to whether that law will do good or ill, but with the knowledge that not much will come of it, and yet that perhaps the people as a whole will like to see it on the statute books—it does not speak well for the law-makers, and it does not speak well for the people, either. What I hope to see is power given to the National Legislature which shall make the control real. It would be an excellent thing if you could have all the States act on somewhat similar lines so that you would make it unnecessary for the national government to act; but all of you know perfectly well that the States will not act on similar lines. No advance whatever has been made in the direction of intelligent dealing by the States as a collective body with these great corporations. Here in Massachusetts you have what I regard as, on the whole, excellent corporation laws. Most of our difficulties would be in a fair way of solution if we had the power to put upon the national statute books, and did put upon them, laws for the nation much like those you have here on the subject of corporations in Massachusetts. So you can see, gentlemen, I am not advocating anything very revolutionary. I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary. Now, if we can get adequate control by the nation of these great corporations, then we can pass legislation which will give us the power of regulation and supervision over them. If the nation had that power, mind you, I should advocate as strenuously as I know how that the power should be exercised with extreme caution and self-restraint. No good will come from plunging in without having looked carefully ahead. The first thing we want is publicity; and I do not mean publicity as a favor by some corporations—I mean it as a right from all corporations affected by the law. I want publicity as to the essential facts in which the public has an interest. I want the knowledge given to the accredited representatives of the people of facts upon which those representatives can if they see fit base their actions later. The publicity itself would cure many evils. The light of day is a great deterrer of wrongdoing. The mere fact of being able to put out nakedly, and with the certainty that the statements were true, a given condition of things that was wrong, would go a long distance toward curing that wrong; and, even where it did not cure it, would make the path evident by which to cure it. We would not be leaping in the dark; we would not be striving blindly to see what was good and what bad. We would know what the facts were and be able to shape our course accordingly.

A good deal can be done now, a good deal is being done now. As far as the anti-trust laws go they will be enforced. No suit will be undertaken for the sake of seeming to undertake it. Every suit that is undertaken will be begun because the great lawyer and upright man whom we are fortunate enough to have as Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, believes that there is a violation of the law which we can get at; and when the suit is undertaken it will not be compromised except upon the basis that the government wins. Of course, gentleman, no laws amount to anything unless they are administered honestly and fearlessly. We must have such administration or the law will amount to nothing. I believe that it is possible to frame national legislation which shall give us far more power than we now have, at any rate over corporations doing an interstate business. I can not guarantee that, because in the past it has more than once happened that we have put laws on the statute books which those who made them intended to mean one thing, and when they came up for decision by the courts, it was found that the intention had not been successfully put into effect. But I believe that additional legislation can be had. If my belief is wrong, if it proves evident that we can not, under the Constitution as it is, give the national administration sufficient power to deal with these great corporations, then no matter what our reverence for the past, our duty to the present and the future will force us to see that some power is conferred upon the national government. And when that power has been conferred, then it will rest with the national government to exercise it.

AT HAVERHILL, MASS., AUGUST 26, 1902

_My Fellow-Citizens_:

Naturally at the home of Secretary Moody I should like to say a word or two about the navy. I think that whenever we touch on the navy we are sure of a hearty response from any American audience; we are just as sure of such a response in the mountains and great plains of the West as upon the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards. The entire country is vitally interested in the navy, because an efficient navy of adequate size is not only the best guarantee of peace, but is also the surest means for seeing that if war does come the result shall be honorable to our good name and favorable to our national interests.

Any really great nation must be peculiarly sensitive to two things: Stain on the national honor at home, and disgrace to the national arms abroad. Our honor at home, our honor in domestic and internal affairs, is at all times in our own keeping, and depends simply upon the possession of an awakened public conscience. But the only way to make safe our honor, as affected not by our own deeds but by the deeds of others, is by readiness in advance. In three great crises in our history during the nineteenth century—in the War of 1812, in the Civil War, and again in the Spanish War—the navy rendered to the nation services of literally incalculable worth. In the Civil War we had to meet antagonists even more unprepared at sea than we were. On both the other occasions we encountered foreign foes, and the fighting was done entirely by ships built long in advance, and by officers and crews who had been trained during years of sea service for the supreme day when their qualities were put to the final test. The ships which won at Manila and Santiago under the Administration of President McKinley had been built years before under Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison. The officers in those ships had been trained from their earliest youth to their profession, and the enlisted men, in addition to their natural aptitude, their intelligence, and their courage, had been drilled as marksmen with the great guns and as machinists in the engine rooms, and perfected in all the details of their work during years of cruising on the high seas and of incessant target practice. It was this preparedness which was the true secret of the enormous difference in efficiency between our navy and the Spanish navy. There was no lack of courage and self-devotion among the Spaniards, but on our side, in addition to the courage and devotion, for the lack of which no training could atone, there was also that training—the training which comes only as the result of years of thorough and painstaking practice.

Annapolis is, with the sole exception of its sister academy at West Point, the most typically democratic and American school of learning and preparation that there is in the entire country. Men go there from every State, from every walk of life, professing every creed—the chance of entry being open to all who perfect themselves in the necessary studies and who possess the necessary moral and physical qualities. There each man enters on his merits, stands on his merits, and graduates into a service where only his merit will enable him to be of value.

The enlisted men are of fine type, as they needs must be to do their work well, whether in the gun turret or in the engine room; and out of the fine material thus provided the finished man-of-war’s man is evolved by years of sea service.

It is impossible after the outbreak of war to improvise either the ships or the men of a navy. A war vessel is a bit of mechanism as delicate and complicated as it is formidable. You might just as well expect to turn an unskilled laborer offhand into a skilled machinist or into the engineer of a flyer on one of our big railroad systems as to put men aboard a battleship with the expectation that they will do anything but discredit themselves until they have had months and years in which thoroughly to learn their duties. Our shipbuilders and gunmakers must keep ever on the alert so that no rivals pass them by; and the officers and enlisted men on board the ships must in their turn, by the exercise of unflagging and intelligent zeal, keep themselves fit to get the best use out of the weapons of war intrusted to their care. The instrument is always important, but the man who uses it is more important still. We must constantly endeavor to perfect our navy in all its duties in time of peace, and above all in manœuvring in a seaway and in marksmanship with the great guns. In battle the only shots that count are those that hit, and marksmanship is a matter of long practice and of intelligent reasoning. A navy’s efficiency in a war depends mainly upon its preparedness at the outset of that war. We are not to be excused as a nation if there is not such preparedness of our navy. This is especially so in view of what we have done during the last four years. No nation has a right to undertake a big task unless it is prepared to do it in masterful and effective style. It would be an intolerable humiliation for us to embark on such a course of action as followed from our declaration of war with Spain, and not make good our words by deeds—not be ready to prove our truth by our endeavor whenever the need calls. The good work of building up the navy must go on without ceasing. The modern warship can not with advantage be allowed to rust in disuse. It must be used up in active service even in time of peace. This means that there must be a constant replacement of the ineffective by the effective. The work of building up and keeping up our navy is therefore one which needs our constant and unflagging vigilance. Our navy is now efficient; but we must be content with no ordinary degree of efficiency. Every effort must be made to bring it ever nearer to perfection. In making such effort the prime factor is to have at the head of the navy such an official as your fellow-townsman, Mr. Moody; and the next is to bring home to our people as a whole the need of thorough and ample preparation in advance; this preparation to take the form not only of continually building ships, but of keeping these ships in commission under conditions which will develop the highest degree of efficiency in the officers and enlisted men aboard them.

AT PORTLAND, MAINE, AUGUST 26, 1902

_Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens, men and women of Maine_:

I wish to say a word to you in recognition of great service rendered not only to all our country but to the entire principle of democratic government throughout the world, by one of your citizens. The best institutions are of no good if they won’t work. I do not care how beautiful a theory is, if it won’t fit in with the facts it is of no good. If you built the handsomest engine that ever had been built and it did not go, its usefulness would be limited. Well, that was just about the condition that Congress had reached at the time when Thomas B. Reed was elected Speaker. We had all the machinery, but it didn’t work,—that was the trouble,—and you had to find some one powerful man who would disregard the storm of obloquy sure to be raised by what he did in order to get it to work. Such a man was found when Reed was made Speaker. We may differ among ourselves as to policy. We may differ among ourselves as to what course government should follow; but if we possess any intelligence we must be a unit that it shall be able to follow some course. If government can not go on it is not government. If the legislative body can not enact laws, then there is no use of misnaming it a legislative body; and if the majority is to rule some method by which it can rule must be provided. Government by the majority in Congress had practically come to a stop when Mr. Reed became Speaker. Mr. Reed, at the cost of infinite labor, at the cost of the fiercest attacks, succeeded in restoring that old principle; and now through Congress we can do well or ill, accordingly as the people demand, but at any rate, we can do something—and we owe it more than to any other one man to your fellow-citizen, Mr. Reed. It is a great thing for any man to be able to feel that in some one crisis he left his mark deeply scored for good in the history of his country, and Tom Reed has the right to that feeling.

AT AUGUSTA, MAINE, AUGUST 26, 1902

_Governor Burleigh, my fellow-citizens, men and women of Maine_:

It would be difficult for any man speaking to this audience and from in front of the house in which Blaine once lived to fail to feel whatever of Americanism there was in him stirred to the depths. For my good fortune I knew Mr. Blaine quite well when he was Secretary of State, and I have thought again and again during the past few years how pleased he would have been to see so many of the principles for which he had stood approach fruition.

One secret, perhaps I might say the chief secret, of Mr. Blaine’s extraordinary hold upon the affections of his countrymen was his entirely genuine and unaffected Americanism. When I speak of Americanism I do not for a minute mean to say, gentlemen, that all the things we do are all right. I think there are plenty of evils to correct and that often a man shows himself all the more a good American because he wants to cut out any evil of the body politic which may interfere with our approaching the ideal of true Americanism. But not only admitting but also emphasizing this, it yet remains true that throughout our history no one has been able to render really great service to the country if he did not believe in the country. Mr. Blaine possessed to an eminent degree the confident hope in the nation’s future which made him feel that she must ever strive to fit herself for a great destiny. He felt that this Republic must in every way take the lead in the Western Hemisphere. He felt that this Republic must play a great part among the nations of the earth. The last four years have shown how true that feeling of his was.

He had always hoped that we would have a peculiarly intimate relation with the countries south of us. He could hardly have anticipated—no one could have—the Spanish War and its effects. In consequence of that war America’s interest in the tropic islands to our south and the seas and coasts surrounding those islands is far greater than ever before. Our interest in the Monroe Doctrine is more complicated than ever before. The Monroe Doctrine is simply a statement of our very firm belief that on this continent the nations now existing here must be left to work out their own destinies among themselves and that the continent is not longer to be regarded as colonizing ground for any European power. The one power on the continent that can make that doctrine effective is, of course, ourselves; for in the world as it is, gentlemen, the nation which advances a given doctrine likely to interfere in any way with other nations must possess power to back it up if she wishes the doctrine to be respected. We stand firmly on the Monroe Doctrine.

The events of the last nine months have rendered it evident that we shall soon embark on the work of excavating the Isthmian Canal to connect the two great oceans—a work destined to be, probably, the greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century, certainly a greater engineering feat than has ever yet been successfully attempted among the nations of mankind; and as it is the biggest thing of its kind to be done I am glad it is the United States that is to do it. Whenever a nation undertakes to carry out a great destiny it must make up its mind that there will be work and worry, labor and risk, in doing the work. It is with a nation as it is with an individual; if you are content to attempt but little in private life you may be able to escape a good deal of worry, but you won’t achieve very much. The man who attempts much must make up his mind that there will now and then come days and nights of worry; there will come even moments of seeming defeat. But out of the difficulties we wrest success. So it is with the nation. It is not the easy task that is necessarily the best.

AT BANGOR, MAINE, AUGUST 27, 1902

_My Fellow-Citizens_: