Although these conditions are not novel ones, and are therefore not difficult to grasp even when stated in general terms, it is still true that the concrete often helps to make the point appear more pertinent. Take then the railroad business as it is now shaping itself, in comparison with its conditions and methods twenty or thirty years ago. The railroads have always existed by virtue of charters which gave them a quasi-public character, and have always been theoretically subject to certain old principles of English common law under which the public or common carrier, like the innkeeper, performs a function not wholly private in its nature. Nevertheless, in its earlier stages the railroad system of this country was in large part constructed and operated by its projectors with no sense whatever of responsibility for their performance of public functions, but with the idea that they were carrying on their own private business in which interference on the part of the public was to be avoided and resented. They fought the railroad codes of State legislatures in the federal courts; they made oppressive rates to give value to new issues of watered stock; they discriminated in favor of one city and against another; by a system of secret rebates they made different terms with every shipper, thus enabling one merchant or manufacturer to destroy his competitor; and they pursued in general a career at least anti-social in its spirit and false and short-sighted in its principles.
A profound change—would that it were already complete!—is coming about in this great field of transportation business. It is perceived that many of the evils to which I have alluded were incident to the speculative periods of construction and development in a new country. The better leaders in the business of railway administration now see clearly that it is the duty of the railroads to work with and for the public and not against it. The railroads are gradually passing out of the hands of the stockjobbers and speculators, into the control of trained administrators. It is to be remembered that in a country like ours, the largest single branch of organized administration is that of the railroads. We have reached a point where their relations to all the elaborate interests of the community are such that their public character becomes more and more pronounced and evident. It was only the other day that a brilliant railway administrator, Mr. Charles S. Mellen, recently president of the Northern Pacific, and now president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, made some statements in an address to the business men of Hartford at a Board of Trade meeting. With much else of the same import, he made the following significant remarks:
"If corporations are to continue to do their work as they are best fitted to, those qualities in their representatives that have resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the background.
"They must come out into the open and see and be seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what they want and no more, and then be prepared to explain satisfactorily what advantage will accrue to the public if they are given their desires, for they are permitted to exist not that they may make money solely, but that they may effectively serve those from whom they derive their power. Publicity should rule now. Publicity, and not secrecy, will win hereafter, and laws will be construed by their intent and not killed by their letter; otherwise public utilities will be owned and operated by the public which created them, even though the service be less efficient and the result less satisfactory from a financial standpoint."
Mr. Mellen's state of mind is that which ought to prevail among all the managers of corporations which enjoy public franchises and perform functions fundamental to the welfare of the community. There will at times be prejudice and passion on the part of the public, and unfair demands will be made. We shall not see the attainment of ideal conditions in the management or the public relations of any great business corporations in our day. But the time has come when any intelligent and capable young man who chooses to enter the service of a railroad or of some other great corporation may rightly feel that he becomes part of a system whose operation is vital to the public welfare. He may further feel that there is room in such a calling for all his intelligence and for the exercise and growth of all the best sentiments of his moral nature.
In the vast mechanism of modern business the constructive imagination may find its full play; and the desire to be of service to one's fellow men in a spirit reasonably disinterested may find opportunity to satisfy itself every day. Under these circumstances there is no reason why railway administration should not take on the same ethical standards as belong rightly to governmental administration, to educational administration, or to the best professional life.
The same thing is clearly true when one considers nowadays the delicate and important functions of the world of banking and finance. The old-fashioned money-changer and the usurer of earlier periods were regarded as the very antithesis of men engaged in honorable mercantile life, and especially of those who possess a social spirit and the desire to be useful members of the community. But in these days the banks are not merely private money-making institutions, but have public functions that admittedly affect the whole social organism, from the government itself down to the humblest laborer. They must concern themselves about the soundness and the sufficiency of the monetary circulation; they must protect the credit and foster the welfare of honest merchants and manufacturers; they must coöperate in critical times to help one another, and thus to sustain the public and private credit and avert commercial disaster; they must at all hazards protect the savings of the poor. Thus the banks, like the railroads and many other corporate enterprises, are quasi-public affairs, in the conduct of which the public obligation grows ever clearer and stronger.
We are not at heart—in this splendid country of ours—engaged in a mad struggle and race for wealth. We are engaged rather in the greatest effort ever made in the world for the upbuilding of a higher civilization. To avow that this civilization must rest upon a physical and material basis,—that is to say, upon a high development of our productive capacity and upon a constant improvement in our processes of distribution and exchange,—is not, on the other hand, to confess that our civilization is materialistic in its nature or in its aims. I was very glad, the other day, to read the wholesome and understanding words of a distinguished Boston clergyman who is just now coming to New York to take charge of an important parish. He declared that this nation was founded on an ideal, and that the most powerful influences in its life today are working toward noble ideals. The moral and spiritual tone of the country, he asserted, is higher than ever, in spite of the accidents of wealth and poverty. He declared that the great host of men and women who cherish our ideals will continue to stamp idealism upon the minds and hearts of our youth, and that they in turn "will convert wealth to the service of ideals."
Such views are not merely the expressions of a comfortable optimist. They are true to the facts of our current progress. There are vast portions of this country today in which the enterprising business man who can succeed in selling to the farmers an honest and effective commercial fertilizer is the best possible missionary of idealism,—is, in fact, a veritable angel for the spread of sweetness and light. There are regions where the capitalist or the company that will build a cotton mill or some other kind of factory is rescuing whole communities from degradation. It is poverty that has kept the South so backward, and it is poverty alone that explains the illiteracy and the lawlessness not merely of the Kentucky mountains, but of great areas in other States as well. Good schools cannot be supported in regions like those, for the palpable reason that the taxable wealth of an entire school district cannot yield enough to pay the salary of a teacher. But when modern business invades those uplands, utilizes the water-power now wasted, opens the mines, builds cotton factories or foundries, the situation changes almost as if by magic.
There will, indeed, ensue a brief period of disturbance due to changed social conditions,—to women and children in factories, and other things of incidental or serious disadvantage. But, as against a survival of the sort of life that was widely prevalent a century or two ago, all the phenomena of our modern industrial life make their appearance, in full development. The one-room cabin gives place to the little house of several rooms. There is rapid diffusion of those minor comforts and agencies which make for self-respect and personal and family advancement. The advent of capital, that is to say, of taxable property, is speedily followed by the good schoolhouse and the good teacher.