[316]. “... Non-resistance would be fatal.... If ever war is done away, it will be when the spirit of aggression, not of protection, shall have been quenched.”—Lester F. Ward: Dynamic Sociology, Vol. I., p. 684.
[317]. See Chapter Seven, Section 12.
[318]. William Howard Taft: Present-Day Problems, pp. 162–63:—
“... It is also true that had the Elkins bill never been passed, the same acts could and doubtless would have been prosecuted ... under the Interstate Commerce Act of 1889 which the Elkins law supplanted.... Under the 1889 amendment, however, the individuals convicted could have been sent to the penitentiary, whereas under the Elkins Act the punishment by imprisonment was taken away.... The chief effect of the Elkins law had on these particular prosecutions ... was ... to save the guilty individual perpetrators from imprisonment.
“It was well understood that the Elkins bill was passed without opposition by, and with the full consent of, the railroads, and the chief reason was the elimination of the penitentiary penalty for unjust discriminations.... The imprisonment of two or three prominent officers of a railway company, or a trust ... would have greater deterrent effect for the future than millions in a fine.”
Theodore Roosevelt knows a good deal about the capitalist class. He wrote on pages 5, 6, 9, 10 of his book, American Ideals, as follows:
“The people that do harm in the end are not the wrong-doer whom all execrate.... The career of Benedict Arnold has done us no harm as a nation.... The foes of order harm quite as much by example as by what they actually accomplish. So it is with the equally dangerous criminals of the wealthy classes. The conscienceless stock speculator who acquires wealth by swindling his fellows, by debauching judges, and corrupting legislatures, and who ends his days with the reputation of being among the richest men in America, exerts over the minds of the rising generation an influence worse than that of the average murderer or bandit, because his career is even more dazzling in its success, and even more dangerous in its effects upon the community. Any one who reads the essays of Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams, entitled A Chapter of Erie, and the Gold Conspiracy in New York, will read about the doings of men whose influence for evil upon the community is more potent than that of any band of anarchists or train robbers.... Too much cannot be said against men who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune ... whether ... to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church which makes those good people, who are also foolish, forget his real iniquity.” Italics mine. G. R. K.
[319]. Theodore Roosevelt: in a speech at the State Fair, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 3, 1901.
[320]. “If the public economy of a people be an organism, we must expect to find that the perturbations, which affect it, present some analogies to the diseases of the body physical. We may, therefore, hope to learn much that may be of use in practice, from the tried methods of medicine.” Roscher: Political Economy, Vol. I., pp. 85–86.
[321]. It must be added for the sake of clearness (and fairness):