It is not easy to estimate the value, or otherwise, of Mr. Roosevelt's work in that capacity in which he has of late come to be best known to the world, namely as an opponent of the Trusts; but it is a pity that so many English newspapers habitually represent him as an enemy of all concentrated wealth. He has been called "the first Aristocrat to be elected President." Whether that be strictly true or not, he belongs distinctly to the aristocratic class and his sympathies are naturally with that class. His instincts are not destructive. No one, I have reason to believe, has a shrewder estimate of the worthlessness of the majority of those politicians who use his name as a cloak for their attacks on all accumulated wealth than he. It is only necessary to read his speeches to see how constantly he has insisted that it is not wealth, but the abuse of it, which he antagonises: "We draw the line not against wealth, but against misconduct." He has many times protested against the "outcry against men of wealth," for most of which he has declared "there is but the scantiest justification." Again and again he has proclaimed his desire not to hurt the honest corporation, "but we need not be over-tender about sparing the dishonest."[296:1]
One of the chief difficulties in the practical application of his policies has been that the Government cannot have the power to punish dishonest corporations without first being entrusted with a measure of control over all corporate operations, the concession of which control the honest corporations have felt compelled to resist. Nor is it possible to say that their resistance has not been justified. However wisely and forbearingly Mr. Roosevelt himself might use whatever power was placed in his hands, there has been little in the experience of the corporations in America to make them believe that they can trust either office-holders in general or, for any long term, the Government itself. Dispassionate students of the railway problem in the United States are aware that there is nothing which the corporations have done to the injury of the public worse than the wanton and gratuitous injuries which have been done by the politicians, by the State governments, and even on occasions by the Federal Government itself, to the corporations. If particular railway companies have at times abused the power of which they were possessed as monopolising the transportation to and from a certain section of the country, that abuse has not excelled in wantonness and immorality the abuses of their power over the corporations of which several of the Western States have been systematically guilty. There has been little encouragement to the corporations to submit themselves to any larger measure of public control than has been necessary; and the lessons of the past have shown that it would be injudicious for the railways to surrender uncomplainingly to the State governments authority which the British companies can leave to the Board of Trade without misgiving. And there was a time when the national Interstate Commerce Commission was, if more honest, not much less prejudiced in its dealing with the corporations subject to its authority than were the governments or railway commissions of the individual States.
Mr. Roosevelt's desire may have been (as it is) only to protect the people against the misuse of their power by dishonest corporations; and the honest corporations would be no less glad than Mr. Roosevelt himself to see the dishonest brought to book. But in the necessity of resisting (or what has seemed to the corporations the necessity of resisting) the extensions of the federal power which were requisite before reform could be achieved, the honest have been compelled to make common cause with the dishonest, so that the President has, in particular details, been forced into an attitude of hostility towards all corporations (and the corporations have for the most part been forced to put themselves in an attitude of antagonism to him) in spite of their natural sympathies and common interests.
The result has been unfortunate for business interests generally because the mere fact that the President was "against the companies" (no matter on what grounds, or whether he was against them all or only against some) has encouraged throughout the country the anti-corporation feeling which needed no encouragement. Any time these forty years, or since the early days of the Granger agitation, the shortest road to notoriety and political advancement (at least in any of the Western States) has been by abuse of the railroad companies. A thousand politicians and newspapers all over the country are eager to seize on any phrase or pronouncement of the President which can be interpreted as giving countenance to the particular anti-railroad campaign at the moment in progress in their own locality. A vast number of people are interested in distorting, or in interpreting partially, whatever is said at the White House, so that any phrase, regardless of its context,—each individual act, without reference to its conditions,—which could be represented as an encouragement to the anti-capitalist crusade has been seized upon and made the most of. All over the West there have always, in this generation, been a sufficient number of persons only too anxious, for selfish reasons, to inflame hostility against the railroad companies or against men of wealth; but only within the last few years has it been possible for the most unscrupulous demagogue to find colour and justification for whatever he has chosen to preach in the example and precept of the President—and of a President whose example and precept have counted for more with the masses of the people than have those of any occupant of the White House since the war. In this way Mr. Roosevelt has done more harm than could have been accomplished by a much worse man.
If the corporations have suffered, the course of events has been unfortunate too for Mr. Roosevelt. No one is better aware than he of the misrepresentation to which he is subjected and the unscrupulous use which is made of his example; and it is impossible that at times it can fail to be very bitter. It must also be bitter to find arrayed against him many men whose friendship he must value and whose co-operation in his work it must seem to him that he ought to have. It happens that his is not a character which is swayed by such considerations one hair's breadth from the course which he has marked out for himself; but it is deplorable that a very large proportion of precisely that class of men in which Mr. Roosevelt ought (or at least is justified in thinking that he ought) to find his strongest allies have felt themselves compelled to become his most determined opponents, while those interests which ought (or at least are justified in thinking that they ought) to to find in Mr. Roosevelt, as the occupant of the White House, their strongest bulwark against an unreasoning popular hostility only see that that hostility is immensely inflamed and strengthened by his course and example. The conditions are injurious to the business interests of the country and weaken Mr. Roosevelt's influence for good.
Yet it seems impossible—or certainly impossible for one on the outside—to place the responsibility anywhere except on those general conditions of the country which make possible both the misrepresentation of the position of the President and the wide-spread hostility to the corporations, or on those laxities in political and commercial morality in the past which have put it in the power alternately of the politician to plunder the railways and the railways to prey upon the people. In the ill-regulated conditions of the days of ferment there grew up abuses, both in politics and in commerce, which can only be rooted out with much wrenching of old ties and tearing of the roots of things; but it is worth an Englishman's understanding that the fact that this wrenching and this tearing are now in progress is only an evidence of that effort at self-improvement, an effort determined and conscious, which, as we have already seen more than once, the American people is making. Whatever certain sections of the American press, certain politicians, or certain financial interests, may desire the world to think, there is no need for those at a distance to see in the present conflict evidence either of a wicked and radically destructive disposition in the President or of an approaching disintegration of the American commercial fabric.
Meanwhile, as has been said, one result has been to weaken Mr. Roosevelt's personal influence for good. I have been assured by men of undoubted truthfulness, who are at the head of large financial interests, that he has, in the last few years, become as tricky and unscrupulous in his political methods as the oldest political campaigner; a statement which I believe to be entirely mistaken. "Practical politics," said Mr. Roosevelt once, "is not dirty politics. On the contrary in the long run the politics of fraud and treachery is unpractical politics, and the most practical of all politicians is the one who is clean and decent and upright." There is no evidence which I have been able to find that Mr. Roosevelt does not now believe this as thoroughly and act upon it as consistently as when he first entered the New York State Legislature.
A more reasonable accusation against him, which is made by many of his best friends, is that his imperious will and his confidence in his own opinions make him at times unjust and intolerant in his judgment of others. There have been occasions when he has seemed over-ready to accuse others of bad faith without other ground than his own opinion or the recollection of what has occurred at an interview. He may have been right; but it is certain that he has alienated the friendship of not a few good men by the vehemence and positiveness with which he has asserted his views. And anything, independent of all questions of party, which weakens his influence is, for the country's sake, a thing to be deplored.
The negro question has contributed not a little to Mr. Roosevelt's difficulties, as it has to the misunderstanding of the American people in England. I know intelligent Englishmen who have visited the United States and honestly believe that in the not very distant future the country will again be torn with civil war, a war of black against white, which will imperil the permanence of the Republic no less seriously than did the former struggle. I do not think that the apprehension is shared by many intelligent Americans.