[17] Mr. Perkins is chairman of the Finance Committee of the International Harvester Company, a hundred million dollar corporation owning divers subsidiary companies which make twine and cordage. See Moody’s Manual.
[18] The Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe.
[19] Paul Morton.
Chapter XXVII
The Rights of Man
The rights of man cannot be changed. It is the government which attempts to change them that must change.—Webster.
It was the homely common sense of Mr. Lincoln that first reminded us most vividly how like to the sins of an individual are those of a nation. To the Southern man who admires Mr. Lincoln as one of the great figures of all time, he seems like a great physician, who, with malice toward none and with charity for all, kept vigil for four years at the bedside of a sick nation through all the long agony of its efforts to throw off from its system the inherited curse of slavery. Of course, human slavery was a relic of barbarism. But in fixing the Rights of Man, the founders of the Republic actually overlooked the fact that a negro was a human being. So that, vast property rights having accrued pursuant to that mistake, the march of progress had to wipe them out, no matter whom it hurt financially. The enormity of the iniquity of human slavery did not dawn suddenly and exclusively upon William Lloyd Garrison. He is not the sole, original inventor and patentee of the idea. Lord Macaulay’s father was doing the same sort of agitating in England about the same time. Westminster Abbey has its monument to the elder Macaulay, just as Commonwealth Avenue has its monument to the elder Garrison. Simultaneous like stirrings occurred elsewhere throughout Christendom. But, of course, in America, arguments for the emancipation of the slave first took root most readily in a thrifty section of our liberty-loving country which had nothing to lose by abolition.
John Quincy Adams once said that our government was “an experiment upon the heart of man.” It is because this government of the people by the people for the people was a deliberate and thoughtful attempt upon the part of its founders to apply the Golden Rule as a doctrine of international and inter-individual law, that we believe our form of government is the last hope of mankind. It is, as we conceive it, the voice of humanity raised in protest against the proposition that might makes right. It is, as we conceive it, a government which entered the lists of the nations as the champion of the human mind, in the great struggle of Mind for the mastery over Matter, the world-old struggle between Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. Our government, like everything else, must follow the law of its being, or die. Its first great sin in violation of the Rights of Man was due to heredity. We inherited the institution of slavery, the governmental exception to the rule that all men are created with equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This was a sin against human liberty, one of the “unalienable” Rights of Man, upon which the Republic purported to be builded. The consequences of that sin are still with us; but, except for the occasional bloody-shirt waver, whose intellectual resources are not sufficient to provide him with a live issue, we are meeting those consequences, as a nation, bravely, and with the mutual forbearance born of the fact that none are wholly free from responsibility for present difficulties.
Our second great national sin was a yielding to the temptation of the environment which arose, unforeseen, after a splendid war waged for the Rights of Man against Spain in Cuba. The Philippine war was waged to subjugate the Filipino people, because Mr. McKinley believed it would be financially profitable to us to own the islands, and in the face of the fact that the only thing he knew officially about the Filipino people was that Admiral Dewey thought them superior to the Cubans and more capable of self-government. The war in the Philippines was, therefore, a war against the Rights of Man. Nowhere in any state paper has any American statesman, soldier, or sailor, had the temerity to invoke the name of God in connection with the retention of the Philippine Islands. Nowhere in any American state paper connected with the Philippines is there any reference to “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The sin of our Philippine policy is that it is a denial of the right of a people to pursue happiness in their own way instead of in somebody else’s way. It is a denial of the very principles in maintenance of which we went to war against Spain to free Cuba, as we had previously gone to war against England to free ourselves.