There can be no doubt that the movement to restrict the functions of government, the laissez-faire movement, was in its time an important step in human freedom, because so much of governmental action was despotic in intention and stupid in execution. But it is also a mistake to continue to think of a government which is only the people associated for the assuring of their own ends as if it were the same sort of thing as a government which represented the will of an irresponsible class. The advance of means of publicity, and of natural and social science, provides not only protection against ignorant and unwise public action, but also constructive instrumentalities of intelligent administrative activities. One of the chief moral problems of the present day is, then, that of making governmental machinery such a prompt and flexible organ for expressing the common interest and purpose as will do away with that distrust of government which properly must endure so long as "government" is something imposed from above and exercised from without.
2. Indifference to Public Concerns.—The multiplication of private interests is a measure of social progress: it marks the multiplication of the sources and ingredients of happiness. But it also invites neglect of the fundamental general concerns which, seeming very remote, get pushed out of sight by the pressure of the nearer and more vivid personal interests. The great majority of men have their thoughts and feelings well occupied with their family and business affairs; with their clubs for recreation, their church associations, and so on. "Politics" becomes the trade of a class which is especially expert in the manipulation of their fellows and skilled in the "acceleration" of public opinion. "Politics" then gets a bad name, and the aloofness from public matters of those best fitted, theoretically, to participate in them is further promoted. The saying of Plato, twenty-five hundred years ago, that the penalty good men pay for not being interested in government is that they are then ruled by men worse than themselves, is verified in most of our American cities.
3. Corruption.—This indifference of the many, which throws the management of political affairs into the hands of a few, leads inevitably to corruption. At the best, government is administered by human beings possessed of ordinary human frailties and partialities; and, at the best, therefore, its ideal function of serving impartially the common good must be compromised in its execution. But the control of the inner machinery of governmental power by a few who can work in irresponsible secrecy because of the indifference and even contempt of the many, incites to deliberate perversion of public functions into private advantages. As embezzlement is appropriation of trust funds to private ends, so corruption, "graft," is prostitution of public resources, whether of power or of money, to personal or class interests. That a "public office is a public trust" is at once an axiom of political ethics and a principle most difficult to realize.
In our own day, a special field has been opened within which corruption may flourish, in the development of public utility companies. Railways, city transportation systems, telegraph and telephone systems, the distribution of water and light, require public franchises, for they either employ public highways or they call upon the State to exercise its power of eminent domain. These enterprises can be carried on efficiently and economically only as they are either monopolies, or quasi-monopolies. All modern life, however, is completely bound up with and dependent upon facilities of communication, intercourse, and distribution. Power to control the various public-service corporations carries with it, therefore, power to control and to tax all industries, power to build up and cast down communities, companies, and individuals, to an extent which might well have been envied by royal houses of the past. It becomes then a very special object for great corporations to control the agencies of legislation and administration; and it becomes a very special object for party leaders and bosses to get control of party machinery in order to act as brokers in franchises and in special favors—sometimes directly for money, sometimes for the perpetuation and extension of their own power and influence, sometimes for the success, through influential support and contribution to party funds, of the national party with which they are identified.
4. Reforms in Party Machinery.—The last decade or so of our history has been rife with schemes to improve political conditions. It has become clear, among other things, that our national growth has carried with it the development of secondary political agencies, not contemplated by the framers of our constitutions, agencies which have become primary in practical matters. These agencies are the "machines" of political parties, with their hierarchical gradation of bosses from national to ward rulers, bosses who are in close touch with great business interests at one extreme, and with those who pander to the vices of the community (gambling, drink, and prostitution) at the other; parties with their committees, conventions, primaries, caucuses, party-funds, societies, meetings, and all sorts of devices for holding together and exciting masses of men to more or less blind acquiescence.
It is not necessary to point out the advantages which parties have subserved in concentrating and defining public opinion and responsibility in large issues; nor to dwell upon their value in counteracting tendencies which break up and divide men into a multitude of small groups having little in common with one another. But behind these advantages a vast number of abuses have sheltered themselves. Recent legislation and recent discussion have shown a marked tendency formally to recognize the part actually played by party machinery in the conduct of the State, and to take measures to make this factor more responsible in its exercise. Since these measures directly affect the conditions under which the government as the organ of the general will does its work of securing the fundamental conditions of equal opportunity for all, they have a direct moral import. Such questions as the Australian ballot, the recognition of party emblems and party groupings of names; laws for direct primary nominations; the registering of voters for primary as well as for final elections; legal control of party committees and party conventions; publicity of accounts as to the reception and use of party funds; forbidding of contributions by corporations, are thus as distinctly moral questions as are bribery and ballot-box stuffing.
5. Reforms in Governmental Machinery.—Questions that concern the respective advantages of written versus unwritten constitutions are in their present state problems of technical political science rather than of morals. But there are problems, growing out of the fact that for the most part American constitutions were written and adopted under conditions radically unlike those of the present, which have a direct ethical import. As already noted, our constitutions are full of evidences of distrust of popular coöperative action. They did not and could not foresee the direction of industrial development, the increased complexity of social life, nor the expansion of national territory. Many measures which have proved indispensable have had therefore to be as it were smuggled in; they have been justified by "legal fictions" and by interpretations which have stretched the original text to uses undreamed of. At the same time, the courts, which are the most technical and legal of our political organs, are supreme masters over the legislative branch, the most popular and general. The distribution of functions between the states and the nation is curiously ill-adapted to present conditions (as the discussions regarding railway regulation indicate); and the distribution of powers between the state and its municipalities is hardly less so, resting in theory upon the idea of local self-government, and in practice doing almost everything possible to discourage responsible initiative for the conduct of their own affairs on the part of municipalities.
These conditions have naturally brought forth a large crop of suggestions for reforms. It is not intended to discuss them here, but the more important of them, so far as involving moral questions, may be briefly noted. The proposals termed the initiative and the referendum and the "recall" (this last intended to enable the people to withdraw from office any one with whose conduct of affairs they are dissatisfied) are clearly intended to make the ideal of democratic control more effective in practice. Proposals for limited or complete woman's suffrage call attention to the fact that one-half of the citizenship does the political thinking for the other half, and emphasize the difficulty under such conditions of getting a comprehensive social standpoint (which, as we have already seen, is the sympathetic and reasonable standpoint) from which to judge social issues. Many sporadic propositions from this and that quarter indicate a desire to revise constitutions so as to temper their cast-iron quality and increase their flexible adaptation to the present popular will, and so as to emancipate local communities from subjection to State legislatures in such a way as to give them greater autonomy and hence greater responsibility, in the management of their own corporate affairs. It is not the arguments pro and con that we are here concerned with; but we are interested to point out that moral issues are involved in the settlement of these questions. It may, moreover, be noted that dividing lines in the discussion are generally drawn, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the degree of faith which exists in the democratic principle and ideal, as against the class idea in some of its many forms.
6. Constructive Social Legislation.—The rapid change of economic methods, the accumulation and concentration of wealth, the aggregation of capital and labor into distinct bodies of corporations and trusts, on one side, and federated labor unions, on the other; the development of collective agencies of production and distribution, have brought to the focus of public attention a large number of proposals for new legislation, almost all of which have a direct moral import. These matters are discussed at length in subsequent chapters (chs. xxii.-xxv.); and so are passed over here with the reminder that, while on one side they are questions of the ethics of industry, they are also questions of the right and wrong use of political power and authority. We may also note that the theoretical principle at issue, the extension versus the restriction of governmental agencies, so far as it is not simply a question of what is expedient under the given circumstances, is essentially a question of a generalized versus a partial individualism. The democratic movement of emancipation of personal capacities, of securing to each individual an effective right to count in the order and movement of society as a whole (that is, in the common good), has gone far enough to secure to many, more favored than others, peculiar powers and possessions. It is part of the irony of the situation that such now oppose efforts to secure equality of opportunity to all on the ground that these efforts would effect an invasion of individual liberties and rights: i.e., of privileges based on inequality. It requires perhaps a peculiarly sympathetic imagination to see that the question really involved is not one of magnifying the powers of the State against individuals, but is one of making individual liberty a more extensive and equitable matter.
7. The International Problem.—The development of national States marks a tremendous step forward in the realization of the principle of a truly inclusive common good. But it cannot be the final step. Just as clans, sects, gangs, etc., are intensely sympathetic within and intensely exclusive and jealous without, so States are still arrayed against States, with patriotism, loyalty, as an internal virtue, and the distrust and hatred of divisive hostility as the counterpart vice. The idea of humanity in the abstract has been attained as a moral ideal. But the political organization of this conception, its embodiment in law and administrative agencies, has not been achieved. International law, arbitration treaties, and even a court like the Hague tribunal, whose power is sentimental rather than political, mark steps forward. Nothing could be more absurd, from the historic point of view, than to regard the conception of an international State of federated humanity, with its own laws and its own courts and its own rules for adjudicating disputes, as a mere dream, an illusion of sentimental hope. It is a very slight step to take forward compared with that which has substituted the authority of national States for the conflict of isolated clans and local communities; or with that which has substituted a publicly administered justice for the régime of private war and retaliation. The argument for the necessity (short of the attainment of a federated international State with universal authority and policing of the seas) of preparing in peace by enlarged armies and navies for the possibility of war, must be offset at least by recognition that the possession of irresponsible power is always a direct temptation to its irresponsible use. The argument that war is necessary to prevent moral degeneration of individuals may, under present conditions, where every day brings its fresh challenge to civic initiative, courage, and vigor, be dismissed as unmitigated nonsense.