The United States of America is a great Corporation, in which the Stockholder is the Elector. Stockholders of financial and industrial corporations desire dividends, which are paid in cash. Not desiring office, the stockholders are satisfied to have the corporation managed by representatives of aptitude and experience. The dividends paid by political corporations like the United States and the several states are “liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “equality before the law,” an army and navy for national defense, and courts of justice for the enforcement of rights and the redress of wrongs. But stockholders in political corporations are not always satisfied with these returns. Some prefer office to dividends payable only in blessings.
In banks and other business corporations, stockholders are apt to insist that representatives and officers who show aptitude and efficiency shall be continued in office so long as dividends are satisfactory. In political corporations the people have recently been pursuing a very different course. They have been changing their representatives so frequently that efficiency, which results only from experience, is impossible.
While stockholders of a corporation would certainly wreck the institution if they attempted to manage its affairs directly or by referendum, it is very appropriate for stockholders, acting on the recommendation of their representatives—the board of directors—to determine an important measure like an issue of bonds, or whether the scope and purpose of the concern shall be enlarged or its capital increased. Analogous to this is the determination of governmental policies at regular elections where the people choose between the programs of different political parties as set forth in their platforms. Thus the people sometimes ratify the policy of protection, and sometimes the policy of free trade, demonstrating that they do not always act wisely by frequently reversing themselves.
Political parties usually omit from their platforms the details of legislation. The only exception that occurs to me was when every detail of a financial policy was incorporated in the platform submitted for ratification. The coinage was to be “free,” it was to be “unlimited,” and at the “ratio of 16 to 1.” If the people had approved this at the polls their representatives would have had no discretion. There would have been no room for compromise. While the people are presumably competent to choose between policies recommended in the platforms of political parties, it is a far stretch of the imagination to suppose that the average citizen is better prepared to determine the details of a policy than the man he selects to represent him in the halls of Congress. The congressman who concedes that his average constituent is better prepared to pass upon a proposition than he is necessarily admits in the same breath that his district committed a serious blunder in sending him. It ought to have selected a man at least of average intelligence.
The fact that neither stockholders en masse, nor employees en masse are able to manage a business enterprise does not imply that the principle of a republic may not be advantageously applied to industrial concerns. This question is again referred to in Chapter XXX, and the possible safe, middle course between the industrial autocracy demanded by capital, and the industrial democracy demanded by labor, is suggested and briefly discussed.
CHAPTER III
STATESMEN MUST FIRST BE BORN AND THEN MADE
Some fundamental qualifications for statesmanship. Integrity and wisdom compared.
How are lawyers obtained? Admission to the bar does not always produce even an attorney. And there is a very marked difference between an attorney and a lawyer. But when a young man is admitted to the bar who has aptitude for the law, without which no man can be a lawyer, industry in the law, without which no man ever was a lawyer, then with some years of appropriate environment—the court room and the law library—a lawyer will be produced into whose hands you may safely commit your case.
How are law makers obtained? Many seem to think it only necessary to deliver a certificate of election, and, behold, a constructive statesman, of either gender. I would like to ask whether, in your judgment, it requires any less aptitude, any less industry, or a less period of appropriate environment to produce a constructive law maker, than to develop a safe law practitioner.