I very earnestly hope that the legislation which deals with the regulation of corporations engaged in interstate business will also deal with the rights and interests of the wageworkers employed by those corporations. Action was taken by the Congress last year limiting the number of hours that railway employees should be employed. The law is a good one; but if in practice it proves necessary to strengthen it, it must be strengthened. We have now secured a national employers’ liability law; but ultimately a more far-reaching and thorough-going law must be passed. It is monstrous that a man or woman who is crippled in an industry, even as the result of taking what are the necessary risks of the occupation, should be required to bear the whole burden of the loss. That burden should be distributed and not placed solely upon the weakest individual, the one least able to carry it. By making the employer liable the loss will ultimately be distributed among all the beneficiaries of the business.
I also hope that there will be legislation increasing the power of the National Government to deal with certain matters concerning the health of our people everywhere; the Federal authorities, for instance, should join with all the State authorities in warring against the dreadful scourge of tuberculosis. Your own State government, here in Massachusetts, deserves high praise for the action it has taken in these public health matters during the last few years; and in this, as in some other matters, I hope to see the National Government stand abreast of the foremost State governments.
I have spoken of but one or two laws which, in my judgment, it is advisable to enact as part of the general scheme for making the interference of the National Government more effective in securing justice and fair dealing as between man and man here in the United States. Let me add, however, that while it is necessary to have legislation when conditions arise where we can only cope with evils through the joint action of all of us, yet that we can never afford to forget that in the last analysis the all-important factor for each of us must be his own individual character. It is a necessary thing to have good laws, good institutions; but the most necessary of all things is to have a high quality of individual citizenship. This does not mean that we can afford to neglect legislation. It will be highly disastrous if we permit ourselves to be misled by the pleas of those who see in an unrestricted individualism the all-sufficient panacea for social evils; but it will be even more disastrous to adopt the opposite panacea of any socialistic system which would destroy all individualism, which would root out the fiber of our whole citizenship. In any great movement, such as that in which we are engaged, nothing is more necessary than sanity, than the refusal to be led into extremes by the advocates of the ultra course on either side. Those professed friends of liberty who champion license are the worst foes of liberty and tend by the reaction their violence causes to throw the Government back into the hands of the men who champion corruption and tyranny in the name of order. So it is with this movement for securing justice toward all men, and equality of opportunity so far as it can be secured by governmental action. The rich man who with hard arrogance declines to consider the rights and the needs of those who are less well off, and the poor man who excites or indulges in envy and hatred of those who are better off, are alike alien to the spirit of our national life. Each of them should learn to appreciate the baseness and degradation of his point of view, as evil in the one case as in the other. There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy, for there is a peculiar unwholesomeness in a social and governmental ideal where wealth by and of itself is held up as the greatest good. The materialism of such a view, whether it finds its expression in the life of a man who accumulates a vast fortune in ways that are repugnant to every instinct of generosity and of fair dealing, or whether it finds its expression in the vapidly useless and self-indulgent life of the inheritor of that fortune, is contemptible in the eyes of all men capable of a thrill of lofty feeling. Where the power of the law can be wisely used to prevent or to minimize the acquisition or business employment of such wealth and to make it pay by income or inheritance tax its proper share of the burden of government, I would invoke that power without a moment’s hesitation.
But while we can accomplish something by legislation, legislation can never be more than a part, and often no more than a small part, in the general scheme of moral progress; and crude or vindictive legislation may at any time bring such progress to a halt. Certain socialistic leaders propose to redistribute the world’s goods by refusing to thrift and energy and industry their proper superiority over folly and idleness and sullen envy. Such legislation would merely, in the words of the president of Columbia University, “wreck the world’s efficiency for the purpose of redistributing the world’s discontent.” We should all of us work heart and soul for the real and permanent betterment which will lift our democratic civilization to a higher level of safety and usefulness. Such betterment can come only by the slow, steady growth of the spirit which metes a generous, but not a sentimental, justice to each man on his merits as a man, and which recognizes the fact that the highest and deepest happiness for the individual lies not in selfishness but in service.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.