Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of the great war recollect that about six weeks after Sumter had been fired on there began to be loud clamor in the North among people who were not at the front that you should go to Richmond; and there were any number of people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull Run, and a lot of those same people who a fortnight before had been yelling “On to Richmond at once,” turned around and said the war was over. All the hysteric brotherhood said so. But you didn’t think so. The war was not over. It was not over for three years and nine months, and then it was over the other way. And you got it over by setting your faces steadily toward the goal, by not relying upon anything impossible, but by each doing everything possible that came in his line to do, by each man doing his duty. You did not win by any patent device; you won by the generalship of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan, and, above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried the muskets and the sabres. It did not come as soon as you wanted, and the men who said it would come at once did not help you much either.
In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the trusts or anything else, you are going to get along in just about the same fashion. There is not any patent remedy for all the ills. All we can do is to make up our minds definitely that we intend to find some method by which we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what are the real evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in the next place, what of those real evils it is possible to cure by legislation; and then to cure them by legislation and by an honest administration of the laws after they have been enacted. That statement of the problem will never be attractive to the man who thinks that somehow, by turning your hand, you are going to get a complete solution at once.
Grant’s plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all summer, was not attractive to the men who wanted it done in a week. But it was the only plan that won. The only way we can ever work out even an approximately satisfactory solution of these great industrial problems, of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but one, is by approaching them in a spirit which shall combine equally sanity and self-restraint on the one hand and resolute purpose on the other.
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a perfect solution. It is not given to me or to any one else to promise you even an approximately perfect solution in a short time. But I think that we can work out a very great improvement over the present conditions, and the steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along the lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere so that we shall be able to say, the nation has power, let it use that power—and not as it is at present, where it is out of the question to say exactly where the power is.
We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly, but with moderation. Let me say that again—with moderation, with sanity, with self-restraint. The mechanism of modern business is altogether too delicate and too complicated for us to sanction for one moment any intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all in a spirit of rancor. Something can be done, something is being done now. Much more can be done if our people resolutely but temperately will that it shall be done. But the certain way of bringing great harm upon ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution of the problem, but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely its proper solution, would be to act in a spirit of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a spirit which would make us tear down the temple of industry in which we live because we are not satisfied with some of the details of its management.
I want you to think of what I have said, because it represents all of the sincerity and earnestness that I have, and I say to you here, from this platform, nothing that I have not already stated in effect, and nothing I would not say at a private table with any of the biggest corporation managers in the land.
AT DALTON, MASS., SEPTEMBER 3, 1902
Governor Crane, and you, my Friends and Fellow-Citizens:
It seems to me that in a town like this we not only have but ought to have a better standard of citizenship and a more thorough appreciation of the rights and duties of the individual citizen and of the possibilities of government than in almost any other community. Here is a town where you have both farming and manufacturing, where you have on a small scale all the elements that go to make up the industrial life of the nation as a whole—the capitalist and wage-earner, the farmer and hired man, merchant, men of the professions, you have them all; you see the forces that have built up the nation and that are at work in the nation, in play round about you in the farms, in the factories, in the houses, right among your neighbors and friends. When men live in a big city they lose touch with one another; they tend to lose intimate touch with the government, and they get to speak of the state, of the government, as something entirely apart from them. Now the government is us, here, you and me, and that ought to make us understand on the one hand what we have a right to expect from the government, and on the other hand what it is foolish to expect from the government. We have a right to expect from it that it will secure us against injustice; that so far as is humanly possible it will secure for each man a fair chance; that it will do justice as between man and man, and that it will not respect persons; that in that division of the government dealing with justice each man shall stand absolutely on his merits, not being discriminated for or against because of his wealth or his poverty, because of anything but his own conduct.
The government can take hold of certain functions which are in the interest of the people as a whole. More than this the government can not do or else does at the risk of doing it badly. The government can not supply the lack in any man of the qualities which must determine in the last resort the man’s success or failure. Instead of “government” say “the town.” Now what can the town do for you? A good deal; but not nearly as much as you can do for it, not nearly as much as you must do for yourself. The government can not make a man a success in life. If we would remember that and remember that when we use the large terms of the government and nation, we only mean the town on a large scale, there would be much less danger in our thinking that perhaps by some queer patent device or some scheme, the state, the government, the town, can supply the lack of individual thrift, energy, enterprise, resolution. It can not supply such lack. Something can be done by government, that is, by all of us acting together to protect the rights of all, to accomplish certain things for all. Something can be accomplished by helping one another. He is a poor creature who does not give help generously when the chance comes. But finally in the last resort the man who wins now will be the man of the type who has won always, the man who can win for himself. Do not make the mistake of thinking that it is possible ever to call in any outside force to take the place of the man’s own individual initiative, the man’s individual capacity to do work worth doing.