THERE is a very real need of governmental action, but it should be action along a totally different line. The result of the unlimited action of the competition system is seen at this moment in the bituminous coal-mines of West Virginia, where the independent operators, in the ferocity of their unregulated competition, and partly because they are forbidden to combine even for useful purposes, seek their profit in the merciless exploitation of the wage-workers who toil for them. The law, in the strict spirit of the “new freedom,” forbids them to combine for a useful purpose, and yet offers no check upon their dealing with their employees in a spirit of brutal greed. What is needed is thoroughgoing, efficient, and, if necessary, drastic supervision and control of the great corporations doing an interstate business, by means of a Federal administrative body akin in its functions to the Interstate Commerce Commission. This body should have power not only to enforce publicity, but to secure justice and fair treatment to investors, wage-workers, business rivals, consumers, and the general public alike.
Such an industrial commission should do as the Interstate Commerce Commission should do, that is, remember always its dual duty, the duty to the corporation and individual controlled no less than to the public. It is an absolute necessity that the investors, the owners, of an honest, useful, and decently managed concern, should have reasonable profit. It is impossible to run business unless this is done. Unless the business man prospers, there will be no prosperity for the rest of the community to share. He must have certainty of law and opportunity for honest and reasonable profit under the law.
Experience has proved that we cannot afford to leave the great corporations to determine for themselves without governmental supervision how they shall treat their employees, their rivals, their customers, and the general public. But experience has no less shown that it is as fatal for the agents of government to be unjust to the corporation as to fail to secure justice from them. In dealing with railways, for example, it is just as important that rates should not be too low as that they should not be too high. The living wage and the living rate are interdependent. In dealing with useful, honestly organized, and honestly managed railways, rates must be kept high enough to permit of proper wages and proper hours of labor for the men on the railroad, and to permit the company to pay compensation for the lives and limbs of those employees who suffer in doing its business; and at the same time to secure a reasonable reward to the investors—a reward sufficient to make them desirous to continue in this type of investment. Precisely the same course of action which should be followed in dealing with the railroads should also be followed by the Interstate Industrial Commission in dealing with the great industrial corporations engaged in interstate business.
TAXATION
WE believe that great fortunes, even when accumulated by the man himself, are of limited benefit to the country, and that they are detrimental rather than beneficial when secured through inheritance. We therefore believe in a heavily progressive inheritance tax—a tax which shall bear very lightly on small or ordinary inheritances, but which shall bear very heavily upon all inheritances of colossal size. We believe in a heavily graded income tax, along the same lines, but discriminating sharply in favor of earned, as compared with unearned, incomes.
It would be needless and burdensome to set forth in detail all the matters, national, state, and municipal, to which we would apply our principles. We believe that municipalities should have complete self-government as regards all the affairs that are exclusively their own, including the important matter of taxation, and that the burden of municipal taxation should be so shifted as to put the weight of land taxation upon the unearned rise in value of the land itself rather than upon the improvements, the buildings; the effort being to prevent the undue rise of rent. We regard it as peculiarly the province of the government to supervise tenement-houses, to secure proper living conditions, and to erect parks and playgrounds in the congested districts, and to use the schools as social centers.
THE PEOPLE AND THE LAWS
WE hold that all the agencies of government belong to the people, that the Constitution is theirs, and that the courts are theirs. The people should exercise their power, not to overthrow either the Constitution or the courts, but to overthrow those who would pervert them into agents against the popular welfare. We believe that where a public servant misrepresents the people, the people should have the right to remove him from office, and that where the legislature enacts a law which it should not enact or fails to enact a law which it should enact, the people should have the right on their own initiative to supply the omission. We do not believe that either power should be loosely or wantonly used, and we would provide for its exercise in a way which would make its exercise safe; but the power is necessary, and it should be provided.
We hold, moreover, with the utmost emphasis, that the people themselves should have the right to decide for themselves after due deliberation what laws are to be placed upon the statute-books and what construction is to be placed upon the constitutions, national and state, by the courts, so far as concerns all laws for social and industrial justice. This proposal has nothing whatever to do with any ordinary case at law. It has nothing to do with the exercise by the judge of judicial functions, or with his decision in any issue merely between man and man. It has to do only with the exercise by the court of political and legislative functions. We believe that it is wise to continue the American practice of using the courts as a check upon the legislature in this manner, but only so long as it is possible, in the event of conflict between the legislature and the court, to call in as arbiter the people who are the masters of both legislature and court, and whose own vital interests are at issue. The court and the legislature alike are the servants of the people, and they are dealing with the interests of the people; and the people, the masters of both, have the right to decide between them when their own most intimate concerns are at stake.
The present process of constitutional amendment is too long, too cumbrous, and too uncertain to afford an adequate remedy, and, moreover, after the amendment has been carried, the law must once more be submitted to the same court which was, perhaps, originally at fault, in order to decide whether the new law comes within the amendment. Provision should be made by which, after due deliberation, the people should be given the right themselves to decide whether or not a given law passed in the exercise of the police power for social or industrial betterment and declared by the court to be unconstitutional, shall, notwithstanding this, become part of the law of the land. This proposal has caused genuine alarm and been treated as revolutionary; but opposition to it can proceed only from complete misunderstanding both of the proposal and of the needs of the situation. Of course, however, the selfish opposition of the great corporation lawyers and of their clients is entirely intelligent; for these men alone are the beneficiaries of the present reign of hidden, of invisible, government, and they rely primarily on well-meaning but reactionary courts to thwart the forward movement.