Ethics in Service

by William H. Taft

The effect is much the same upon your personal hope of accomplishing some good in the world as when a professor of astronomy takes you over to the observatory, lets you look through the telescope, tells you that light takes something like eight minutes to come the 95,000,000 miles from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are such atoms and so unimportant in the general result, what's the use?"

Still if you study Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule and the world is made up of them—at least it was in my college days. Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible effort to help along the general weal, and it is no excuse, because we cannot play a large part, that we should play no part at all and should feel no sense of responsibility for what we can do.

What then of conditions of civilization in our country in the last half-century? The Civil War grew out of a great moral and social issue. It was a moral issue on the part of the North and a social issue on the part of the South. Material considerations were subordinated. After the war we had a pretty hard time in getting over its immediate effects. The panic of 1873, which prostrated all business, was the result of the excesses of the war, the overissue of legal tender and the feverish, unhealthy expansion that followed. In 1878, we resumed specie payments. I presume no country in the world ever showed such an enormous expansion and such material growth as ours between 1878 and 1907. It was shown in the useful inventions. Steam had been invented before, but it was increased in its uses, and electricity was made the tool of man. Now it is easy to follow that kind of material expansion. We can count the growth in wealth and trace the effect of it on the people, for they all got into the chase for the dollar.

In the West, the pioneer spirit was so strong that they were glad to have anything in the way of development at any cost. Counties would issue railroad bonds to build railroads and would give the bonds to the railroads. They would give franchises of all sorts and do everything that they thought would help open the country. There was a most substantial increase in the average income, and the average comfort, especially in the bodily comfort, of everyone. Have you ever thought that today the humblest workman has more bodily comfort in many ways than Queen Elizabeth or even George III? We had learned the advantage of combination in machinery and we adopted it in business.

This brought about great combinations of plant and capital which reduced the cost of producing commodities necessary to man to a price never conceived of before. I do not wish to depreciate the value or importance of improvement in material comfort. When you hear a man denounce it, you may know that either he is not a clear, calm thinker, or else he is a demagogue. Material growth and material comfort are essential for the development of mental and spiritual activities. The result of this combination and material expansion, however, was to create great corporations which began to get control of things. The same spirit of combination entered into politics and we had machines and bosses which lent their hand to, and furnished a complacent instrument for, corporations. Time was when they ordered delegates in a convention with the same degree of certainty that the order would be supplied, as they did steel rails or any other commodity. That time has passed and why? Because the danger of plutocracy forced itself on the people. Leaders took it up and showed it to them; and in the last ten years we have had a great movement to eliminate corporate and money control in politics. Great statutes have been passed—the anti-trust law, the interstate commerce law, the statutes against the use of contributions from corporations in politics, the statutes requiring the showing of the electoral expenses, have all been brought about in response to a popular demand.

The people failed to scrutinize before, but now that they are aroused and have taken matters in their own hands, they have brought about reform. The fact that he is supported by bosses is now generally enough to defeat a man, and the charge that he has a machine with him is enough to interfere with his electoral success. Organization is necessary for political success; even reformers find that out after they get into politics, but today there is an unreasonable prejudice against it. The great and good effect of the reform, however, is that corporations are no longer in politics. Of course corruption is not all gone, but it is largely stayed, and there is no longer any chance that corporations can control as they did.

But the leviathan of the people cannot be aroused in this way and his movement stopped at the median line. We must expect unwise excess. Sincere reformers have reasoned that because we had the representative form of government during this corrupt period, it is the representative form of government which is responsible. Because we had courts during the corrupt period, the courts are responsible for the corruption. Therefore we must change the representative system by injecting more democracy into it and we must change the courts by injecting more democracy into them and require the people at an election to decide cases instead of judges on the Bench. These are the excesses to which we trend.

We are a pretty great people. We admit it. We have great confidence in what we can do, and when we are set, neither an economic law drawn from political science nor experience seems a very formidable objection. We are a successful people in machinery, and so we take our analogy for political reforms from machinery. We found that by uniting various mechanical elements we could make machines which would do as much as one hundred or one thousand men in the same time. So we think that if we are only acute enough to devise a governmental machine which will work without effort on the part of the people, we can sit at home while elections run themselves so well that only what the good people desire in political action will necessarily result. We want the equivalent of what, in the slang of practical mechanics, we call a fool-proof machine, because anybody can run it and no fool can interfere with its normal operation. So these political reformers are hunting a corrupt-politician-proof machine for government. It does not and cannot exist. No government can exist which does not depend upon the activity, the honesty and the intelligence of those who form it. The initiative, the referendum and the recall have been urged and in many states adopted, as a machine which no boss or corrupt politician can prevent from producing honest, effective political results. They are expected to reform everything and those who doubt their wisdom are, for the time being, in the minds of many enthusiasts, public enemies.

The representative system, on the contrary, recognizes that government, in the actual execution of governmental measures, and in the actual detailed preparation of governmental measures, is an expert matter. To attempt to devise and adopt detailed legislative measures to accomplish the general purpose of the people through a mass vote at a popular election is just as absurd as it would be for all those present at a town meeting to say, "We will all of us now go out and build a bridge, or we will use a theodolite." Thus to say that by injecting more democracy you can cure the defects of our present democracy is to express one of those epigrams that, like many of its kind, is either not true at all or is only partly true and is even more deceptive than if it were wholly untrue.

Take the power of appointment in executive work. You elect officers, choosing men of character, intelligence, and experience for a few great offices, and then what do you do under the Federal Constitution? You turn over to the President the appointment of great officers because he needs intelligence, knowledge and skill to make their selections.