The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship

To begin this great task with the machinery of transportation was the first clear duty. Scarcely one of the gigantic abuses can be touched apart from these highways of distribution. We have but just waked up to the plain stupidity of giving away so recklessly all sorts of franchise grants, and are beginning to see the equal stupidity of parting madly with such an overwhelming part of the main and primary sources of wealth – mines, forests, water-power, oil deposits, and ground areas in large towns. These are the sure nesting-places of monopoly, and therefore, of all the fantastic extremes of wealth which make puppets of our politicians and set before the youth of the nation snobbish and materialistic ideals. This policy, be it remembered, does not ask, as the socialists do, for all forests, all mines, or all the water-power. It asks that the hand of government control be kept firmly upon such portions of these resources as are susceptible to vicious monopoly. All this is possible along the lines of state regulation, without even raising the question of universal ownership. We have a chief executive who sees what the evils are and dares to face them. Yet the courage involved is not his highest gift; but, rather, the intelligence with which he has so stated and grouped the issues as to give us a coherent administrative policy that works toward equality and not away from it.

To group those sources of monopoly that may still be saved; to show how this retention will fortify the government in its great struggle to regulate privileged capital, – is a service that should command the intellectual and moral sympathy of an entire people. It is a policy broadly public and social, as against any lower and partial interest. It is a policy for the whole and for the many, rather than for the monopoly-coddled few. It is a policy that looks to the future rather than to the possible dividends of the next six months. Not separable from it is the President's proposal to put upon these huge accretions a decent inheritance tax. He does not spoil his case by conventional or academic timidities. He does not ask this tax merely as a fiscal device, but as a measure that makes for more rational, social equalities. He asks it in order that the common wealth may grow larger and the top-heavy fortunes (the larger portion of which privilege has made) may be lessened for the common good. The fatuous outcry that this is to be opposed because it is "Socialism" will, of course, continue, although the most conservative governments in the world have long proclaimed it with such conspicuous success, from the public point of view, that it is no longer questioned.

With jaunty prodigality we have scattered these primary sources of wealth precisely as we scattered transportation and other franchises upon which dangerous private monopolies were built. The kind of mistakes that have been made with the franchises, we have in this generation come to see clearly. In the teeth of extreme difficulties, we are trying to protect the public through legislative control of these corporations. We are learning the same lesson in our forestry. We have the lesson still to learn in remaining mines, oil-lands, water-powers, and phosphate-beds. Nothing in the statesmanship of President Roosevelt will more surely win him laurels in the future than his pluck and consistency in forwarding this policy, which stands for the whole people and for the future. It is as serenely above party as it is above corporate or private interest.

The warring and balancing of sectional, partial, and immediate interests will always have their claims; but the next clearest step in civilization is to learn the political habit of acting also for the social whole. Social politics, so called, already has this character. The forestry legislation of Switzerland or Germany has its inspiration in the thought for the whole people and for future generations.

Many years ago I heard a discussion in Germany among three art-teachers, – two of them with a world-wide fame, – that was as new to me as it was amazing. They seemed to agree that the art of the sculptor reached its height in the Age of Phidias; that never again would men give shape to figures fit to be put, let us say, beside the Elgin Marbles. As some nineteen centuries passed by, another art came to its finest flowering in the Italian Cinquecento, when Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michael Angelo added color to form. They agreed that never again would paintings be produced fit to be classed with the Sistine Madonna. Another two centuries passed, and the Bachs began the great music which these three modern artists thought of as the reigning art of our time. Here came their question, "What is to be the next and coming art that shall compare with the Greek period, with the Cinquecento, and with modern music?" One thought it would be the theatre. He wrote, I believe, a pamphlet to prove this. I do not recall the guess of either of the others; but I venture to make my own guess.

Art is knowledge in its applications; and to apply our experience and our knowledge to the shaping of a higher social justice is also an art. It is an art already showing itself in the field of politics and social reconstruction; a politics, enriched and ennobled by ideals of citizenship, freed at last from that party machinery whose boss has been the puppet of business men fighting for monopoly privilege. It will be a politics not for the few or the favored; not alone for the strong and successful; but a politics for the common weal, for the common and inclusive good of every citizen according to his good will and honest endeavor.