You will observe that the idea of Progress took three forms in as many years. First it was a pure force moving straight ahead toward a goal of unimaginable splendor, even whose questionableproducts like bigger cannon and higher explosives accomplished by one of its larger ironies benefits that were the opposite of their purposes.
Then assuming the aspects of a more personal deity, it became capable of intentions and could choose courses utterly inconsistent with itself in order to achieve ends that would be splendidly consistent with itself. It made larger demands upon faith.
Then it began to require a little aid from man himself, on the principle that God helps them that help themselves, the cleaning up by men of the human rubbish heap, the purging of autocracy by democracy. Human responsibility began to emerge. The picture in our heads was changing.
Then, as the war came to a close it became apparent that President Wilson's happy idea that democracies, being stupid and unready to fight, would live together in eternal peace, was inadequate. The treaty would leave the three great democracies armed as the autocracies never had been armed. They might elect to remain so and use their weapons as provocatively as any Hapsburg or Hohenzollern ever did. Men must organize, must league themselves together, must govern themselves internationally in order to have peace, which was no longer an accidental by-product of the modern factory, but must be created by men themselves, deliberately acting to that end. Men must work out their own salvation, aided andadmonished of course by such perfect works of progress as a war to end war.
Men make the attempt. The peoples of the earth assemble and write a treaty which keeps the chief democratic nations on the continent of Europe armed against each other, which provides endless subjects of dispute among the smaller countries; and they sign a covenant which the unanimous opinion of mankind rejects as an effective safeguard against future wars and which many regard as dividing the earth into two hostile camps. "It was humanity's failure," declares General Smuts. "There will always be war," asserts President Harding, calling a conference not to end war but to lessen the cost of preparing for war.
Not only has material progress failed to produce peace as its by-product, but moral progress has failed to produce peace as its deliberate product.
And Progress is in reality moving forward to wars more deadly and more ruinous than the last. Weapons were developed toward the end of the Great War capable of vastly worse havoc than any used during its course. And only a beginning has been made. If we may come to use the power that holds atoms together in the driving of engines, we may also use it in war to blast whole cities from the face of the earth. Conquest of the air means larger bombs from the air. Greater knowledge of chemistry means industrial advancement and also deadlierpoison gases. Material gains bring compensating material ills or the possibility of them.
Even the material gains, great as they have been, seem somewhat smaller today than they once were thought to be. In our most optimistic moments before the war we had the pleasant illusion of steadily decreasing hours of labor and steadily lowering costs. Men had worked twelve, ten, and finally eight hours a day, and it was predicted that this process would go on until six, perhaps four hours a day would be sufficient to supply the needs of the race.
We paid five cent fares on the street cars and were hopeful that they would become three cent fares; three cents was established by law in many cities as the maximum charge. The railroads collected a little over two cents a mile for carrying passengers and in many states statutes were enacted establishing two cents a mile as the legal rate. We were impressed by striking examples of lowering prices, in the automobile industry for example, and were confident that this was the rule of modern life.
Prices, except of food products, were steadily decreasing; there might be an end to this movement but we were nowhere near the end. The wonders of modern inventions, and if not these, the economics of concentrated organization, and if not these, the use of by-products, were steadily lowering costs. The standard of living was rising.What was the rich man's luxury in one generation was the poor man's necessity in the next. It would always be so. That was Progress.
We now pay seven or eight cents to ride on street cars and more than three cents a mile to travel on trains. All prices have advanced. The standard of living has declined and we ask ourselves if it will not have to decline still further. No one now talks of a six-hour day. We recognize a check in the process toward increasing well-being at less effort. Life has become more difficult. Progress is no longer a simple and steady movement onward in a single direction. Like evolution sometimes it seems to stand still or perhaps go back. Like evolution it requires avital élan; it is a thing of leaps and rests. We are less enthusiastic about it when it rests.
We blame our discomfiture, the higher prices and the lower standard of living on the war, but much of it was inevitable, war or no war. The idea that the struggle for existence would grow steadily easier was largely a conclusion from appearances. We were raising our standard of living by skimming the cream of our natural resources. When our original forests were cut, when the most easily mined veins of iron and coal were exhausted, when oil wells ceased to gush and had to be pumped, unless substitutes were found, all the basic costs of production would advance. Ultimately they would advance to the point where economies of organization,of quantity production, of by-product development, so far as they have been realized, would no longer serve to keep down final prices. We were rapidly reaching that point when the war came.
We lived under an illusion. What we called the results of progress was the rapid exhaustion of easily available resources. We used our capital and thought ourselves rich. And we lie under a burden of debt made much heavier by the weapons which progress put into our hands. Progress had not made war too expensive to fight but it had made peace too expensive to be borne. We forgot the law of diminishing returns. We ignored the lessons of history that all ages come to an end, when the struggle for existence once more grows severe until new instruments are found equal to the further conquest over nature. Useful inventions have not kept pace with increasing consumption and rapidly disappearing virgin resources. The process of steadily lowering costs of production has stopped and reverse process has set in. Spectacular inventions like the airplane have deluded us into the belief that Progress, always blessing us, we had the world by the tail. But coal and iron became harder and costlier to mine. Oil neared exhaustion. Timber grew scarcer. Agricultural lands smaller in proportion to population.
Immense possibilities lie before us. So they did before the man with the stone hatchet in his hand,but he waited long for the steam, saw and drill and crusher. An invention which would mean as much in the conquest of nature as did the steam engine would make the war debt as easily borne as the week's account at the grocery store. But when will progress vouchsafe it? Converting coal into power we waste 85 per cent of its energy in coal and call that efficient. But does Progress always respond instantly to our needs with new methods and devices, like a nurse responding to a hungry child? A few years ago we were sure it did, but now we look anxiously at the skies for a sign.
We had another characteristic pleasant illusion during the war. Progress, like the Lord, in all previous conflicts was on our side. Here was a great need of humanity. Surely, according to rule, it should be met by some great invention that would blast the Germans out of their places in the earth and give the sons of light an easy and certain victory. All the familiars of the deity sat about in boards watching for the indication that the engine to meet the needs of civilization had been granted. But it never was.
I do not write this to suggest that men, especially American men, have ceased to believe in Progress. They would be fools if they had. I write to suggest that they have ceased to believe in Progress. They would be fools if they had not. A great illusion is gone, one of the chief dislocations wrought by the war.
What the war has done to our way of thinking has been to lay a new stress upon man as a free and responsible agent. After all the battles were won not by guns, or tanks or gas or airplanes, but as always by the common man offering his breast to the shots of the enemy. The hope of the future is all in human organizations, in societies of nations, in councils and conferences. Men's minds turn once more to governments with renewed expectation. Not only do we think for the first time seriously of a government of the world but we focus more attention on the government at Washington. Groups with special interests to serve reach out openly to control it.
The war laid a new emphasis on government. Not only did the government have our persons and our lives at its command but it assumed authority over our food, it directed our factories and our railroads, it told us what we could manufacture and ship, it decided who could borrow of the general credit and for what purposes, it fixed the prices at which we could buy and sell. It came to occupy a new place in the national consciousness and one which it will never wholly lose. One rival to it,—the belief, having its roots in early religious ideas, and strengthened by scientific theory and the outward results of the great inventions, that moved by some irresistible impulse, life went steadily forward to higher and higher planes, and that man had but little to do but pluck thefruits of progress—has been badly shattered by events.
But men do not change beliefs suddenly. Perhaps after all the war was only the way of progress—to usher in a new and brilliant day. Perhaps the unfolding future has something near in store far greater and better than went before. We shall not trust men too far, men with their obstinate blindness, men with their originally sinful habit of thinking they know better than the forces which rule the world. We want not leaders but weather cocks, who will veer to the kindlier wind that may blow when it is yet only a zephyr.
We turn to men yet, we cling a little to the hope that fate will yet save us. This division in us accounts for Lloyd George and Harding, our own commonplace "best we have on hand" substitute for the infinitely variable Englishman, adjusted to every breath that blows, who having no set purpose of his own offers no serious obstacle to any generous design of fate.
Senator Borah once said to me, "The Administration has no definite policies." And it is not Mr. Harding's fault. If he wanted to form any the people wouldn't let him. They elected him not to have any. They desired in the White House some one who would not look further ahead than the next day until the future became clearer. If he had purposes events might prove them to be wrong.
The same fundamental idea underlay the remark of a member of the Cabinet, at the outset of the recent disarmament and Far Eastern Conference, that "Lloyd George was the hope of the gathering because he had no principles."
The war destroyed many men but it half restored Man. You see how inevitable optimism is. The ways of Progress are indeed past finding out. Governments during it performed the impossible. They even took in hand the vast industrial mechanism which we ordinarily leave to the control of the "forces." We half suspect they might do the impossible in peace but we half hope that some kindlier fate is in store for us than to trust ourselves to human intelligence. We don't know whether to put our money on Man or on Progress; so we put it on Mr. Harding.
Unlike government by Progress, government by business, by the semi-sacred intermediaries between the will to increase and the rest of us, began to disintegrate before the war; which merely completed the process.
Let us consider what has happened in the last few years to government by business, that government which the smoking compartment philosopher has in mind when he says so hopefully of Mr. Harding: "Theywill see to it that he gets along all right."
The first manifestation of nationality in this country was the nationality of business. Before industry became national nothing was national. The United States was a pleasant congeries of localities. It was held together by reading everywhere the story of the Battle of Bunker Hill in the same school history, which sometimes bore a different author's name but which was always the same history. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of their eyes" and "If we don't hang together weshall all hang separately" were the unifying bond, and they were enough. We had the same sense of identity as an infant has when it becomes aware that the delightful toe and the delightful mouth where it is inserted appertain vaguely to the one ego. The local factory and the local bank subtended the entire arc of economic consciousness. There was one single-track railroad which ran from Podunk to Peopack and another from Peopack to Peoria, unrelated, discontinuous.
In those simple times when business was local the local factory owner, banker, or railroad builder was the hero of his neighborhood. It was he who "put the town on the map." He gave it prosperity. He built it by attracting labor into his employment. He gave it contact with the outside world. If you owned town lots it was he who gave them value and it was he who might take away their value if he was offended. If you had a general store it was he who added to its patronage by adding to the population. If you raised farm products nearby it was he who improved your market. He built the fine house which it was your pride to show visitors. Your success and happiness was bound up in his. He conferred his blessings for a consideration, for you were careful to make no laws which restricted the freedom of his operations. You permitted him a vast unofficial "say" in your local government; you gave him a little the best of it in the assessment for taxes. You felt a little lifted upby his condescension in calling you by your first name and stopping to ask about your family on the street corner. You were jealous of his rights because after all the value of your own depended upon his use of his.
When business figures arose upon the national horizon they were merely these local figures vastly multiplied. As a people we called them "Jim" and "Jay," and "Dan'l," just as we had called the local manufacturer and banker by their first names. All the good will that went to the local business leaders went to them. They put money into our pockets, when they didn't happen to take it out of our pockets; on the whole they were doing the great work of making this country a richer and better land. Some who did not conceive the resources of the printing press in the issuance of new securities had to suffer, but that was their lookout; suffering for some was the way of the world.
Business began to be national in the tying together into systems the little dislocated railroads that local enterprise had laid down and in the creation of a national securities market for the distribution of ownership in the new combinations.
A new era opened when Gould and Fisk and Drew started at full speed their rival printing presses in Wall Street. Look over our whole drab political story from the death of Lincoln to the arrival of Roosevelt, more than a generation, and, if we did not preserve the names of our Presidentsin our histories, how many names are there worth remembering? Garfield was shot, which was dramatic. Cleveland was a fat man who used long Latin words. He was also the first Democratic chief executive in more than thirty years. What else? Who else?
Meanwhile an amazing array of business personages diverted attention from the inconspicuous Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys, who were the flower of our public life. Gould, Fisk, Drew, Hill, Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Harriman, Morgan, Ryan—business was fertile of men, politics sterile; you have to go back to the foundation of the government for a period so prolific in men, of the other sort, or to the age of Elizabeth or of Pericles for another as prolific in men, of still another kind. How could the dull sideshow in Washington compete with the big spectacle in New York?
These demigods of business were not only shining personalities; they were doing the work of making America great and rich; we all shared in the prosperity they were creating. To go back to the small town again, who was it increased the opportunities of the storekeeper, the neighboring farmer, or real estate holder? Was it the mayor and the common council by passing ordinances about street signs and sidewalk encumbrances? Or the manufacturer or railroad builder who put the town on the map, giving employment to labor or an outlet for its products?
The government at Washington occupied a place in our consciousness similar to that of the government of the small town. It was charged with our national defense, a function of such little importance that we had hardly an army or a navy. It conducted our economic defense, against the foreigner, with laws written, however, by business itself, which naturally knew best how it wanted to be defended; you could not, in your proper senses, suppose that the Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys were wiser than the Carnegies, Hills, Morgans, or Harrimans. For the rest it was told severely to let well enough alone. To make assurance doubly sure that it would do so it was rather openly given over to the great men who were creating the national wealth.
Starting with the combination of the little speculatively built railroads into systems and the development of a security market to float the shares of stock in the new companies, business took on rapidly a more and more national character. Great bankers arose to finance the consolidations. An investing public with a wider horizon than that which used to put its money in local enterprises entrusted its funds in the hands of the great bankers or took its chances in the market for stocks. Industry went through a similar concentration. Stronger companies absorbed their weaker and less successful rivals. The same bankers who sat in the boards of directors of the railroads representingtheir investing public took their places in the directorate of manufacturing combinations.
The railroads seeking the business of the big industrial companies and the big industrial companies desiring favors from the railroads placed representatives in each others' boards. This interlocking created a national organization of business dominated by a few striking and spectacular figures.
The popular imagination was as much heated over the discovery of the United States as a single field of enterprise as the imagination of Europe had been centuries earlier over the discovery of the new world.
The psychology of the local industry period carried over into this new period of national industry. The whole country became one vast small town. The masters of industry, banking, and the railroads were the leading citizens. They were "putting the United States on the map," as the local creator of wealth had put the small town on the map. They were doing something vast, from which we all undoubtedly benefited. Perhaps we could not trace our advantage so immediately as we could to the enterprise of the man who brought population to our town, swelling the price of our real estate or increasing the sales at our stores. But what had been a matter of experience on a small scale was a matter of belief on a large scale. The same consequences must follow, with manifold abundance.And the nation was demonstrably growing rapidly, immensely richer; surely cause and effect.
Business had from the first taken on among us, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson remarks, a religious character; and when by a great thrust it overreached the bounds of locality and became national, its major prophets emerged. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks quotes Mark Twain as writing: "The words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound, and his common sayings are as if they were solid wisdom." How much more of this sacred character inhered in the heroes who created nationwide railroad systems, vast steelmaking consolidations, monopolies of oil and coal!
When a New York lawyer said of E. H. Harriman that he moved in spheres which no one else dare tread, he was putting, a little late, into words the national awe of the men who had overleapt the bounds of locality and bestrode the continent industrially, the heads of the vast business hierarchy. When Mr. Baer said that he operated the Reading Railroad by divine right he said only what a worshipping people had taught him to think. Those men did not use this half-religious language by accident; they crystallized into phrases the feeling of the country toward those who had done God's work of making it rich, making it successful.
Each like an unconscious Cervantes helped to laugh our industrial chivalry away.
How easy it is to believe about yourself whateveryone believes about you! How hard not to! How easy to believe that you rule railroads by "divine right," or walk in "higher spheres," when the whole unexpressed consciousness of a hundred million people assigns you just such hieratic appurtenances and privileges. How doubt in the face of all this evidence? They identified themselves with Progress, and Progress was what ruled the world. If you have faith and if you are fortified with the faith of others, self-identification with one of the larger forces is not difficult. Was not what they were doing Progress, was it not the realization of that benignant will to the utter blossoming of chaos into utility which was planned in the beginning? Were they not instruments rather than mere men, instruments of the greater purpose of which America was the perfect work? If you believe in theocratic forces you believe also in chosen human agencies for carrying them out.
They were more than instruments of Progress. I have spoken of government by economic law as having challenged political government in the consciousness of the people. As a country we perhaps believe in economic law more firmly than any nation in the world. Wasn't America being produced in accordance with economic law and wasn't America one of the marvels of the earth? I asked a salesman recently, a man with no personal interests which would give him the prejudices of the business world, why he hated Henry Ford."Because," he replied instantly and without hesitation, "he defies economic law." He spoke like a true American. To defy economic law and make money at it is like selling the Savior for twenty pieces of silver.
"The physical laws," says De Gourmont, "promulgated or established by the scientists, are confessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain a mechanism they declare its movements are due to a law. Bodies fall by virtue of the law of gravitation. This has precisely the same value in the serious order as the comicvirtus dormitiva." In the promulgation of economic law our interest perverts the simple and just operation of our ignorance. In the field of physical phenomena we perceive a series of uniform events and call that uniformity a law. In the field of economic phenomena we perceive a series of events uniformly serving our interests and call that uniformity a law.
These greater business men of the past fruitful generation operated on the whole over a long period of falling prices. Wealth accumulated. You read about it in the government reports, dividing the total by the total population. The division thus effected was mighty assuring. Labor was better paid. Higher institutions of learning multiplied. Libraries housed in marble grew upon every crossroads. Intellectual as well as material needs were in process of being better satisfied. We were approaching an age when ink upon white paper, nowso cheap, cheaper than ever in the pitiful past, should lift humanity to a new and higher level.
The evidence was conclusive. These greater business men were in supreme, in conspicuous direction of the country's development. The happiest results followed. They worked in harmony with economic law, for they prospered gloriously and one could no more break economic law and prosper than one could break criminal law and keep out of jail. Until Ford came no one could defy economic law with impunity.
And law and justice being two ideas that associate themselves together in the human mind, in a binder of optimism perhaps, like the disparate elements that form clinkers in a furnace, they were accomplishing that perfect work of the justice which inhered in things at the beginning, when tiny atoms with the urge to produce an earth fit for man to live on, to produce America in short, began to discover affinities for each other. No wonder they penetrated "higher spheres" ruled by "divine right," and that "golden words" dropped from their mouths. Progress, destiny, an instinct for economic law, it was much to unite one man.
Again, they were more than this. Men cannot be so universally looked to for the welfare of the nation as they were, without becoming in effect the government of that nation. Business and the government were one. Public opinion at that time would have regarded an administration whichdefied the great commercial interests as dangerous to the country's advancement. Lawyers like Mr. Knox or Mr. Root, who had proved their value to them, went to the Senate as their spokesmen. Able and ambitious men in both Houses of Congress, wishing power and influence, became their agents. The chairmen of the important committees of both houses were in their confidence and spoke with authority because of what they represented. Some of the virtue of the great, some shadow of divine right, descended upon them. Among valets the valet of the king is king.
We forget, in the great outcry that was raised a few years ago over the "invisible government," that the invisible government was once sufficiently visible, almost consciously recognized, and fully accepted. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that the men who were making the country rich, making it a nation economically, should work their will freely at Washington. We jealously guarded their liberties. Woe unto the legislator who would interfere with their freedom to contract, for example, for the labor of children, which we described as the freedom of children to sell their labor advantageously. Adult labor banding together to arrange terms of its own sale was felt to be a public enemy. Every age has its fetish; the medicine man who could exorcise the evil spirit in stone and bush was not a more privileged character than his successor at whose touch prosperity sprangout of the earth, at whose word the mysterious economic forces which might in their wrath prove so destructive, bowed and became kind.
Make a few individuals the embodiment of a national purpose that has long existed, unconscious and unquestioned, give them as you inevitably do in such a case the utmost freedom that is possible on this earth, let them be limited enough mentally so that they are blind to any other possible purpose; do all these things and you produce great men. It was an age of great men, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Hills, Ryans, Harrimans, and a host of others, richer in personalities than any other period of American life except that which produced Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, and Marshall. They were the flowering of the whole pioneer civilization.
One hundred and fifty years of freedom has produced few free men. Perhaps these were all. They may not have been free intellectually. Charles Francis Adams writes of their kind: "I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many successful men,—'big' financially, men famous during the last half century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement."
Never mind. They were free in all the essential ways. The men of whom Adams wrote had nosuch sense of their limitations as he expressed. Only an Adams would then have had it, and the Adamses were not what M. Galtier ofLe Tempssuggested when, hastily absorbing the American spirit at Washington, he said to me: "I am readingThe Education of Henry Adams: He was what you would call a typical American, was he not?"
An Adams, even Charles Francis Adams, writing of that time, was untypical enough, to have missed the point, which was not whether these men "'big' financially" were interesting, witty, thoughtful, or refined, but whether they were free. And they were; they were so sure of themselves, and public opinion was so sure of them, that they concentrated on the one great aim of that simple day, and did not waste themselves upon non-essentials like "humor, thought, or refinement."
I have a theory that we are wrong in ascribing the poverty of American literature and statesmanship to the richness of our business life. "All our best and ablest minds went into commerce," we say. We flatter ourselves. Mr. Carnegie, born in the days of Elizabeth, might not have been Shakespeare. Mr. Harriman was perhaps, after all, no mute Milton, Mr. Morgan no Michaelangelo.
These brave spirits developed in business not so much perhaps because of the national urge to "conquer a continent" as because in business, enjoying the immunity it then did, they found the utmost opportunity for self-expression, the onegreat measure of freedom which this free country afforded. A jealous public guarded their divine right from impious hands. They believed in themselves. The people believed in them. So the flowering of the pioneer age came, in such a race of men as are not on the earth today, and the rule of business reached its climax.
It was an autumn flowering, rich and golden like the Indian summer of New England culture, a sign that a cycle was run. Adams sniffing from the transcendental heights of Boston wrote: "a race of mere money-getters and traders." Remember the sneers in our cocksure press of those days at the "culture" of Boston? Boston has had its revenge. The words "mere money-getters" bit in. There were other objects in life beside pioneering the industrial opportunities of a whole continent just brought together into commercial unity. Mr. Morgan began to buy art. Mr. Carnegie began to buy libraries and started authorship himself. The men "'big' financially" began to look over their shoulders and see the shadows—as we all do now—where they a little before kept their eyes straight forward and saw the one clear vision, the truth, such as it was, that made them free.
I have traced that element in the American political consciousness, government by business, to its highest moment.
"Divine right" is only safe when it is implicit. When you begin to avow it, as Mr. Baer did, it isalready in question. The national passion for equality began to work. Had not Mr. Carnegie confessed the weakness in his soul's fortress by writing a book? Had not Mr. Morgan by buying art suggested the one aim of pioneering on a grand scale might not be life's sole end?
Mr. Baer with his avowal, Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan with their seeking of the broader satisfactions, Mr. Schwab behaving like a king in exile at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, may have invited what followed. But they were only expressing in their own way the sense becoming general that pioneering was over and that its ideals were too narrow and too few—even if no clear sense was coming of what state and what ideals were to take their place. Men turn from leaders whose day of greatest usefulness is past and set up new leaders against them. Against the government by business the first great national unity that entered the American consciousness they began to erect the state, the national government at Washington.
No one meant to end government by business and substitute for it government by the people. Not for a moment. We devised a new set of checks and balances, like that between the various branches provided for in our Constitution, a new political organism which should equal and coexist with the one we already had. The government personified by Mr. Roosevelt was the check and balance to the government personified by Mr.Harriman and Mr. Morgan. Governments never die but merely recede in the national consciousness, like the old clothes which we keep in the attic. Thus revolutions never effect a revolution; democracy is only a Troy built upon nine other prehistoric Troys: beneath, you find aristocracy, rule by divine right, despotism, theocracy, and every other governance on which men in their invincible optimism have pinned their faith.
The revolution which Mr. Roosevelt brought about was the kind which exclaims loudly "malefactors of great wealth" while writing to Mr. Harriman "we are both practical men." It was the kind of revolution this country desired. The nation wished to eat its cake and have it, to retain government by business and have alongside it another government, as powerful, as interesting, as colorful, as rich in personalities, as the late autumn of pioneering had brought into gorgeous bloom.
Mr. Roosevelt's method with the new government was this: Senator Aldrich and Speaker Cannon representing the still powerful coexistent government by business in Congress, would call at the White House and tell the President just how far he could go and no further. They would emerge. A moment later the press in response to a summons would arrive. Mr. Roosevelt would say: "I have just sent for Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Cannon and forced them to accept my policy, etc." Nobodywas deceived. Unlike the philosopher who made all knowledge his province, Mr. Roosevelt made all knowledge his playground, and not only all knowledge but all the arts, including the art of government.
In Mr. Roosevelt's day the two governments, government by business and political government, existed side by side, of about equal proportions; and no one really wished either to overtop the other. We were indulging in revolution with our customary prudence.
The human passion for equality which had risen against the last of those dominant figures, the last and greatest of the pioneers, and started to set up representatives of the public as great as they were, was singularly fortunate in its first manifestations. It "found a man," in that most amazing jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Roosevelt.
If business had its array of extraordinary personalities, the rival establishment had its Roosevelt, who surrounded himself with a shining group of amateurs, Mr. Root, Mr. Knox, General Wood, James Garfield, Mr. Pinchot, Mr. Knox Smith, the "Tennis Cabinet," to all of whom he succeeded in imparting some vividness from his own abounding personality. If pioneers from the days of Daniel Boone on have been romantic, amateurs are equally romantic. It was romance against romance.
The balance between the two governments did not last long. Government by business wasdeclining. It was being extruded from the control of political affairs. Political government was rising. It was reaching out to control certain phases of business itself. The great pioneers of national industry were growing old. They were becoming self-conscious, vaguely aware of changing circumstances, casting about for solider foundations than "mere money getting," buying art and writing books, establishing foundations, talking foolishly about their "divine right," about the crime of "dying rich."
A race of gamblers came in their train who caricatured their activities. The great figures who were passing took long chances magnificently, pioneer fashion, "to strike it rich," to found industries or magnify avenues of trade. Their imitators, the Gateses, Morses, Heinzes, and —— took long chances vulgarly for the excitement there was in them.
Railroads had to be "rescued" from them. Wall Street had to organize its Vigilantes against them.
I went as a reporter to see —— once in New York and found him in his library drinking. He sent for his servant, ordered six bottles of champagne at once, and after his man had gone opened the whole six, one after another, on his library rug. He had to exhibit in some way his large manner of doing things, and this was the best way he could think of at the moment. He belonged to a fevered race, intoxicated with the idea of bigness,juggling millions about to no more useful end than that of pouring champagne on a carpet. They were thereductio ad absurdumof the pioneer.
The public no longer put its faith blindly as before in those romantic figures, the great industrial pioneers, those Mississippi River pilots who knew every rock and reef in the river. Stripped of much power and prestige, no longer looked to without question for the safety of the country, that magnificent species, the great pioneer, disappeared. It is as dead and gone as that equally magnificent species the Mississippi pilot of Mark Twain's day.
The legitimate succession was the dynasty—it was the dynasty that destroyed belief in the divine right of kings—of the second generation, of the younger Stillman, of the younger Rockefeller, competent but unremarkable, of the younger Morgan, more capable than the rest, doubtless, but compare his countenance with the eagle mien of his predecessor.
I used often to discuss with Mr. Roosevelt the members of the dynasty. He had no illusions. We both knew well a second-generation newspaper proprietor, a young man of excellent character, as prudent as the earlier generation had been daring, a petty King who always had an aspiring Mayor of the palace at his elbow, inclined to go to sleep at his post from excessive watching of his property. As we would go over the names in the dynasty, Mr. Roosevelt would say almost invariably: "Ican't describe him better to you than to say he's another ——," naming our mutual acquaintance, one of the many of his sort into whose hands by inheritance the control of business has descended.
Whatever the reason is, whether the inertia of large organization and the weakening of competition have favored the remaining in power of the second generation, whether we have evolved but one great type, the pioneer, whose day is past, and have not yet differentiated the true business man any more than we have differentiated the true statesman; whether that psychological change which I have sought to trace, that denial of freedom which once was the pioneers'—the new laws, the hard restraints operating now upon business as upon everything else and enforcing conformity—there are today no Titans, no one stealing fire from the heaven of Progress for the benefit of the human race—unless Henry Ford—no Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Harrimans, of the blessed nineties.
The old sureness is gone. The great pioneers were never assailed by doubts: they went straight forward, wearing the blinkers of a single aim, which kept their eyes like those of harnessed horses in the narrow road; God was with them, Progress was with them, Public Opinion was with them, the government at Washington was with them.
But their successors, like everyone else, look over their shoulders and see the shadows: see the governmentat Washington and attach a comic importance to that bewildered figure; just as the government at Washington looks over its shoulder and sees at New York the government by business, its traditional master, and wishing a master, is unaware that the twilight of the gods is come. And both see that greatest of all shadows, Public Opinion, the new monster of Frankenstein which everyone feeds with propaganda, and fears. These three things were all one in the bright days of the great pioneers, and in that perfect unity everyone was sure, so sure, and the few were free, so free!
Business no longer imposes itself up on the imagination through its extraordinary personalities. In vain do we seek to recover the past. In vain does the popular magazine fiction strive to furnish what life no longer does—the pioneer ideal, the hero who overcomes fire and flood and the machination of enemies and moves irresistibly forward to success, who believes in himself, whose motto is that the will is not to be gainsaid, whose life is one long Smile Week.
Vast propaganda exists to hold us true to the old faith; we read it as we used to read Sunday School fiction; but religion only sought its way into hearts within the covers of E. P. Roe when other channels began to close. We beat the bushes for the great, the kings that should come after Agamemnon. Monthlies of vast circulation tell us of every jack-of-all-trades who hits upon a million dollars. Thisone found out how to sell patches for automobile tires. That one was an office boy who never knew when it became five o'clock in the afternoon. Our faith requires vast stirring.
To the gradual weakening of the idea that business was all-wise and all-powerful, the war greatly contributed. Before 1914 men would say confidently, "Ah, but business, the bankers, will not let the nations fight. They have only to pull the strings of the purse and there will be no money for the fighters." After hostilities began they would say with equal confidence: "It will be all over in six weeks. The bankers will not let it go on."
Business was, however, not only powerless to prevent war but it stood by impotent while the very foundations on which it itself rested were destroyed. One illusion went.
Then again, during the war unorganized private production failed. Publicly organized production was immensely successful. Governments the world over showed that the industrial mechanism could be made to run faster and turn out more than ever before. The illusion that business was a mystery understood only by initiates, the men "'big' financially," was shaken.
After the war was over the government organization for regulating production was abandoned. A period of chaos, rising prices, speculation, wasteful production, of luxuries, ensued and then a crash. One may explain all that happened in both caseson the basis of the war. But business needed triumphs to restore its old place in the public consciousness, and it has had instead a catastrophe.
The weakness of business today is its division. Many financial leaders saw the depression that would follow peace. Frank A. Vanderlip, for one, came back from Europe in 1919 full of warnings. He counselled moderation. He urged deflation instead of further inflation. His advice was unpopular with those who saw profits from a sudden withdrawal of wartime restraints. And the consequence of his prudence, according to what he has told his friends, was his being forced to retire from the Presidency of the great Wall Street bank of which he had been head.
Henry Ford, moreover, is a destroyer of old illusions. He "defies economic laws." He does what business says is impossible. In a day of high prices he produces at an unprecedentedly low price. He does not cut wages. He finds a market where there is no market. To lower his costs he needs cheaper steel than he can buy, so he manufactures it himself cheaper than the great steelmakers can manufacture it. He operates independently of the "big business" group. Mr. Morgan sends for him and he declines to go. He grows vastly rich, proving that all the knowledge the men "'big' financially" have of the mystery of business is no knowledge at all, only rules made in their own interest.
And business never twice answers the same question in the same way. One week Mr. Morgan and the international bankers come to Washington and tell Mr. Harding that American credit must go into foreign trade. The next week equally "big" bankers from the interior visit the capital and tell the President that American credit must stay at home developing American industries. It is the same with the tariff. It is the same with the taxes. Business is not of one mind about anything.
A politician recently described business on errands of advice to Washington. "One bunch of fat boys with high hats and morning coats comes to Washington. The Administration holds out its nose wishing to be led by it. The fat boys decline the nose. They are not leading anybody. In deprecatory manner they say: 'Please drive North. We think that is the way.' They go. The next day another bunch of fat boys in high hats and morning coats arrives. Again the offer of the nose. Again the declination. And this time: 'Please drive South. We're sure that is the way.'"
The government strains its ear to catch the word from Wall Street. But there never was a time when business had less influence at Washington than now. It is divided in its own mind, it is ruled by second-rate men. Of two governments that have occupied a place in the popular consciousness,government by business and government by parties, I do not know which is weaker. I do not know which has less unity and capacity to function, the Republican party or big business.
When we became doubtful, as pioneering drew to a close, that business served a social end; when, becoming jealous of its great and irresponsible power, we started to set up an equal or greater authority in Washington, we followed the line of least resistance; we did the easy and obvious thing; we had recourse to a one man government.
We magnified the office of President and satisfied that primitive instinct in us which must see the public welfare and the public safety personified in a single individual, something visible, tangible, palpable. The President speaks and you read about him in the daily press; the President poses and you see him in the movies and feel assured, as in smaller realms under simpler conditions people were able to see their monarch dressed and equipaged in ways that connected him with all the permanence of the past, a symbol of stability, wisdom, and the divine favor.
If the trappings are lacking, imagination and theemotions supply their moral equivalent. Of our little temporary king no one must speak evil; no voice may be raised in criticism.
His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly country woman grown dull in the monotony of village life or worn with the task of pushing an unambitious husband forward to power, looking her most natural when in the frankness of early morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron across the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, becomes to the awed eyes of Washington women, quite "beautiful." You hear them say it of every—let us quote the illuminating phrase—every "first lady of the land."
When Burke said that aristocracy was the most natural thing in the world he did not go half far enough. The most natural thing in the world, the thing which is always repeating itself under no matter whatever form of government exists, is an autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as in the late war when Mr. Wilson was made by common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar of all the Russias.
The herd instinctively follows one authority. The mob is single-headed. All the traditions of the race lead back toward despotism and it is easier to revert toward something primitive than to go forward toward something higher in the scale of development.
And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives are with authority imposed from above. Our childhood is controlled by the autocracy of the family. Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclinations, represses our individuality, and turns us out stamped with a uniform mark, the finished product of its unvarying course. The single head of the classroom is the teacher. The single head of the school is the principal, of all the schools the Superintendent.
More important still, our economic lives are at the disposal of autocracy. We earn our livings under foremen and managers. Everywhere is the boss who says to us "Do this or starve." He represents to us not only authority but wisdom. The organization out of which proceeds to us the beneficent results of food and clothing operates because he is endowed with a knowledge which we have not. "He knows about it all, he knows, he knows."
In all the essential everyday relations of life we have never been able to evolve any higher organization than that of the chieftain and his tribe. We read about democracy in the newspapers; once every two years or every four years we go through certain motions which vaguely relate to democracy, and which are not convincing motions.
Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a society which is in all other than its political aspects entirely primitive. All our direct experiences are of one man power. It is the only organizationwe actually know at first hand. We trust to it for the means to live. We revert to it politically whenever it becomes an issue of life and death, and even in lesser emergencies.
So it came about that when we determined to have a government at Washington independent of and better representing the social will, whatever that might come to be, than the government of business we had recourse to that one form of rule which is ever present in our consciousness, the only form under which the race has lived long enough to have any real faith in it.
The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken form to utilize all the complex institutions which existed in this country. Business was at that time intrenched in Congress. It would have been a huge, an impossible task, to re-make Congress, especially when no one knew definitely what purpose should animate the re-making. It was so much easier to find one man than to find many men. It is so much easier for a people which does not know where it is going but means to go there to choose one man, and by an act of faith endow him with the divination of leadership, than it is to have a national will and express it through numerous representatives.
The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of the national purposes. Creating an autocracy is an act of faith; democracy is work. And faith is so much easier than work.
We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of political inertia, as a reversion to an outworn type. On the contrary, we were immensely pleased with our innovation. As usual the United States had made an immense contribution to the art of government. We were repeating the race history of governments, as a child resumes in his life the race history of the human kind. We had got so far as to evolve that oldest of human institutions—autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we were as proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper with a pencil the very picture which his stone age ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus tooth.
Our President had more power than the King of England, we boasted, more than the Emperor of Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obsolete because they preserved autocracy out of the darkness of the Middle Ages. Our government was in the forefront of progress because it had created autocracy out of the suffrage of the people.
And how clever we were with the restrictions of our written constitution with its exact balance of powers, executive, legislative, and judicial. The Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing an instrument by which the carefully distributed authority might be well reconcentrated; as if they were the first to use words whose import depended on the point of view of those who interpreted them!
Acres of space in the newspapers were coveredwith gratulatory articles proving that the dominating executive was the inevitable unifying principle in our disjointed and not otherwise workable government.
Ours was a government by parties, so the argument ran, and the President was the head of his party. As a matter of fact the writers of the Constitution had not conceived of a government by parties. What they had in mind was what they had before them in the Constitutional Convention of which they were a part, a government by the best and ablest men of the community, who should meet together and select the executive; who should equally through the state legislature choose the Senators. The role of job brokers was the last thing they imagined themselves to be creating. Parties came later. Ours was not originally a government of parties. It is hardly a government by parties today. So there was nothing inevitable about this great reason why the Executive should be the element in our system which would hold it together and make it work.
Nor until the beginning of this century did it ever occur to us that the President was the head of his party. The control of the organization had been in other hands, in Hanna's or Quay's or Cameron's, or divided among a group of men like these three, who represented the interests of business in the parties, and often also in the Senate.
The idea that the executive was the party's headwas merely a happy afterthought which was adopted to justify the resort to the line of least resistance in creating a stronger government at Washington, the concentration upon one man to represent the national will. We had simply done what other peoples had so often done in the history of mankind. When the English wished to weaken the rule of the great barons they magnified the office of the King. When we wished to get away from the rule of the barons of business we magnified the office of our elective King, the President. We invented new reasons for an old expedient.
And by making the amplified executive the head of his party, which we did—for the Quays and Hannas speedily disappeared under the new order and left no successors—we set him to sawing off the limb on which he sat. If his authority rested on that of his party then to be firm the authority of the party must be firm. For parties to endure and be strong there must be a certain quality of permanence about them. They must not rest upon personalities but on principles and jobs, principles for the disinterested and for those whose interests are expressed in the principles, and jobs for those whose interests are less large and indirect.
Of parties with the executive as their head nothing remained but their name. The only nexus there could be between the executive and the mass of voters was personal. One year a party was Roosevelt, the next year it was Taft and thedistance between Roosevelt and Taft was the distance between East and West. A little later it even changed its name and voted in another column because Roosevelt had adopted a new party name and gone unto a new column. Four years later it split up and much of it went to Wilson, who temporarily rallied a personal following just as Roosevelt had done.
And because the dispensing of jobs was an unseemly occupation for the executive we reduced by law the patronage that was available for the sustenance of parties. Thus we substituted personal caprice for the permanency of parties and at the same time cut down the practical means of holding organizations together. At the same time the decay of government by business left parties no longer an instrument of the economic will of the nation.
Thus the executive headship was wholly inconsistent with government by parties, upon which our magnified President was supposed to rest. A further inconsistency was that we adopted another theory for strengthening one man power. This was that the President was the leader of the people. Have we a government by parties there? Not at all; the power of the executive rests upon something outside of and superior to parties.
If the legislative did not respond to pressure he might "go to the people," as it was called, through the newspapers and upon the stump. He mightdiscipline the recalcitrant by stirring up public sentiment against them. He might build up a personal following to such an extent that his party must have it in order to win. He might encourage the movement away from parties by attaching people to ideas and measures, policies that the party had declined to accept. In this theory of executive power it was conceded that parties were not to be trusted. In the other it was held that they were a necessary link between the dissociate branches of government.
It is no exaggerated notion that executive control of parties contributed to the disintegration of party government. It is nothing more than a statement of what actually happened. Roosevelt broke up the Republican party nationally. He left it with its name covering an agglomeration of groups and blocs and personal followings, supporters of various interests difficult to reconcile, whose votes fluctuate from year to year.
Mr. Hughes, the same kind of executive and party leader as governor of New York, left the Republicans of that state in the hands of the little local banditti. Mr. La Follette, following the same methods as Governor of Wisconsin, left no one in that state definitely a Republican or a Democrat. Every voter there is the personal follower of some chieftain.
And what virtue is there in the theory that the Executive alone represents the national point ofview, that he alone speaks "for the country?" Political inertia always finds good excuses.
There are reasons why the President should try to represent the country as a whole, since he is elected in a nationwide balloting. But there is no reason why he should succeed in representing the country as a whole, why he should have a national point of view.
Why should Mr. Harding have a vast understanding of national problems and a clear sense of the country's will? A little while ago he was a Senator, and the supposition that the Executive alone has the national point of view implies that a Senator has not that point of view. Mr. Harding is chosen President and immediately upon his election by some magic virtue of his office he is endowed with insight and imagination which he did not possess as Senator.
Mr. Harding is a good average President, a typical President, whether of the United States or of a business corporation, just the kind of man to put at the head of a going concern where a plodding kind of safeness is required of the executive. We shall do well, should our standards of public life remain what they are, if we have three Presidents superior to Mr. Harding in energy or originality of mind, during the whole of the coming century. But why should Mr. Harding understand or represent the national point of view?
Mr. Harding lived his life in the indolentcomfortable mental atmosphere of a small town. His horizon was narrow and there was no force in him which made him seek to widen it. His public experience before coming to Washington consisted of brief service in the Ohio State legislature and a term as Lieutenant-Governor of Ohio. His service in the Senate at Washington was short and it was beginner's work, undertaken in the spirit of a man who finds the upper house a pleasant place in which to pass the latter years of a never strenuous life.
His point of view on national problems was a second-hand point of view. He knew about them what his party had said about them, in its platforms, on the stump, in the press. He accepted the accepted opinions. No magic wrought by election to the Presidency could make of him or of anyone else a great representative of the national purpose or endow him or anyone else with deep understanding of national problems.
Of recent Presidents Mr. Taft failed so completely to understand his people and express its will that after four years in office he could command the support of only two states when seeking re-election. Mr. Wilson after four years had so far failed that only the incredible stupidity of his opponents enabled him to succeed himself; and again so far, that his second term ended in a tragedy. The floundering of Mr. Harding is apparent to every eye.
Only under two Presidents has the theory ofexecutive domination of the Government succeeded, and not completely under them. Congress rose against Mr. Roosevelt in the last year or two of his administration. Congress was not of Mr. Wilson's party, and was thus out of his control in the last two years of his administration. Mr. Taft lacked the will to rule. Mr. Harding is feebler than Mr. Taft, and party authority, one of the pillars of executive power and responsibility, is now completely broken down. A system which is successful only half the time cannot be called workable.
Let us examine the circumstances under which the Executive was able to prevail over Congress and effect a limited sort of one man government. They are not likely soon to repeat themselves.
Mr. Roosevelt was an extraordinary personality. Only Andrew Jackson, among our Presidents, was as picturesque as he, only Andrew Jackson had a popular following comparable to his.
Both of them represented strong democratic movements,—Jackson the extrusion of the landed aristocracy, in favor of the masses, from their preferred position in our political life; Mr. Roosevelt, the similar extrusion of the business aristocracy, in favor of the masses from the preferred position they had gained in our political life. Like agitations of the political depths, finding expression in personalities as unusual as those of Jackson and Roosevelt, will give us from time to time executives who may carry everything before them; but onlyemergencies like this and one other will make the President supreme.
And even then it is easy to overstate the power of the Executive as it was exercised by Mr. Roosevelt. The Colonel lived by picturesque exaggeration. If he went to South America it was to discover a river and find animals that the eye of man never rested on before or since. He read more books than it was humanly possible to read and not become a pallid bookworm. He pursued more interests than mere man can have. He exercised daily as only a pugilist exercises briefly when in training.
He had the gusto of the greatest amateur of all time and enjoyed the immunity which is always granted to amateurs, that of never being measured by professional standards. When you might have been noting a weakness in one direction he was diverting you by an enormous exhibition of versatility in another. He had the capacity of seeming, and the semblance was never penetrated. He seemed to bestride Washington like a Colossus. Actually his rule was one long compromise with Aldrich and Cannon, the business leaders of Congress, which he represented as a glorious triumph over them.
One man government was developed much further under Mr. Wilson than under Mr. Roosevelt, Mr. Harding's predecessor entered office as the expression of that movement toward a governmentbased on numbers rather than on wealth, which the Colonel had so imperfectly effected. There had been a reaction under Taft; there was a new determination under Wilson, and a new concentration on the executive.
Poor, bookish, without the friendships in the business world which Mr. Roosevelt had had, having few contacts with life, Mr. Wilson embraced the idea of putting business in its place passionately, where Mr. Roosevelt played with it as he played with everything else.
Mr. Wilson was by temperament an autocrat. An illustration of how personal was his government was his treatment of his enemies. His bitterness against Huntington Wilson, the Republican Ambassador to Mexico, is well known. A year or two after the dispute was over, Huntington Wilson's son came up for examination to enter the Consular service. He passed at the top of the list. President Wilson heard of his success and directed that he should receive no appointment. He carried his enmity to the second generation. The law which would have given young Mr. Wilson a place meant nothing under his personal government.
As Anatole France says of Robespierre, he "était optimiste qui croyait á la vertue." Those who are "optimists and believe in virtue," remarks the French author, end by killing men. Wilson in a revolution would have conducted a Terror, as indeed during the war he did conduct a sort oflegal terror among pacifists and radicals. Roosevelt belonged to the other school in the conduct of affairs which Anatole France praises because it never forgets that men are "des mauvais singes." In a revolution Roosevelt would have cut off no more heads than would be necessary to make a good show.
Moreover, when Mr. Wilson entered office his party had been long out of power. Its leaders in the House and Senate were not firmly established. Unlike Cannon and Aldrich, of the Roosevelt day, they did not represent business in the national legislature. They had no authority except the purely factitious authority created by the accident of seniority. They were easily dominated from the White House.
Coming into power at such a moment, possessing such a temperament, representing such a popular movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most perfect example of the concentrated executive that we have yet had. But even his one man government was attacked from the outset. His personality proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamiliar an object in America as to seem almost a monstrosity, and his ascendancy would not have lasted beyond two years if the war had not come.
War is the other great cause that leads to autocracy in popular governments. In times of common danger we revert to the herd with the single leadership. We resort to the only form of rule of whichwe have any experience in our daily lives, the only form in which the race has yet developed any lasting faith. From the time when war threatened, with the invasion of Belgium, till the time when it ended with the armistice, Mr. Wilson became what any President may become under like circumstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament especially fitted him to become—an absolute dictator.
When we think of the powerful executive as the natural development of the American system, imparting that unity to our government which the makers of the Constitution in their zeal for checks and balances refused to give it, we are over-impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and Wilson and do not make sufficient allowances for the conditions which made their power inevitable. So impossible is it for authority to remain permanently in the hands of the executive that we are now witnessing its spontaneous movement away from the White House—toward, well for the moment I should say, toward nowhere.
A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire for power over your fellow man is an unmistakable sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia amounting to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia which makes history amusing. If that is true, then we are in an era of perfect sanity at Washington. No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, in Wall Street, the capitol of business, or backamong the home folks, as far as I can learn, wants power—and responsibility.
The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright young observer at the capital of what happens when Business arrives in Washington is the picture of our whole present national political organization. "A bunch of tall-hatted fat boys comes. The governmental nose is thrust out awaiting the guiding hand. The guiding hand is put unostentatiously behind the back." It is the same when the organ of leading is extended from the White House for the hand of leadership at the Capitol, or, as happens, as often the organ of leading at the Capitol awaits the hand of leadership at the White House.
Power is in transition and we do much inconsistent thinking about where it is and where it should be. We deliberately elected a weak executive, to retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old equilibrium and co-ordination of the equal and co-ordinate branches of our government. Yet when things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the critics exclaim that the President should be firm and "assert his authority" on the hill. Mr. Harding himself said, over and over again, "This is no one man job at Washington." Yet we read that his face assumes a "determined expression"—I have myself never seen it—and he sends for the leaders in Congress.
We haven't executive domination and we haven'tanything in its place. We voted to go back to the nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no Mark Hanna speaking for business and for party to make the system work. We have the willessness of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to act and direct. Not even seven million majority is enough to bring back the past. In spite of "landslides" the course is always forward, and I use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic sense of those who were once so sure of Progress.