THE CHANGING VIEW OF GOVERNMENT
A GROWING SENSE OF ITS DUTIES TO THE PEOPLE
AMEMBER of Congress summed up the strongest impression from his latest electoral campaign as being that the people in this country are coming to have a much more vivid sense of the Government as “a political entity†which “owes duties.†He obviously means something more than Secretary Hay’s famous phrase about the “administrative entity†of China. This is no mere quibble about Pope’s “forms of government.†It implies a wide departure from the old view that government is a necessary evil, to be kept as limited as possible. However we explain or interpret the new conception, its existence and increasing sway over the minds of men will not be questioned by any one who keeps his eyes open to the facts. He may call the tendency socialistic or simply an extension of the democratic principle, but that it has now become a part of American political thinking he cannot well deny.
Equally undeniable is it that the idea that people have of the nature and function of their Government is more important than any mere question of governmental machinery. We hear much of a movement to “restore the government to the people.†All manner of political devices are commended, or else condemned, to bring about a more direct participation by the citizen in the work of government. Be these proposals wise or foolish, it isplain that the chief question lies behind them. It is what the people wish their Government to be; what they would now have done by those responsible for its conduct; what they themselves would undertake by means of governmental agencies in case those agencies were somehow made more quickly responsive to the popular will. Show a political philosopher what the driving forces of a republic really desire it to be or to become, and he will be able to get much more instruction out of that, much more material on which to base prophecies respecting future development, than he possibly can from endless talk about primaries and conventions, ballot-laws and corrupt-practices acts. Those are only means and machinery; the end aimed at is the main thing.
Looking back at the recent enlargement of governmental activities, and endeavoring to read in them the new sense of duties owed, we are able to detect at least a few general indications and even certain principles. For example, it is clear that the people are demanding, and will more and more demand, that their governments, local and national, do a great deal more than was formerly expected to conserve the physical health of the nation. Here is the origin of pure-food laws, of meat-inspection, of statutes against the adulteration of drugs. In this feeling of the vital relation that ought to exist between the Government and the bodily well-being of its subjects we have also the explanation of official campaigns against disease, of the movement for a national quarantine, and of the great broadening of the work everywhere laid upon health officers.
All this has not come about through a deliberate or reasoned change in the point of view. It is, rather, the result of quiet pressure from the practical side. Large problems of public health have pushed themselves to the front; and in seeking to solve them, the people have merely laid hold of the powers of government as ready and efficient instruments. It is now tacitly assumed that the Government is under a continuing obligation to guard the people against epidemic disease and exposure to impure food and deleterious drugs. This is now distinctly one of the duties owed.
But life is more than meat, liberty and equality of opportunity are more precious than health. And in seeking to preserve these, the work of our Government during the last few years has made of official activity something very different from the conceptions and standards of 1787 or 1850—something which is no doubt open to abuse, but which, we are persuaded, has thus far been largely beneficial in its practical manifestations.
When the Government takes hold of the evil of railway rebating with a strong hand, it is not alone a question of enforcement of the law, but of striking down an insidious and dangerous form of special privilege. The real offense in the old rebate system, now happily so nearly a thing of the past, was not alone its secret favors to a secret few, but its gross discrimination against the unprotected many. It was the denial of the right to compete on equal terms. This is the intolerable thing in a free democracy. It can endure the sight of great wealth, of vast fortunes honestly gained, but it cannot submit to a method of accumulating property which destroys the opportunities of thousands in order to give unfair advantages to one. It is the determination to keep the career open to talent, not to shut it up to favoritism, which has been the animating spirit in the long struggle to prevent the railroads from virtually creating private fortunes at their own sweet will, and bringing whom they please to penury by means of rebates.
A like attitude and animus are seen in the other forms of legislative restriction upon great corporations. All the anti-monopoly laws and anti-trust suits, all the regulating statutes and the public-utilities commissions, have one principle at bottom, and it is to make all men stand equal before the law. On the one hand to strike down oppression, on the other to equalize opportunity, has been the intent of these new activities of government which, whatever else they show, leave no doubt of an altogether changed view of what governments owe.
In all these matters, the greatest peril that lurks in our path is that of being misled by abstractions. If we talk overmuch of “government,†we are in danger of forgetting the human beings who make it up. If we are afflicted by bad rulers, it is no help to us to fall back upon an ideal conception of “the state.†The state is simply men acting. Much amusementwas created in Paris by an innocent peasant who passed from one public building to another demanding that he be allowed to seel’état. He had heard of it all his life; he thought it was something at the capital; being there, he wanted to inspect it at close range. He was an unsophisticated rustic, but was he not right in his instinct? We are not, after all, governed by an “entity.†Government is the most concrete of human affairs. It is vested in mortal men. And in all the agitations and the hopes and fears of our day respecting the extension of governmental functions, and the quickening of the whole idea of what the state owes to citizens, it would be fatal to forget that government cannot be made better except by putting better men in charge of it.