صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

granted under conditions which would make impossible any amalgamation of these interests and would retain for the Government the right to regulate rates, terminate all franchises within a reasonable time, and provide for periodical revaluations.

Agriculture. For the farmer Uncle Sam might work wonders. Owning the phosphate beds, he could reduce present prices at least two-thirds. By developing the potash deposits, and evolving a practical method of extracting potash from the Pacific coast seaweed, the alunite veins of the West, and the granites of the East and South, relief would be insured from the German monopoly which now charges a price four times greater than the cost of potash production and delivery at Atlantic coast ports. As for nitrate, the scientifically operated coke ovens would provide $20,000,000 worth a year, seventy-five per cent of which now goes to waste.

All of which looks good.

Now, the paramount objection to any or all of this seems to be a fear in the public mind that successful operation would be impossible at the hands of the Government. The railways sowed and cultivated this belief in the old days when Government ownership was first being discussed and stock-watering was much better than it is now. This fear took root and has grown ever since despite the fact that public ownership under the direction of municipalities is being vindicated at every hand.

Somehow the public appears to forget the smooth-running departmental work of the Government which disburses more than three quarters of a billion dollars annually with so little fuss that the people aren't even interested. At the top of the list is the Post-Office Department, which expends about $250,000,000 and is fast becoming self-supporting. Then a little $400,000,000 job like building the Panama Canal, without a hitch or a hint at graft, inspires no confidence whatever in Uncle Sam's ability to do big things in a big way. Queer, isn't it?

Every time Government ownership is mentioned some railway attorney bobs up and calls attention to Article V of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution providing that citizens may not be deprived of their property for public use without due

process of law and just compensation. Then he sits back and smiles complacently, as if that settled the whole proposition by forever barring it.

Of course Uncle Sam wouldn't think for a moment of flatly confiscating any of these properties. Neither would the longsuffering public expect nor demand that. No one would object to the allowance of a just compensation, save perhaps the present owners. But it would be the particular duty of the Government to see that the compensation was just and no more.

Other countries do these things quite readily. Twenty-odd years ago New Zealand was parcelled off in huge landed estates inhabited mostly by sheep. The Government wanted farms for the rapidly increasing influx of immigrants, but the landowners refused to sell. So the Government simply had passed an act permitting it to use public funds to purchase estates to be thrown open to settlement, then went out and took the lands and arbitrated the question of valuation. The Government and property-owner each named an arbitrator, these two naming the third and the trio fixing the values. To their final valuation the Government added five per cent, and the landowner was compelled to accept the award whether it suited him or not. He was a bar to the public welfare and the Government summarily removed him.

A present-day example was the taking over last year by the British Government of the telephone systems in England. Late in 1911 Parliament decided that the Government should conduct the business. So on January 1, 1912, the Post-Office Department quietly took charge of the stations, apparatus, operation, business everything. This action incited no revolution. The question of valuation was referred to the Railway and Canal Commission by agreement between the Government and the telephone companies, the latter asking approximately twentyone million pounds for their properties. After a hearing lasting seventy-two days the Commission awarded them twelve and a half million pounds. A little difference of forty-odd million dollars; but the companies probably will accept the finding, and there the matter will end.

300

The way will be easy enough for Uncle Sam once the people voice an emphatic demand that it be done.

Financing the proposition should be the easiest part of it. There are millions of stockings in the homes of people in moderate circumstances that are holding dollars instead of feet. This army of savers is largely without business interests or experience. Many of them distrust the banks. Three per cent Government bonds would appeal strongly to them as an investment. Issued in small denominations, they would serve as an ideal savings bank for the workingman. In France, where Government bonds are sold directly to the people, every issue is invariably over-subscribed. The demand would be just as keen with us.

The trouble in America has always been, not only with the corporations but with the Government, that the bondholding class has been made too exclusive. Corporation bond issues usually carry a stipulated minimum of subscription. With the railways this minimum has been placed occasionally as high as $10,000. A fine opportunity for the widows and orphans and the ordinary workingman! The denomination of Uncle Sam's smallest bond is $25. It should be $10. Then all of us might have a little certificate of ownership in our Government. could buy them at the post-office just as we do a special delivery stamp. With small denomination bonds and direct sale to the people these projects could be financed without the country ever feeling it.

We

But before anything can be done the people must be thoroughly aroused to the situation which confronts us. This prevalent National disregard of the future must be put aside for a new policy of aggressive, far-seeing governmental activity.

We must provide against the future if the United States is to fulfil its manifest destiny and prove to the world that the democratic Republic, of the people, for the people, and by the people, is the ideal form of government, insuring freedom in its widest sense and forever wiping out tyranny, whether official, industrial, or monopolistic.

Think it over, my fellow-countrymen. It will be for you to say what is to be done much sooner than you realize.

5. Persuasion

ADDRESS AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE1

WOODROW WILSON

YOUR EXCELLENCY, MR. CLOTHIER, MR. PRESIDENT: That greeting sounds very familiar, and I am reminded of an anecdote told of that good artist, but better wit, Oliver Herford. On one occasion, being seated at his club at lunch, a man whose manners he did not very much relish came up to him and slapped him on the back and said, "Hello, Ollie, old boy, how are you?" He looked up at the man somewhat coldly, and said, "I don't know your name and I don't know your face, but your manners are very familiar." The manners exemplified in that cheer are delightfully familiar.

I find myself unaffectedly embarrassed to-day. I want to say, in sincere compliment, that I do not like to attempt an extemporaneous address following so finished an orator as the one who has just taken his seat. Moreover, I am somewhat confused as to my identity. I am told by psychologists that I would not know who I am to-day if I did not remember who I was yesterday; but when I recollect that yesterday I was a college president, that does not assist me in establishing my identity to-day. On the contrary, this very presence, the character of this audience, this place with its academic memories, all combine to remind me that the greater part of my active life has been spent in companies like this, and it will be difficult for me in what follows of this address to keep out of the old ruts of admonition which I have been accustomed to follow in the rôle of college president.

No one can stand in the presence of a gathering like this, on a day suggesting the memories which this day suggests, without asking himself what a college is for. There have been times when I have suspected that certain undergraduates did not know. I remember that in days of discouragement as a teacher I grate

1 Delivered October 25, 1913.

fully recalled the sympathy of a friend of mine in the Yale faculty who said that after twenty years of teaching he had come to the conclusion that the human mind had infinite resources for resisting the introduction of knowledge. Yet I have my serious doubts as to whether the main object of a college is the introduction of knowledge. It may be the transmission of knowledge through the human system, but not much of it sticks. Its introduction is temporary; it is for the discipline of the hour. Most of what a man learns in college he assiduously forgets afterwards. Not because he purposes to forget it, but because the crowding events of the days that follow seem somehow to eliminate it.

What a man ought never to forget with regard to a college is that it is a nursery of principle and of honor. I cannot help thinking of William Penn as a sort of spiritual knight who went out upon his adventures to carry the torch that had been put in his hands, so that other men might have the path illuminated for them which led to justice and to liberty. I cannot admit that a man establishes his right to call himself a college graduate by showing me his diploma. The only way he can prove it is by showing that his eyes are lifted to some horizon which other men less instructed than he have not been privileged to see. Unless he carries freight of the spirit he has not been bred where spirits are bred.

This man Penn, representing the sweet enterprise of the quiet and powerful sect that called themselves Friends, proved his right to the title by being the friend of mankind. He crossed the ocean, not merely to establish estates in America, but to set up a free commonwealth in America and to show that he was of the lineage of those who had been bred in the best traditions of the human spirit. I would not be interested in celebrating the memory of William Penn if his conquest had been merely a material one. Sometimes we have been laughed at by foreigners in particular for boasting of the size of the American Continent, the size of our own domain as a nation; for they have, naturally enough, suggested that we did not make it. But I claim that every race and every man is as big as the thing that he takes

« السابقةمتابعة »