Charles McCarthy

“ It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control. Wisconsin has achieved a really remarkable success along each and every one of those lines of difficult endeavor. It is a great feat, which deserves in all its details the careful study of every true reformer; and Mr. McCarthy in this volume makes such study possible. ”

“ McCarthy's purpose is to impress not only every real reformer, but every capable politician, with the fact that the people are more concerned about "good works" than about "faith."
The Wisconsin reformers have accomplished the extraordinary results for which the whole nation owes them so much, primarily because they have not confined themselves to dreaming dreams and then to talking about them. They have had power to see the vision, of course; if they did not have in them the possibility of seeing visions, they could accomplish nothing ”

“ It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. ”

“ It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men. It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. ”

“ McCarthy not only shows how Wisconsin has proceeded in specific instances to accomplish specific results, but he has so interwoven his studies of those separate results as to make the volume into a connected whole. Through his account of actual accomplishment in the field of political and industrial reform in Wisconsin, there runs a strain of philosophy that it would be well for every practical reformer to master. As Professor Simon N. Patten says: "Without means of attainment and measures of result an ideal becomes meaningless. The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. ”

“ All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson of scientific popular self-help, and of patient care in radical legislation. The American people have made up their minds that there is to be a change for the better in their political, their social, and their economic conditions ”

“ Nor must political reform stand by itself. It must accompany economic reform; and economic reform must have a twofold object; first to increase general prosperity, because unless there is such general prosperity no one will be well off ”

“ The people must be given full power to make their action effective, and at the same time the educational institutions of the commonwealth must be built up in such shape as to give the people the opportunity to learn how to use their power wisely. ”