John Graham Brooks

“ Here is a sphere for art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. ”

“ The essence of the socialist's logic is, that all interest on money and all profits on goods made for the market (as well as all rent) are inherently vicious and antisocial so long as they drop into private pockets. There is no distinction between the greedy abuses of capitalism through organized privilege and the possible uses of capitalism under regulation.
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But think of this issue as we may, we are as a fact now committed to regulation—committed to a long and hard struggle to bring monopoly evils under social control. ”

“ It meant nothing to them that society had given them stupendous privileges which qualified their ownership. These franchise-grants once in their pockets, everything that was built upon them came to be used in any conceivable game to enrich the owner.
Properly informed persons no longer discuss whether it is right and moral to allow railroad magnates to do as they like—to act as if these properties were strictly a private possession. We know, at last, how society has suffered from leaving this form of ownership so long without social control. ”

“ How often we have seen within a year or two the lament that the efficiency of labor has lessened in many of our great industries! What in Heaven's name can we expect? If that labor-world believes what is everywhere cried on the housetops about the crooked exploiting devices of these monopolies, why should not its interest and its fidelity fall off? ”

“ Wealth everywhere gives [Pg 7] power, but with us it is almost the only symbol that has wide and practical recognition. This passion, working in a vigorous people upon the resources which the United States offers, has intensified the competitive struggle in industry to a degree hitherto unknown in the world. This struggle has absorbed the thought and strength of the people to an extent without known parallel.
It is the magnitude and stress of this competition that have bent and subdued politics to business ends. ”

“ Though a dozen other cities would serve as well, look for a moment at the monopoly of the New York street-railways. A people, careless and ignorant of their own interests, so far give away the [Pg 17] rights in their streets, that a few men get them into their possession. With the grip once fast upon this power, it becomes not a machinery primarily to serve the people: primarily it becomes an enginery to filch vast unearned increments from the public. It becomes a device for gambling, with the dice so heavily loaded in your favor that you cannot lose. You change power from one kind to another ”

“ Her Compulsory Arbitration may fail; she may be forced to an industrial pace slower than we like; but the main purpose of her social policy is sound to the core; and we are now trying clumsily to imitate it. Yet we are still afraid—we "don't more'n half believe it." Her purpose is to use the power of city and state in New Zealand to prevent the private fleecing of the people through monopoly. Whether it is her land policy or her insurance policy, the aim is to check at their source inherent monopoly abuses.
One is forever hearing that New Zealand is being given over hand and foot to Socialism. ”

“ The socialist tells us that these combined interests in transportation—mines, oil, timber, etc.—have become a power with which city and state cannot cope; that we are at the present moment governed by these monopoly interests, and shall continue so to be governed until the state has absolute possession of them.
To this claim of the socialists, one reply is obvious. Every immediate political duty now before us is committed to the principle of regulation. ”

“ Yet how easy it is to put these evils into phrases! How hard it is to relate ourselves to definite and effective proposals for the elimination of the evils! Such proposals have nevertheless been at last put before us with coherence and with deliberation. They have been put before the American people with a clearness which cannot be shirked without bad faith on our part. They have been brought within the sphere of practical politics, where their decision now waits upon the choice of the people as a whole. ”

“ There is, further, the almost universal concentration on wealth-production as a means of winning what average men most crave in this world. What the strong of any race work for is not, ultimately, money, it is social power. ”

“ To-day a forestry policy derived absolutely from the common, social point of view has become a necessity so commanding that the nation's attention is at last caught. A generation ago no one had even guessed at the franchise-value of our streets,—not even those of New York city. ”

“ At first no public protection of fish and game is necessary, but the pressure of population will eventually compel a common rule to which the individual must submit. As surely as a growing town sooner or later requires a common water-supply, a common drainage, common sanitary provisions, and regulated hack charges, just so surely will the private [Pg 13] monopoly somewhere and at some time require strict social control,—that is, control from the point of view of all of us and not from that of a few money-makers. A generation ago the stripping of our forests did not matter vitally. ”

“ 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 [Pg 42] 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 ”

“ This commanding policy for future as well as for present interests, for the entire people as well as for the few, has been stated in its integrity in two messages from President Roosevelt. Men may differ about the Philippines; about our military and naval ambition; about nature-fakirs and race-suicide; but about the ordered and constructive purpose to curb the abuses of our ill-regulated private monopolies, there should be no disagreement among sane and disinterested men. No one has ever yet shown genius enough to do disagreeable duties agreeably to all men. ”

“ Louis, and Chicago: it is in a whole nest of industries—oil, mining, and timber—which are interknit with our railroad system.
Here is the real antagonism between monopoly and good citizenship. Anthracite coal is not a business apart—it is a railroad business; and if there are abuses, they cannot be corrected apart from railroad regulation. There is nothing that we now need to know so thoroughly as that the railroad is the one key to the control of all monopolies, including those that often last just long enough to gut the properties according to get-rich-quick principles. ”

“ The various methods of railroad regulation may irritate us, but that the railroad must be brought so far under public control as to obey the law and serve all men with approximate fairness, no human being who is intellectually and morally awake can longer deny.
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. ”

“ Nothing in the statesmanship of President Roosevelt will more surely [Pg 39] 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. ”

“ This shell-game has gone on decade after decade, so gayly that it seems as if it were a delight to the American people to have their pockets picked. And yet, let us say it over and over again, the pocket-picking is not the worst of it. That the people's money should be used to debauch their own chosen representatives in city and state legislatures is the uttermost evil. ”

“ But another, weightier reason must now be added,—namely, our private monopolies with their influence and reactions on our whole community life. In the earlier and looser stages of development, when vast resources still remain unappropriated, private monopoly may aid a city or a nation. ”

“ It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping and directing of those conditions out of [Pg 43] which may emerge a society in which the spirit of justice and equal opportunity will be realized at least so far that it will be no longer a mockery among honest men. ”

“ Any one interested enough to run through the files of the distinctively labor press at the present moment, will find a body of convinced opinion about those who control us industrially that has an extremely ugly look. The labor-world is drawing the only natural inference it can from the data given. ”

“ I am thinking of definite large business interests in which the evil will remain as common as it is inevitable so long as the business is unregulated and its shady practices concealed from public authorities and public opinion. In some of our huge concerns it is the traditional procedure to bring the various heads of departments together at regular intervals and pit them [Pg 10] against each other as if running a race for life. What is the showing that each can make against the other? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Labor is learning that unfair industrial privilege flouts every essential principle of democratic government. The real iniquity of it is hidden from us until we see that secrecy, cunning, and unscrupulousness may be good pecuniary assets. ”

“ Part and parcel of the uttermost evil is the resulting suspicion and distrust that eat their way deep through [Pg 19] the masses of the wage-earning world. Not to mention their own trade papers, or the socialistic sheets with the scandals of high and low finance, wage-earners have only to read the capitalistic sheets, presidential messages, and summarized reports from scores of legislative committees, in order to believe that almost everything investigated—insurance, city traction companies, mining syndicates, railway finance—is heavy with rottenness. ”

“ If you are frightened by the challenge of an indignant public, the most important records are destroyed. Surplus funds belonging to the stockholders are freely loaned to personal friends or put to private speculative ventures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If you tax [Pg 31] a vast estate down there so that it must be cut into small holdings upon which some twenty times more people can live than lived on the private estate, and if this added population is encouraged to win more and more interest and profit-bearing forms of wealth, you have a situation in which the thoroughpaced socialists may be entirely out of the game. ”

“ A man who should happen to have the people's interest really at heart could not be an active partner in the worst of these monopolies. The unscrupulous, the men bent upon the stock-watering game and their own immediate enrichment, would crowd the honest men to the wall. ”

“ The doctrinaires had worked out to perfection the idea that a people who could freely make and unmake their own laws would, for that plain reason, respect the laws. Of course, a people who had laws thrust upon them from above would hate them and disobey them. But a democracy would escape this temptation. ”

“ In this relentless contest before their superiors, the foreman or agent learns that the one key to favor and advancement is that no other shall make a better showing. If he can safely get this superior result out of his labor group, that is one way; if he can reach his end by introducing children under age, or by any other questionable [Pg 11] device, the temptation is there in the subtlest form it can assume for the average man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That we now see this sorry partnership as it is, and are daily more and more aroused by it, and bent on its dissolution, is the surest sign of progress, as it is the surest sign that democracy need not fail. ”

“ It is not my purpose to bristle up and strike back at these critics of American behavior. Amid possible exaggeration, they are telling a great deal of truth about us. It is a truth that it has its own natural history. A long adventurous border-life was in some respects the great fact of the nineteenth century in moulding our national habits. A large part of the population lived under conditions where no appeal to legal restraints was possible. ”