THE ROOSEVELT DOMESTIC POLICIES

=Social Questions to the Front.=—­From the day of his inauguration to the close of his service in 1909, President Roosevelt, in messages, speeches, and interviews, kept up a lively and interesting discussion of trusts, capital, labor, poverty, riches, lawbreaking, good citizenship, and kindred themes.  Many a subject previously touched upon only by representatives of the minor and dissenting parties, he dignified by a careful examination.  That he did this with any fixed design or policy in mind does not seem to be the case.  He admitted himself that when he became President he did not have in hand any settled or far-reaching plan of social betterment.  He did have, however, serious convictions on general principles.  “I was bent upon making the government,” he wrote, “the most efficient possible instrument in helping the people of the United States to better themselves in every way, politically, socially, and industrially.  I believed with all my heart in real and thorough-going democracy and I wished to make the democracy industrial as well as political, although I had only partially formulated the method I believed we should follow.”  It is thus evident at least that he had departed a long way from the old idea of the government as nothing but a great policeman keeping order among the people in a struggle over the distribution of the nation’s wealth and resources.

=Roosevelt’s View of the Constitution.=—­Equally significant was Roosevelt’s attitude toward the Constitution and the office of President.  He utterly repudiated the narrow construction of our national charter.  He held that the Constitution “should be treated as the greatest document ever devised by the wit of man to aid a people in exercising every power necessary for its own betterment, not as a strait-jacket cunningly fashioned to strangle growth.”  He viewed the presidency as he did the Constitution.  Strict constructionists of the Jeffersonian school, of whom there were many on occasion even in the Republican party, had taken a view that the President could do nothing that he was not specifically authorized by the Constitution to do.  Roosevelt took exactly the opposite position.  It was his opinion that it was not only the President’s right but his duty “to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or the laws.”  He went on to say that he acted “for the common well-being of all our people whenever and in whatever manner was necessary, unless prevented by direct constitutional or legislative prohibition.”