It is curious to see how difficult it is to make some men understand that insistence upon one factor does not and must not mean failure fully to recognize other factors.  The selfish individual needs to be taught that we must now shackle cunning by law exactly as a few centuries back we shackled force by law.  Unrestricted individualism spells ruin to the individual himself.  But so does the elimination of individualism, whether by law or custom.  It is a capital error to fail to recognize the vital need of good laws.  It is also a capital error to believe that good laws will accomplish anything unless the average man has the right stuff in him.  The toiler, the manual laborer, has received less than justice, and he must be protected, both by law, by custom, and by the exercise of his right to increase his wage; and yet to decrease the quantity and quality of his work will work only evil.  There must be a far greater meed of respect and reward for the hand worker than we now give him, if our society is to be put on a sound basis; and this respect and reward cannot be given him unless he is as ambitious to do the best possible work as is the highest type of brain worker, whether doctor or writer or artist.  There must be a raising of standards, and not a leveling down to the standard of the poorest and most inefficient.  There is urgent need of intelligent governmental action to assist in making the life of the man who tills the soil all that it should be, and to see that the manual worker gets his full share of the reward for what he helps produce; but if either farmer, mechanic, or day laborer is shiftless or lazy, if he shirks downright hard work, if he is stupid or self-indulgent, then no law can save him, and he must give way to a better type.

I suppose that some good people will misunderstand what I say, and will insist on taking only half of it as representing the whole.  Let me repeat.  When I say, that, even after we have all the good laws necessary, the chief factor in any given man’s success or failure must be that man’s own character, it must not be inferred that I am in the least minimizing the importance of these laws, the real and vital need for them.  The struggle for individual advancement and development can be brought to naught, or indefinitely retarded, by the absence of law or by bad law.  It can be immeasurably aided by organized effort on the part of the State.  Collective action and individual action, public law and private character, are both necessary.  It is only by a slow and patient inward transformation such as these laws aid in bringing about that men are really helped upward in their struggle for a higher and a fuller life.  Recognition of individual character as the most important of all factors does not mean failure fully to recognize that we must have good laws, and that we must have our best men in office to enforce these laws.  The Nation collectively will in this way be able to be of real and genuine service to each of us individually; and, on the other hand, the wisdom of the collective action will mainly depend on the high individual average of citizenship.