CHAPTER XII

THE BIG STICK AND THE SQUARE DEAL

One of the vital questions with which as President I had to deal was the attitude of the Nation toward the great corporations.  Men who understand and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare of the people as the end of Government.  The men who first applied the extreme Democratic theory in American life were, like Jefferson, ultra individualists, for at that time what was demanded by our people was the largest liberty for the individual.  During the century that had elapsed since Jefferson became President the need had been exactly reversed.  There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism, under which complete freedom for the individual—­that ancient license which President Wilson a century after the term was excusable has called the “New” Freedom—­turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.  The total absence of governmental control had led to a portentous growth in the financial and industrial world both of natural individuals and of artificial individuals—­that is, corporations.  In no other country in the world had such enormous fortunes been gained.  In no other country in the world was such power held by the men who had gained these fortunes; and these men almost always worked through, and by means of, the giant corporations which they controlled.  The power of the mighty industrial overlords of the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of controlling them, or checking abuses by them, on the part of the people, through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically impotent.  The courts, not unnaturally, but most regrettably, and to the grave detriment of the people and of their own standing, had for a quarter of a century been on the whole the agents of reaction, and by conflicting decisions which, however, in their sum were hostile to the interests of the people, had left both the nation and the several States well-nigh impotent to deal with the great business combinations.  Sometimes they forbade the Nation to interfere, because such interference trespassed on the rights of the States; sometimes they forbade the States to interfere (and often they were wise in this), because to do so would trespass on the rights of the Nation; but always, or well-nigh always, their action was negative action against the interests of the people, ingeniously devised to limit their power against wrong, instead of affirmative action giving to the people power to right wrong.  They had rendered these decisions sometimes as upholders of property rights against human rights, being especially zealous in securing the rights of the very men who were most competent to take care of themselves; and sometimes in the name of liberty, in the name of the so-called “new freedom,” in reality the old, old “freedom,” which secured to the powerful the freedom to prey on the poor and the helpless.