In the Legislature the problems with which I dealt were mainly problems of honesty and decency and of legislative and administrative efficiency.  They represented the effort, the wise, the vitally necessary effort, to get efficient and honest government.  But as yet I understood little of the effort which was already beginning, for the most part under very bad leadership, to secure a more genuine social and industrial justice.  Nor was I especially to blame for this.  The good citizens I then knew best, even when themselves men of limited means—­men like my colleague Billy O’Neill, and my backwoods friends Sewall and Dow—­were no more awake than I was to the changing needs the changing times were bringing.  Their outlook was as narrow as my own, and, within its limits, as fundamentally sound.

I wish to dwell on the soundness of our outlook on life, even though as yet it was not broad enough.  We were no respecters of persons.  Where our vision was developed to a degree that enabled us to see crookedness, we opposed it whether in great or small.  As a matter of fact, we found that it needed much more courage to stand up openly against labor men when they were wrong than against capitalists when they were wrong.  The sins against labor are usually committed, and the improper services to capitalists are usually rendered, behind closed doors.  Very often the man with the moral courage to speak in the open against labor when it is wrong is the only man anxious to do effective work for labor when labor is right.

The only kinds of courage and honesty which are permanently useful to good institutions anywhere are those shown by men who decide all cases with impartial justice on grounds of conduct and not on grounds of class.  We found that in the long run the men who in public blatantly insisted that labor was never wrong were the very men who in private could not be trusted to stand for labor when it was right.  We grew heartily to distrust the reformer who never denounced wickedness unless it was embodied in a rich man.  Human nature does not change; and that type of “reformer” is as noxious now as he ever was.  The loud-mouthed upholder of popular rights who attacks wickedness only when it is allied with wealth, and who never publicly assails any misdeed, no matter how flagrant, if committed nominally in the interest of labor, has either a warped mind or a tainted soul, and should be trusted by no honest man.  It was largely the indignant and contemptuous dislike aroused in our minds by the demagogues of this class which then prevented those of us whose instincts at bottom were sound from going as far as we ought to have gone along the lines of governmental control of corporations and governmental interference on behalf of labor.