The Art of Public Speaking
field, cut ripe timber from the forest, dig metal from the mine, fashion
all for human use, carry them to the market place and exchange them
according to their mutual needs--and this is business.
With our vast advantages, contrasted with the vast disadvantages of
other nations, American business all the time should be the best and
steadiest in the world. But it is not. Germany, with shallow soil, no
mines, only a window on the seas and a population more than ten times as
dense as ours, yet has a sounder business, a steadier prosperity, a more
contented because better cared for people.
What, then, must we do to make American business better? We must do what
poorer nations have done. We must end the abuses of business by striking
down those abuses instead of striking down business itself. We must try
to make little business big and all business honest instead of striving
to make big business little and yet letting it remain dishonest.
Present-day business is as unlike old-time business as the old-time
ox-cart is unlike the present-day locomotive. Invention has made the
whole world over again. The railroad, telegraph, telephone have bound
the people of modern nations into families. To do the business of these
closely knit millions in every modern country great business concerns
came into being. What we call big business is the child of the economic
progress of mankind. So warfare to destroy big business is foolish
because it can not succeed and wicked because it ought not to succeed.
Warfare to destroy big business does not hurt big business, which always
comes out on top, so much as it hurts all other business which, in such
a warfare, never comes out on top.
With the growth of big business came business evils just as great. It is
these evils of big business that hurt the people and injure all other
business. One of these wrongs is over capitalization which taxes the
people's very living. Another is the manipulation of prices to the
unsettlement of all normal business and to the people's damage. Another
is interference in the making of the people's laws and the running of
the people's government in the unjust interest of evil business. Getting
laws that enable particular interests to rob the people, and even to
gather criminal riches from human health and life is still another.
An example of such laws is the infamous tobacco legislation of 1902,
which authorized the Tobacco Trust to continue to collect from the
people the Spanish War tax, amounting to a score of millions of dollars,
but to keep that tax instead of turning it over to the government, as it
had been doing. Another example is the shameful meat legislation, by
which the Beef Trust had the meat it sent abroad inspected by the
government so that foreign countries would take its product and yet was
permitted to sell diseased meat to our own people. It is incredible that
laws like these could ever get on the Nation's statute books. The
invisible government put them there; and only the universal wrath of an
enraged people corrected them when, after years, the people discovered
the outrages.
It is to get just such laws as these and to prevent the passage of laws
to correct them, as well as to keep off the statute books general laws
which will end the general abuses of big business that these few
criminal interests corrupt our politics, invest in public officials and
keep in power in both parties that type of politicians and party
managers who debase American politics.
Behind rotten laws and preventing sound laws, stands the corrupt boss;
behind the corrupt boss stands the robber interest; and commanding these
powers of pillage stands bloated human greed. It is this conspiracy of
evil we must overthrow if we would get the honest laws we need. It is
this invisible government we must destroy if we would save American
institutions.
Other nations have ended the very same business evils from which we
suffer by clearly defining business wrong-doing and then making it a
criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment. Yet these foreign nations
encourage big business itself and foster all honest business. But they
do not tolerate dishonest business, little or big.
What, then, shall we Americans do? Common sense and the experience of
the world says that we ought to keep the good big business does for us
and stop the wrongs that big business does to us. Yet we have done just
the other thing. We have struck at big business itself and have not even
aimed to strike at the evils of big business. Nearly twenty-five years
ago Congress passed a law to govern American business in the present
time which Parliament passed in the reign of King James to govern
English business in that time.
For a quarter of a century the courts have tried to make this law work.
Yet during this very time trusts grew greater in number and power than
in the whole history of the world before; and their evils flourished
unhindered and unchecked. These great business concerns grew because
natural laws made them grow and artificial law at war with natural law
could not stop their growth. But their evils grew faster than the trusts
themselves because avarice nourished those evils and no law of any kind
stopped avarice from nourishing them.
Nor is this the worst. Under the shifting interpretation of the Sherman
law, uncertainty and fear is chilling the energies of the great body of
honest American business men. As the Sherman law now stands, no two
business men can arrange their mutual affairs and be sure that they are
not law-breakers. This is the main hindrance to the immediate and
permanent revival of American business. If German or English business
men, with all their disadvantages compared with our advantages, were
manacled by our Sherman law, as it stands, they soon would be bankrupt.
Indeed, foreign business men declare that, if their countries had such a
law, so administered, they could not do business at all.
Even this is not all. By the decrees of our courts, under the Sherman
law, the two mightiest trusts on earth have actually been licensed, in
the practical outcome, to go on doing every wrong they ever committed.
Under the decrees of the courts the Oil and Tobacco Trusts still can
raise prices unjustly and already have done so. They still can issue
watered stock and surely will do so. They still can throttle other
business men and the United Cigar Stores Company now is doing so. They
still can corrupt our politics and this moment are indulging in that
practice.
The people are tired of this mock battle with criminal capital. They do
not want to hurt business, but they do want to get something done about
the trust question that amounts to something. What good does it do any
man to read in his morning paper that the courts have "dissolved" the
Oil Trust, and then read in his evening paper that he must thereafter
pay a higher price for his oil than ever before? What good does it do
the laborer who smokes his pipe to be told that the courts have
"dissolved" the Tobacco Trust and yet find that he must pay the same or
a higher price for the same short-weight package of tobacco? Yet all
this is the practical result of the suits against these two greatest
trusts in the world.
Such business chaos and legal paradoxes as American business suffers
from can be found nowhere else in the world. Rival nations do not fasten
legal ball and chain upon their business--no, they put wings on its
flying feet. Rival nations do not tell their business men that if they
go forward with legitimate enterprise the penitentiary may be their
goal. No! Rival nations tell their business men that so long as they do
honest business their governments will not hinder but will help them.
But these rival nations do tell their business men that if they do any
evil that our business men do, prison bars await them. These rival
nations do tell their business men that if they issue watered stock or
cheat the people in any way, prison cells will be their homes.
Just this is what all honest American business wants; just this is what
dishonest American business does not want; just this is what the
American people propose to have; just this the national Republican
platform of 1908 pledged the people that we would give them; and just
this important pledge the administration, elected on that platform,
repudiated as it repudiated the more immediate tariff pledge.
Both these reforms, so vital to honest American business, the
Progressive party will accomplish. Neither evil interests nor reckless
demagogues can swerve us from our purpose; for we are free from both and
fear neither.
We mean to put new business laws on our statute books which will tell
American business men what they can do and what they cannot do. We mean
to make our business laws clear instead of foggy--to make them plainly
state just what things are criminal and what are lawful. And we mean
that the penalty for things criminal shall be prison sentences that
actually punish the real offender, instead of money fines that hurt
nobody but the people, who must pay them in the end.
And then we mean to send the message forth to hundreds of thousands of
brilliant minds and brave hearts engaged in honest business, that they
are not criminals but honorable men in their work to make good business
in this Republic. Sure of victory, we even now say, "Go forward,
American business men, and know that behind you, supporting you,
encouraging you, are the power and approval of the greatest people under
the sun. Go forward, American business men, and feed full the fires
beneath American furnaces; and give employment to every American laborer
who asks for work. Go forward, American business men, and capture the
markets of the world for American trade; and know that on the wings of
your commerce you carry liberty throughout the world and to every
inhabitant thereof. Go forward, American business men, and realize that
in the time to come it shall be said of you, as it is said of the hand
that rounded Peter's Dome, 'he builded better than he knew.'"
The next great business reform we must have to steadily increase
American prosperity is to change the method of building our tariffs. The
tariff must be taken out of politics and treated as a business question
instead of as a political question. Heretofore, we have done just the
other thing. That is why American business is upset every few years by
unnecessary tariff upheavals and is weakened by uncertainty in the
periods between. The greatest need of business is certainty; but the
only thing certain about our tariff is uncertainty.
What, then, shall we do to make our tariff changes strengthen business
instead of weakening business? Rival protective tariff nations have
answered that question. Common sense has answered it. Next to our need
to make the Sherman law modern, understandable and just, our greatest
fiscal need is a genuine, permanent, non-partisan tariff commission.
Five years ago, when the fight for this great business measure was begun
in the Senate the bosses of both parties were against it. So, when the
last revision of the tariff was on and a tariff commission might have
been written into the tariff law, the administration would not aid this
reform. When two years later the administration supported it weakly, the
bi-partisan boss system killed it. There has not been and will not be
any sincere and honest effort by the old parties to get a tariff
commission. There has not been and will not be any sincere and honest
purpose by those parties to take the tariff out of politics.
For the tariff in politics is the excuse for those sham political
battles which give the spoilers their opportunity. The tariff in
politics is one of the invisible government's methods of wringing