Ethics in Service
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William Howard Taft >> Ethics in Service
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Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a
platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or
inconsistency. They sometimes combine the short ballot with the
initiative, referendum and recall though they are utterly at variance.
The referendum is the submission of every issue to the people.
The short ballot, on the contrary, means putting up one or two men whose
names shall not encumber the ballot. Have you ever seen these ballots?
They are a yard long and a yard wide. They have a hundred and twenty
names on them and the people are expected to make a selection. They are
to make a selection of ten out of fifty or one hundred names. Why, it
would seem to be mathematically demonstrable that that is absurd. But
when some men get into politics and talk about the people, it seems as
if they had to abandon ordinary logic. I am just as much in favor of
popular government as anybody, but I am in favor of popular government
as a means to attain good government, not in order to go upon the stump
and say, "Vote for me because I am in favor of the people. The people
are all wise and never make a mistake."
Now what is the initiative? In practice, it means that if 5 per cent of
the electorate can get together and agree on a measure, they shall
compel all the rest of the electorate to vote as to whether it shall
become law or not. There is no opportunity for amendment, or for
discussion. The whole legislative program is put into one act to be
voted on by the people. Speakers will get up and claim that the
millennium will be brought about by some measure that they advocate.
Suppose it is voted in? It never has had the test of discussion and
amendment that every law ought to have. I am not complaining of the
movement that brings about this initiative and referendum, for that is
prompted by a desire to clinch the movement against corruption, on the
theory that you cannot corrupt the whole people and that the initiative
and referendum mean detailed and direct government by the whole people.
But the theory is erroneous. The whole people will not vote at an
election, much less at a primary. When the people are thus represented
at the polls by a small minority there is nothing that the politicians
will not be able to do with that minority when they get their hands in.
This is still a new movement, for which we have little precedent to
guide us, but we have seen politicians fit their methods to any form of
government. Their chance is always through the neglect to vote on the
part of the majority of the electorate and this new system calls out
fewer votes than ever.
Now what is the referendum? It is a reference of the thing proposed by
the initiative to the people who are to vote on it. These
reformers-for-politics-only are never content to acquire a majority of
the electorate vote for the adoption of the measure referred. They seem
to love the promotion of the power of the minority.
What answer do the people themselves give with reference to the wisdom
of the referendum? At many elections candidates run at the same time
that questions are referred to the people, and what is the usual result
of the vote? In Oregon, where they have tried it most, and where the
people are best trained, they do sometimes get as much as 70 per cent of
those who vote on candidates to vote on the referendum; but generally,
as in Colorado, the vote at the same election upon the referendum
measures is not more than 50 per cent--sometimes as low as 25 or 20 per
cent--of those who vote for candidates. Why, in New York they were
voting as to whether they should have a constitutional convention, and
how did the total referendum vote compare with the total electorate? It
was just one-sixth of that total.
They have tried it in Switzerland. We get a good many of these new
nostrums from that country. They said in Switzerland, "These men vote
for candidates, they shall vote on referendums." What was the result?
The electors went up to the polls and solemnly put in tickets. When they
opened the ballots, they were blanks. What does that mean? It means that
the people themselves believe that they do not know how to vote on
those issues, and that such issues ought to be left to the agents whom
they select as competent persons to discuss and pass upon them in
accordance with the general principles that they have laid down in party
platforms. In Oregon, at the last Presidential election, the people were
invited to vote on thirty-one statutes, long, complicated statutes, and
in order to inform them, a book of two hundred and fifty closely printed
pages was published to tell them what the statutes meant.
I ask you, my friends, you who are studious, you who are earnest men who
would like to be a part of the people in determining what their policy
should be, I ask you to search yourselves and confess whether you would
have the patience to go through that book of two hundred and fifty
closely printed pages to find out what those acts meant? You would be in
active business, you would go down to the polls and say, "What is up
today?" You would be told: "Here are thirty-one statutes. Here are two
hundred and fifty pages that we would like to have you read in order
that you may determine how you are to vote on them." You would not do
it.
There was once a Senator from Oregon named Jonathan Bourne, who
advocated all this system of more democracy. He served one term in the
Senate and then sent word back to his constituents that he was not
coming home at the time of the primary. He said that he was not on
trial, for a man who had worked as hard as he had for the people could
not be on trial. Instead, he said, it was the people of Oregon who were
on trial, to say whether they appreciated a service like his. They did
not stand the test, and he was defeated at the primary. Then he
concluded that after all he would have to forgive them and take pity on
their blindness. So he went out to Oregon and ran on another ticket to
give them the benefit of his service. But still they resisted the acid
test. He himself went to the polls to vote at this election where there
were thirty-one statutes to be approved or rejected. How many of the
thirty-one submitted to him do you suppose he voted for? The newspapers
reported him as admitting that he voted on just three, and the other
twenty-eight he left to fate. Now, gentlemen, is not that a
demonstration? Is not that a _reductio ad absurdum_ for this system of
pure and direct democracy?
CHAPTER V
MORE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The present movement for a purer and more direct democracy--the
initiative, referendum and recall--is clearly an ineffective method of
securing wise legislation, good official agents, or even a real
expression of the people's will. The representative system is the most
valuable system that has thus far been invented to make popular
government possible and the introduction of more democracy, so-called,
is a retrograde step. It is going back to the machinery of the New
England town meeting and of the Republics of Greece and Rome, which we
have given up because conditions have so changed as to make it
impracticable and ineffective.
In the small number of people who constituted the town meeting in New
England, or in a Greek city, it was possible to discharge the
comparatively simple functions fulfilled by government because of the
high average intelligence of the freemen who took part. But even the
Greeks ran into difficulties, and if you will read Lord Acton, possibly
the greatest historical authority on the subject, you will find that
pure democracy, as it is called, resulted in disaster. We now have a
much more complicated government and more democracy will not supply its
needs.
The representative system, much abused as it is, is the system that has
rescued us from plutocracy. Its laws are the laws that have done the
work. Congress has adopted laws that have taken hold of the
corporations, and Congress is the most perfect model of representative
government. Why did Congress act? Because the people were aroused. You
must have the people aroused in order to make any system effective, and
when this is the case under the representative system, there is no
difficulty about its working.
The general primary is, of course, a good thing for certain leading
offices, but if you resort to it for selecting judges or subordinate
officials whose qualifications the public cannot be supposed to know,
the result will be anything but good. Men will be put into office by
some fortuitous circumstance, such as a particular advertisement in the
newspapers. Thus your Senator, and your governor, might well be elected
by the general primary as the result of party selection, but if the
people selected judges and subordinate officers they would have to take
men without regard to their qualifications. The short ballot means, as I
said, that the people should select leading officers who should in turn
select the subordinate officers and appoint the judges.
To the objection that voters will not vote on referendums, it is urged
that they ought to be compelled to do so. This is a futile remedy. Burke
said you cannot bring an indictment against the people, and it is
equally true that you cannot indict a great majority of the electorate
for not complying with their electoral duties. Suppose you attempt to
forfeit their right to vote, you may injure them, but you injure the
whole people a great deal more. The 80 per cent of the population whose
welfare is directly affected by the action of the electorate, but who
are not by law permitted to vote, are entitled to have the more
intelligent voters retained in the electorate. For, I am sorry to say,
it is generally among the intelligent part of the community that we find
neglect of electoral duties. The wisest course, therefore, is to give to
the people as much electoral duty as they are ordinarily able and
willing to perform, and no more. The fundamental fallacies in the
initiative, referendum and recall are, first, that they impose on the
voters three times the electoral work they had to do under the
representative system, and second, that the additional work involved is
of a kind that could be done much better through agents than by the
people directly. As to the recall of officers, I have only to say that
if you elect a man for three years to try to help your city, or state,
you must not make him subject to recall at any moment by those
candidates or people whom he has had to disappoint in order to do his
work effectively. Under the system of recall you are not going to secure
the men who will work well by looking ahead to preserve the real public
interest, but men who are trimmers, devoting their time to politics and
doing as little as possible to avoid criticism. Your executive officers
should be men of independence, courage and ability, who are interested
in the public and willing to encounter criticism for the time being in
order that they may carry out those policies that are going to inure to
public benefit in the end. By making them subject to recall, you
eliminate all independence and courage in your officers.
Another sign of recent times which will repay consideration has been
aptly termed "muck-raking." Mr. Roosevelt took the word from Bunyan's
"Pilgrim's Progress" to describe the irresponsible and slanderous
attacks upon public officials, which were made merely for the purpose of
selling the wares of penny-a-liners. To eliminate corporations from
politics and to bring them under government control, as I have
described, it was doubtless necessary to formulate charges against
individuals and political leaders and it was not to be expected that
misstatements would not creep into such personal attacks. While many
people were doubtless injured unjustly, it was essential that general
corrupt conditions should be revealed to the public. But there were a
great many who were induced to go into outrageous muck-raking solely for
profit, and magazines filled with such stuff and spreading real poison
among the people were sent in the mails at a much less rate than it cost
the government to carry them. I am glad to say muck-raking is not so
profitable now and it has been greatly reduced in volume.
But the opportunity for attacking prominent and powerful men in this way
has served to create a condition that we still suffer from. It has
brought about a feeling that nobody is to be trusted, and it has spread
too far the idea that all men are corrupt. In fact, it has led to the
feeling that everybody is on the same level in matters of character,
learning, skill and effectiveness of labor, and, in short, that every
man is as good as everybody else in everything. The idea is that men are
on a dead level. There is no room for leadership in such a view.
Inequality is essential to progress. If you make a dead level there will
be no interest in life or motive for effort, and you will destroy the
very spring of progress and the fountain of Christian civilization.
We now have political parties that are made by vertical divisions among
the voters. In each party we have the intelligent and the fortunate,
with those who are not so intelligent nor so experienced nor so well
circumstanced. What will be the tendency of this refusal to recognize
intelligence and high character in those who deserve it? It will make
the parties horizontal layers in the body politic. It will unite in one
party those who are ignorant and unfortunate, and array them against the
intelligent and those who have the ability for leadership. When that
comes about, the Republic will be in danger, because the permanence and
usefulness of the Republic rests upon the controlling influence of men
of intelligence, experience, patriotism and character. This array of a
proletariat against intelligent and successful leadership produces
factionalism in society. Factionalism is a class spirit which will
sacrifice the interest of the whole to the interest of the class. It
sometimes permeates a majority, but more frequently a minority. It is
illustrated for us by the militancy of English women suffragists, who
will sacrifice property, art and even life, in order to convince the
majority that unless they receive the vote they will destroy all
society.
We cannot, of course, yield to such a force. Nor can we yield to
trades-unionism when it seeks to promote so-called labor interests by
lawless violence and dynamite. The bonds of society will be loosed if we
do. I would not for a moment be thought to say that those who are in
favor of more democracy, through the initiative and referendum, are
factionalists, and insincere in their view that that system will work a
good result in the fight against corruption in politics. I only think
that they are idealists in this matter, and don't fully understand the
practical operation of the system which they recommend.
In this movement against corruption in politics and corporate control,
it was necessary that corporate control should be attacked. The
muck-raking added to it aroused a spirit against all success in business,
whether the methods pursued were honest or not. The result has been a
hysteria that prompts hostility to capital even when it is working in
honest lines and earning an honest profit. In many states it has led to
excessive restrictive legislation and has terrorized capital; it has
shrunk investments and frightened those who have money until today there
is lots of money in the banks everywhere but it can't be borrowed for
any length of time because nobody will put it into permanent or active
investment.
This state of affairs is likely to continue for some years. I am not
complaining about it because it is part of what we had to pay for the
great reform that was accomplished. After a while confidence will be
restored, and we shall come to our senses, just as they did in Kansas in
the Populist days. The Kansas farmers concluded that all their
unhappiness, and they suffered real stress, was due to the wicked
mortgagees who had lent them money on mortgage security and who insisted
on the payment of interest and even the principal when it was due. So
they elected a Populist legislature and passed a law providing that a
mortgagee could not foreclose his mortgage under two years. They did
this by stay laws and by requiring an obstructive procedure in
collection of debts. As a result, capital fled the state as men would
flee yellow fever. When there was no money at all left in the state and
they found that they couldn't get any, they began to recognize the
benefit in money loaned on mortgages. Their next legislature repealed
all these laws and devoted its attention to advertising their change of
attitude in Eastern markets where money could be had and mortgages could
be floated, promising to be good thereafter, and in general welcoming
the capitalists who would advance money on farms.
The next sign of the times is pleasanter to dwell upon, that is, the
spread of the fraternal spirit that has grown out of this great
material development. Material development in this country had grown
into corruption, undue luxury and waste at the hands of men who did not
realize the responsibility of having been fortunate in accumulating
money, and this absorption in the chase for the dollar began to pall on
the people. They tired of statistics of the growth of business, and
began to look about for some justification for our activities. The
change has brought a greater popular interest in the less fortunate who
have fallen behind in the race.
This feeling has much weakened the influence of the _laissez faire_
school of political and economic thought which was largely in control
when I was in college. Professor Sumner was a strong member of this
school. He was sure of his opinions and taught them. But we have now
drifted away from some of his moorings, and today a good many professors
are giving way to their imagination in suggesting remedies that have not
stood the test of experience. Yet it is generally conceded that the
government can do a lot to help the people that individual enterprise
cannot do. We have also gone far in the matter of regulation, though
there again we are likely to go to excesses.
It is quite probable that we shall find out by hard knocks that the
government cannot perform everything now expected of it. Nevertheless,
under the influence of a greater fraternal spirit, we have done a great
deal. The housing statutes, the safety appliances both for passengers
and employees, the restrictions on the hours of labor, the rules against
child labor, the pure food law, the white slave law, the thorough health
regulations, the control of public utilities, the growth in the public
charitable institutions of the state, the parcels post and the rural
delivery, all are instances of what the government has done to help the
individual by applying the results of public taxation and restrictive
laws. Moreover, we find among rich men a greater feeling of
responsibility for their fortunes, which is proven by their large
donations. Among those less wealthy we find an activity in philanthropic
organizations and in work of a charitable character that has vastly
increased during the last decade. In education, too, we have widened
out, especially in vocational study, by preparing the pupils directly
for wage earning by skilled labor.
Unfortunately, however, many good people in social settlements and in
philanthropic work devote their attention so exclusively to the sore and
rotten spots of society that they lose their sense of proportion, and
bring hysteria even into this movement. Persons so affected come to
think that if suffering, wickedness or squalor is permitted to exist
anywhere, society must all be bad. There must always be sin, and there
must always be neglect and waste until we get to the millennium, which
is not yet so near that we can see and feel it. In making our estimate
of human progress, we must size up the whole situation and take the
average condition. Similarly in attempting to remedy a local or special
evil, we must avoid the injustice of unduly sacrificing the general
welfare. By extreme measures planned to accomplish what may be good in
the abstract but is still not practical, we can make the cause
ridiculous.
Eugenic reformers, for instance, plan to rush right into regulation of
human society and arrange marriages just as horses are bred at a stock
farm. It has made some progress in Wisconsin, where they have required
examination of those about to marry and certificates of health before
issuing the marriage license. But I don't think the American people are
quite ready to submit to that kind of regulation. If it could be
enforced, it might be a good thing for the race, but a strong sentiment
on the other side makes it impractical. In Wisconsin the law is being
ignored and in foreign countries where restrictions upon marriages are
rigorously enforced, marriage is dispensed with and concubinage results.
There is another feature of this present hysterical condition that, I
hope, is going to disappear. But we might as well recognize it. That is
this wish to exculpate the sins of those who are unfortunate by putting
the blame on society at large. The desire seems to be, if possible, to
make scapegoats of those who are fortunate. It is this sentiment that
has given rise to investigations into the cooperative stores in order to
charge their managers with responsibility for the prostitution of some
of their employees because of the wages they pay. As the investigation
shows, there never was a more unfounded charge, but the very fact that
it was used is an indication of what I mean. It manifests itself in the
movement to dispense with all reticence and amplify in every way sex
education on the theory that society is to blame because it is not
telling young people of the danger of sin. You do not have to stand over
a sewer and breathe in the bad smell in order to recognize that it has a
bad smell when you meet it again.
I am strongly in favor of having young men and young women know certain
things about sex matters, the young men through lectures in school or
college, and the young women through instruction by women who can tell
them in a short time all they need to know; but this idea of emphasizing
and expanding the subject and of cultivating a free interchange of
thoughts between the sexes is most dangerous. For one hundred years
these subjects have been suppressed in America to the great benefit of
society and it is well that they should remain so. So-called reforms in
this direction are made the excuse for pruriency in drama, in novels, in
moving pictures and in other ways that are distinctly vicious in their
effect. They promote lubricity and although such literature and
exhibitions may have the support of good people who think they are
advocating great principles, they should be condemned.
Take another instance. Of course we all wish penitentiaries to be free
from disease, and we are interested in prison reform to the extent of
making them as healthful as possible for the prisoners. But this idea of
making society a scapegoat and ridding everybody from responsibility for
his sins, on the theory that his grandfather or grandmother was wicked
and he is only doing it because of his heredity, makes the preservation
of law and order impossible, and destroys the peace and comfort of those
who are law-abiding. The penitentiary is a place for punishment and
reformation. It is not a rest cure or a summer hotel. I have no doubt
that prison discipline can be improved; but changes based on the theory
that convicted criminals are disguised heroes who only need an appeal to
their honor and freedom from restraint to make them good citizens will
have humiliating but perhaps instructive results.
But these extravagances should not blind us to the real benefit of this
growing sense of brotherhood among men. It is shown not only by the fact
that it is preached in the pulpits and emphasized in the press and in
magazines, but, still more, by the fact that it has been taken up by
politicians. When they get hold of a subject and believe it needs
elaboration, you may know that it has a lodgment with the people. Nor
can we ignore the fact that this feeling has been increased by
indignation at the political and social corruption incident to our
enormous material development. The people have become ashamed of it in a
sense.
With many, this growing sense of brotherhood stimulates the movement
toward state socialism. Our excessive paternalism leads on to this. The
view that the government can do anything, remedy every evil, level every
inequality and make everybody happy, would have a most disastrous effect
on production and individual effort and enterprise. The next step will
be to curtail the right of property. It is difficult to define Socialism
as a practical plan of government. The plan as set forth in a little
book published in Austria called "The Quintessence of Socialism" is as
definite as any that I know. It involves such governmental restriction
of individual freedom of action and such real tyranny that the American
people could not stand it. In fact, the regulation of the details of
life by a system of awards for particular work, made by committees
instead of by the operation of the law of supply and demand, would bring
about a condition that would burst itself in a very little time. As
"Billy" Sumner used to say, "If you have that kind of a system, I choose
to be on the committee."
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