The New Freedom.
by Woodrow Wilson.

I

THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH

There is one great basic fact which underlies all the questions that are
discussed on the political platform at the present moment. That singular fact
is that nothing is done in this country as it was done twenty years ago.

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken
away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty
years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our
economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic
society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit
the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten
age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to a past age which men have
almost forgotten. Things which used to be put into the party platforms of ten
years ago would sound antiquated if put into a platform now. We are facing
the necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the
old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of
citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not been
made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the average man. The
life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It does not centre now upon
questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental
powers. It centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of
society itself, of which government is only the instrument. Our development
has run so fast and so far along the lines sketched in the earlier day of
constitutional definition, has so crossed and interlaced those lines, has
piled upon them such novel structures of trust and combination, has
elaborated within them a life so manifold, so full of forces which transcend
the boundaries of the country itself and fill the eyes of the world, that a
new nation seems to have been created which the old formulas do not fit or
afford a vital interpretation of.

We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us. We have
come upon an age when we do not do business in the way in which we used to do
business,-when we do not carry on any of the operations of manufacture, sale,
transportation, or communication as men used to carry them on. There is a
sense in which in our day the individual has been submerged. In most parts of
our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the old way in
which they used to work, but generally as employees,-in a higher or lower
grade,-of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a
very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part,
and most men are the servants of corporations.

You know what happens when you are the servant of a corporation. You have in
no instance access to the men who are really determining the policy of the
corporation. If the corporation is doing the things that it ought not to do,
you really have no voice in the matter and must obey the orders, and you have
oftentimes with deep mortification to co-operate in the doing of things which
you know are against the public interest. Your individuality is swallowed up
in the individuality and purpose of a great organization.