BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE?

The doctrine that monopoly is inevitable and that the only course open to the
people of the United States is to submit to and regulate it found a champion
during the campaign of 1912 in the new party, or branch of the Republican
party, founded under the leadership of Mr. Roosevelt, with the conspicuous
aid,-I mention him with no satirical intention, but merely to set the facts
down accurately,-of Mr. George W. Perkins, organizer of the Steel Trust and
the Harvester Trust, and with the support of more than three millions of
citizens, many of them among the most patriotic, conscientious and
high-minded men and women of the land. The fact that its acceptance of
monopoly was a feature of the new party platform from which the attention of
the generous and just was diverted by the charm of a social program of great
attractiveness to all concerned for the amelioration of the lot of those who
suffer wrong and privation, and the further fact that, even so, the platform
was repudiated by the majority of the nation, render it no less necessary to
reflect on the significance of the confession made for the first time by any
party in the country's history. It may be useful, in order to the relief of
the minds of many from an error of no small magnitude, to consider now, the
heat of a presidential contest being past, exactly what it was that Mr.
Roosevelt proposed.

Mr. Roosevelt attached to his platform some very splendid suggestions as to
noble enterprises which we ought to undertake for the uplift of the human
race; but when I hear an ambitious platform put forth, I am very much more
interested in the dynamics of it than in the rhetoric of it. I have a very
practical mind, and I want to know who are going to do those things and how
they are going to be done. If you have read the trust plank in that platform
as often as I have read it, you have found it very long, but very tolerant.
It did not anywhere condemn monopoly, except in words; its essential meaning
was that the trusts have been bad and must be made to be good. You know that
Mr. Roosevelt long ago classified trusts for us as good and bad, and he said
that he was afraid only of the bad ones. Now he does not desire that there
should be any more bad ones, but proposes that they should all be made good
by discipline, directly applied by a commission of executive appointment. All
he explicitly complains of is lack of publicity and lack of fairness; not the
exercise of power, for throughout that plank the power of the great
corporations is accepted as the inevitable consequence of the modern
organization of industry. All that it is proposed to do is to take them under
control and regulation. The national administration having for sixteen years
been virtually under the regulation of the trusts, it would be merely a
family matter were the parts reversed and were the other members of the
family to exercise the regulation. And the trusts, apparently, which might,
in such circumstances, comfortably continue to administer our affairs under
the mollifying influences of the federal government, would then, if you
please, be the instrumentalities by which all the humanistic, benevolent
program of the rest of that interesting platform would be carried out!