Four aspects of civic duty

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YALE LECTURES ON THE
RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP

FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

IN THE SAME SERIES

Four Aspects of Civic Duty. By William How-
ard Taft, Secretary of War, First Civil Gov-
ernor of the Philippine Islands. 12mo . net, $1.00

Freedom and Responsibility. By Arthur Twin-
ing Hadley, President of Yale University.
12mo net, $1.00

The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial
Situation. By Henry C. Potter, D.D., LL.D.,
Bishop of New York. 12mo .... net, $1.00

American Citizenship. By David J. Brewer, Asso-
ciate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States.
12mo net, $0.75

FOUR ASPECTS OF
CIVIC DUTY

BY

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

SECRETARY OF WAR
FIRST CIVIL GOVERNOR OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1906

\

Copyright, 1906
By Yale University

Published, December, 1906
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TROW DIRECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINOINO COMPANY

NEW YORK

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CONTENTS

PAGE

I. The Duties of Citizenship Viewed from
the Standpoint of a Recent Gradu-
ate of a University 3

II. The Duties of Citizenship Viewed from
the Standpoint of a Judge on the
Bench 35

III. The Duties of Citizenship Viewed from

the Standpoint of Colonial Admin-
istration 61

IV. The Duties of Citizenship Viewed from

the Standpoint of the National
Executive 20

FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

THE DUTIES OP CITIZENSHIP VIEWED FROM
THE STANDPOINT OF A RECENT GRADUATE
OF A UNIVERSITY

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of Yale:

My occupations within the last month have been
so numerous, various, and absorbing that it ha9
been very difficult for me to give thought and
proper time of preparation for the series of lec-
tures which, more than a year ago, I was invited
to deliver on the Dodge foundation by your
alluring secretary — Mr. Stokes. Knowing as I did
that it was foolish for me to accept Mr. Stokes's
invitation, and knowing that whenever the time
came for me to perform my promise it would cer-
tainly be the most inconvenient time in the year,
I nevertheless yielded weakly, and agreed to come
and say something about the duties of citizenship.
Of course I could not anticipate that an earthquake
would throw additional responsibilities on the

3

4 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

War Department; but previous experiences ought
to have taught me that something would happen
to make it altogether inconvenient and almost
impossible for me to comply with a promise so
easily given but with such difficulty performed.
Still, here I am, and if what I have to say to you
proves to be trite or for other reasons lacking in
interest, I hope you will bear with me and at-
tribute it to the lack of preparation. I have
worried over these lectures a good deal, and have
cast about to know what plan for the development
of the subject I could properly pursue which might
be of assistance to the young men who are about
to enter upon what I hope will be useful lives in
doing what they ought to do to make this country
better and to vindicate its form of government
and its capacity for progress and development
toward higher civilization. I met President Had-
ley in St. Louis, and he suggested that I look at
the subject from the four standpoints from which,
in my personal experience, I have had to look at
public matters. He thought that this would give
me the advantage of testifying as a witness quali-
fied by opportunities for observation, whether the
opportunities were improved or not. Acquies-

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 5

cing, as I always do, in the wisdom of his sugges-
tions, I have therefore taken for the four lectures
which I am to deliver the following subjects:

I. The duties of citizenship viewed from the
standpoint of a recent graduate of a university.

II. The duties of citizenship viewed from the
standpoint of a judge on the bench.

III. The duties of citizenship viewed from the
standpoint of colonial administration.

IV. The duties of citizenship viewed from the
standpoint of the national executive.

In taking up the first of these heads for dis-
cussion I hope I may be pardoned for calling
attention to a fact that has not escaped general
observation, that there are few conditions of mind
more exalted, more comforting, more complacent,
than that of the members of the Senior class of
a great university like this. The struggle upward
from the humility of Freshman year, through the
irresponsibility and audacity of Sophomore year,
the budding sense of superiority of Junior year,
to the beatific appreciation of his own importance
in supporting the dignity of the university that
every Senior has, are well-known phases in col-
lege life. The step downward that has to be taken

6 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

from the altitude of Senior year to the sense of
insignificance that comes quickly to the ordinary
graduate in the year succeeding his college life,
adds much to his usefulness as a member of the
community which he is about to enter. It restores
his sense of proportion as to the position that he
fills in society, which, in the epitome of life that
a four years' course at a university is, had some-
what distorted his views of the extent of the de-
mand which there would be for his presence and
services in the community at large.

Of course this humbling change from the esti-
mate of the college world to the estimate of the
world at large has a greater effect upon the men
who, when they leave college, are thrown upon
their own resources and are obliged to earn their
own living, than upon those who have money
enough and are not dependent upon the assistance
of others, or upon the recognition of their ability
by employers, by congregations, by clients, or by
patients. This is one of the great disadvantages
of being born wealthy. The truth is, the wealthy
young man, in winning his way to a useful place
in the community, has to struggle much more and
has to exhibit a moral courage much greater than

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 7

that of the poor man, if he would make a real
success in life and justify his existence as a citi-
zen. The young man most to be congratulated
is he who has been given an education as thorough
and as useful as he himself wishes to make it,
and then under the spur of necessity enters upon
a life of work without the temptation to lack
of effort and idleness, or to dilettanteism, or to
pure pleasure, which a competence always creates.
The great accumulations of wealth that we have
witnessed during the present generation are, of
course, of much benefit to the community in the
promotion of art, of music, of charity, and of
great educational institutions, as well as in the
good they do in the prosecution of industry, the
cheapening of the cost of production, and the
carrying on of the great enterprises that are
needed to make real material and intellectual
progress; but, in my judgment, in no one respect
can wealth be made more useful from now on
than in the support of young men who are will-
ing to devote their attention to politics and public
matters, to assume official responsibilities, to fol-
low and preserve the public weal, and by reason
of their independence of salaries or office to ex-

8 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

ercise the beneficent influence of disinterested
patriotism and attention to public affairs. There
is such a class in England, which has done won-
ders for their politics and the high tone of their
public men. When it comes to be understood in
this country, and impressed on the persons to
whom it applies, that the man who is wealthy
enough to relieve him from any anxiety about
supporting his family owes it to society to devote
his attention to public affairs, and that one who
does not do so is violating his duty, a great step
will have been taken in elevating our politics.
I think this influence has already shown itself
in many directions ; but with the increased wealth
of this generation the influence of this class ought
to become greater and greater. Of course I would
not eliminate from our community what I shall
hereafter refer to at considerable length, to wit:
the motive for gain and accumulation of money,
which is the main-spring of nearly all the material
improvement which has been so marked in this
country ; but in such a hoped-for change of motive
among the wealthy young men as I have de-
scribed we are not likely so to reduce the motive
for accumulation in the community at large as

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 9

to affect injuriously our financial and material
progress.

So much for the wealthy young man. The poor
young man has to earn his own living, but his
attention to politics is likely to be much greater
in the early years of his business or professional
life, when he has only one to support, than when
he takes unto himself a wife, and brings into
the world a family which gradually absorbs all
his energy and takes all his time in earning
money enough to provide for its wants. There
is a period of ten or fifteen years during which
all college graduates, poor as well as rich, have
time enough and energy enough and ought to
have interest enough to attempt to make the poli-
tics of the neighborhood in which they live better ;
and it is to this period and its obligations that
I wish particularly to direct my remarks this
evening.

The training in political economy and sociology,
and other scientific studies likely to affect one's
political views which are pursued in a university
curriculum, tends to certainty and severity of
view with respect to the issues of the day. As
parties and public men fail to square with the

10 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

views thus formed, there develops in the mind
of the young graduate a spirit of criticism and
impatience that the Government is so stupidly
run, and with so little understanding of the
fundamental rules upon which all public affairs
ought to be conducted. While I was in college
it happened that my father was in the national
administration, and I can remember with dis-
tinctness my dissatisfaction with his views of
public affairs and my impatience that he did not
seem to value as fully as I thought he ought the
importance of pursuing the up-to-date principles
that should govern the policy to be pursued by
public men. Now, the step down from Senior
year to a struggle for a living, which I have
already referred to, has a healthy tendency in
moderating this certainty and severity of view
formed in the lecture-room and in the abstract
study of political science. In such view the
graduate is apt to ignore the obstruction by reason
of friction in the operation of natural laws. He
is apt to ignore, as a negligible quantity, the
necessary effect upon the political policies of the
existence of popular prejudices and popular emo-
tions. He is apt to treat man as a peculiarly

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 11

intelligent animal, buying exactly where he can
buy cheapest, and selling exactly where he can
sell at the highest price; patronizing classes and
nations without respect to personal feelings toward
them, and moved by purely business considera-
tions, and those which ought to influence him if
he properly considers his welfare. Now, I do
not mean to say that the professor who instructs,
and who is a man of the world, does not know
the lights and shadows that should be put into
the picture of actual and real political and
economic conditions, so as to modify the rigidity
of the lines laid down by the strict and theoreti-
cal rules which he teaches; but the students
ordinarily are much better able to master the
main principles than their complicated variation
and modification, due to intervening causes.
Those they must learn by actual experience. The
tendency in my own case, and I think in that
of most graduates of my time, was toward the
laissez faire doctrine that the least interference
by legislation with the operation of natural laws
was, in the end, the best for the public; that the
only proper object of legislation was to free
the pathway of commerce and opportunity from

12 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

the effect of everything but competition and en-
lightened selfishness; and that that being done,
the Government had discharged all of its proper
functions. When I graduated we looked upon
the Post-office Department of the Government with
great suspicion. X\e felt that it was a depart-
ure from proper principles, and that it seemed
to offer a pernicious example and suggestion of
the extension of governmental interference and
initiative into fields which ought to be covered
altogether by private enterprise. I do not know
what may be taught in this respect now, and
I am bound to say that I think these principles,
which I may seem to have spoken of in a light
way, f are still orthodox and still sound, if only
the application of them is not carried to such an
extreme as really to interfere with the public
welfare. Experience will show that there are
fields of business action which the Government
can better cover than private enterprise ; and there
are also fields over which, because of probability
of abuse by private enterprise, the Government
should assume control, not by way of initiation
and administration but by way of effective regu-
lation. This topic, however, involves too many

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 13

considerations to justify its discussion further to-
night.

On the other hand, there are, in addition to
those of the laissez faire school, a few graduates of
universities whose substratum of common sense
and whose sense of proportion, with reference to
things as they are, are so lacking, and whose poetic
and emotional temperament is so overwrought,
that they are led to contemplate only the injus-
tice and the abuses that occur under the existing
social order, and fail utterly to note the tre-
mendous advance, the immense progress which has
been made under the present guaranties of life, lib-
erty, and property ; who yearn for an entirely dif-
ferent system and radical change, in which men
are to be governed solely by love and not by any
motive of gain. In their eyes selfishness can
never be enlightened, and they finally acquire a
state of mind so morbid that the only happiness
they have is the contemplation of human misery
as an argument for the immediate abandonment
of the principles lying at the basis of modern
society. When such theories proceed from men
who have really suffered, men to whom equality
of opportunity seems to have been denied, men

14 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

who live under a weight of misfortune and pov-
erty and disease and the other ills that flesh is
heir to, there ought to be much sympathy with
their feeling. It is entirely natural that they
should be lacking in the sense of proportion which
a man not so oppressed may have in respect to
the advantages of our present social and economic
system. ! But when one encounters a graduate of
a university, of means and opportunity for public
usefulness, who allows his emotional side to over-
come his judgment so that he develops into a
parlor socialist, without really understanding any-
thing about the real springs of material and in-
tellectual progress in this world, then we have
a result with which it is difficult to be patient.
I think this class is, for the time, on the in-
crease, but I am glad to think that among edu-
cated men the class is only that of faddists and
will fade away as the Millerites did. The spec-
tacle of men who enjoy all the luxuries of life,
with trained servants and costly establishments of
all kinds, declaiming against the social order and
the injustice done to the poor and suffering in
the community, is not one to attract the sympathy
of sensible men. The truth is that an argument

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 15

in favor of a first cause, or a divine plan of the
universe, finds no better or stronger illustration
than in the progress of the world under the
impulse of men toward personal freedom and the
right of property. The right of property has
played quite as important a part in the develop-
ment of the human race as the right of personal
liberty. Indeed, the two rights are so associated
in the struggle which man has had to make in
taking himself out of the category of the lower
animals and lifting himself to his present material
and spiritual elevation that it is hard to separate
them in a historical discussion. After man be-
came his own master, the next step in his progress
was the conception and establishment of the right
of private property. When he began to live in a
social state with his fellows, he recognized, dimly
at first, but subsequently with greater clearness,
that the laborer should have and enjoy that which
his labor produced. As his industry and self-
restraint grew, he made by his labor not only
enough for his immediate necessities, but also a
surplus which he was able to save for use in aid
of future labor. By use of this surplus, the
amount which each man's labor would produce

16 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

was thereafter increased. As the advantage of
the principle that the laborer should enjoy his
own product came to be recognized, so it came
to be at a later time equally well recognized that
he whose savings from his own labor increased
the product of another's labor was entitled to
enjoy and share in the joint result; and the ad-
justment of their respective shares was the first
settlement of the ever-recurring controversy be-
tween labor and capital. What one had the full
right to enjoy he had the right to give to an-
other to enjoy; and so it happened that when a
man was about to die he assumed, and was ac-
corded, the privilege of giving to those whom he
wished to enjoy it that which was his. As the
natural parental instinct dictated provision for
those whom he had brought into the world, it first
became custom and then law that if he made no
express disposition of that which he had the right
to enjoy, it should become the property of those
for whose existence he was responsible. In this
way the capital saved in one generation was re-
ceived by succeeding generations, and its accumu-
lation for producing purposes was made much
more probable. The certainty that a man could

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 17

enjoy as his own that which he produced or saved,
and that it could be enjoyed after his death by
those to whom he was bound by ties of natural
affection, furnished the strongest motive for in-
dustry beyond what was merely adequate to obtain
the bare necessities of life, and was the chief
inducement to economy and self-control. The
institution of private property with all its inci-
dents is what has led to the accumulation of
capital in the world. Capital represents and
measures the difference between the present con-
dition of society and that which prevailed when
men lived by what their hands would produce
without implements or other means of increasing
the result of their labor; that is, between the
utter barbarism of prehistoric ages and modern
civilization. Without it the whole world would
still be groping in the darkness of the tribe or
commune stage of civilization, with alternating
periods of starvation and plenty, and no happiness
but that of gorging unrestrained appetite. Capi-
tal increased the amount of production. The
cheaper the cost of production, the less each one
had to work to earn the absolute necessities of
life, and the more time he had to earn its com-

18 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

forts. As the material comforts increased, the
more possible became happiness, and the greater
the opportunity for the cultivation of the higher
instincts of the human mind and soul. This
material progress in the human race, covering
cycles of time in the slow process of evolving
as an essential principle in the development of
the race the right of private property,! was at-
tended by violence and fraud and cruelty and
oppression; but in the end it had a profound
educational effect upon the human race and estab-
lished in the human heart and soul the virtues
that have made man the superior being that he is.
The struggle implanted in the human breast the
virtue of providence, the restraint of the appetite
of the present, in order that there may be left
that with which the future can be enjoyed; the
lesson that the pains and thoroughness with which
a work is done increase the product and enlarge
the source of future supply ; and finally, the recog-
nition of the fact that the only peaceable way
by which a man can really enjoy the fruits of
his own labor is to recognize this as a right of
every other man. This struggle thus gave us the
virtues of providence, of industry, and of honesty,

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 19

and with these basic elements of character all
the other traits and virtues that we admire in man
have been developed. Of course, I would not
ignore or minimize the influence of religion on
the development and uplifting of human char-
acter ; but the industrial virtues I have described,
when instilled by hard experience, certainly offer
a greater opportunity for the effective working of
religious influences. | The whole human race has
had to fight its way upward to modern civilization
and its beneficent incidents by a struggle so
arduous and so long continued that we can no
more appreciate it than we can realize thejtime
taken to create the geological formations. This
operation of the natural laws, leading -to the won-
derful development of modern society out of the
prehistoric man, we are told that man must change
by law ; that we must abolish the right of property
and the motive for gain, divide up the wealth,
and distribute it according to the sense of justice
of the socialist committees of organization and

control. j

While we may find a few shining examples of
such dreamers and impracticable and morbid
thinkers among the graduates of universities of

20 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

this country, we may be confident that substan-
tially all the sane graduates of our universities
will set their faces like flint against the spirit of
any such foolish doctrine ; and that they will find
their chief reasons for discrediting the premises
and the conclusions advanced in favor of socialism
in the wholesome principles of political economy
and sociology which they have imbibed at the most
formative period of their lives and characters in
the lecture and recitation rooms of their alma
mater.

But now, assuming the political and economic
sanity of the recent college graduate — not, I think,
a violent assumption — what should be expected of
him politically ? Well, in the first place he ought
to learn where the polling-place is in his ward
and precinct where he can cast a ballot. I think
it might be rather humiliating to some graduates
of several years' standing if a close examination
were made into their knowledge of this simple
fact; and if the investigation were to proceed
farther, to find out where the primaries and the
preliminary political meetings for organization
are held, the amount of ignorance in respect to
these details on their part would be still more

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 21

embarrassing. Perhaps, however, before they go
either to the polls or to the primaries they ought
to select a party. I know there is a disposition
on the part of the free-born American graduate
from an institution of learning, full of admira-
tion for independence of thought and a desire to
maintain his independence of action, to hold him-
self aloof from party regularity and vote for the
best men if he can find them, and thus teach
the party organization that it must beware of
the influence of the independent voter. I think
this tendency on the part of the recent college
graduate is much modified as he acquires ex-
perience and a knowledge of conditions. Whether
he will become a Republican or a Democrat or
a Mugwump will depend on many circumstances.
He may yield to the natural tendency to inherit
his politics, and so become a Democrat or a Re-
publican because his father was. lie may find that
his views upon the main issue between the parties
at the particular time when he comes first to
exercise his franchise and discharge his electoral
duty are such that on principle he selects one
of the parties and thereafter identifies himself
with it. He may find that his pecuniary interests

22 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

are affected by the success or defeat of a particu-
lar party, and select the one or the other in
accordance with those interests. Whatever turns
him in the direction of one party or the other,
he will after a while learn that there is much
to he said in favor of party regularity if that be
not carried to an extreme. The modern govern-
ment of a people of 80,000,000, reaching from
the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to
Mexico, is very complicated. It has long been a
principle, enunciated, but " honored more in the
breach than in the observance," that [the less gov-
ernment has to do, the less government there is,
the better for the people ; but in recent years there
have been so many functions which it is impossible
for private business to maintain and undertake
that even the most orthodox of the laissez-faire
school must admit that the legitimate functions of
the modern government constitute it a very com-
plex machine. The difficulties of its management
are greatly increased if, instead of leaving the
control to one man, as in Russia, or to a small
group of men, as in the ancient aristocracy, we
commit its control to all males over the age of
twenty-one, and call it a popular government. The

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 23

real advantage of a popular government, in se-
curing the greatest good to the greatest number,
is that experience has shown that individuals and
classes of men of reasonable intelligence are better
able to look after their own interests or those
of their class, and secure equality of opportunity
and equal protection for themselves or persons
similarly situated, if they are given a voice in the
government, than if this duty is left to some one
else, however altruistic. How is it possible so to
reduce the varying wishes and views of the entire
population of 80,000,000 people, or 14,000,000
adult males, to one resultant executive force, which
shall carry on this complex machine of government
effectively, as it should be carried on in the public
interest and for the public weal ? The problem has
been solved in the growth and the establishment of
popular government by the institution of parties
among the people. A useful party cannot be
formed unless those who are members of it, with a
sense of responsibility for the successful and unob-
structed continuance of the administration by that
party, yield their views on the less important and
less essential principles, and unite with respect
to the main policies for which the party is to

24 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

become responsible. The resultant solidarity of
opinion is necessary to secure unity of action.
The sense of responsibility for the successful
operation of the Government must furnish a
power of cohesion which shall prevent the break-
ing off from the party of a sufficient number of
its members to make its arm nerveless and to
take away from it its power of initiative and
action. That party is the more efficient party,
therefore, in which the members are more nearly
united on the great principles of governmental
policy. I do not for a moment intend to de~
preciate the good effect of having in the com-
munity persons not affiliated with parties, whose
unbiased judgment will lead them to vote some-
times for one party and sometimes for another;
for it may well be that the power of cohesion in a
party, growing out of its traditions or the desire
for office or some other motive not the highest,
shall lead it into apparent unanimity upon a course
detrimental to the Government and from which
nothing can save the Government but the with-
drawal of support by the independent voter. Be
this as it may, and however useful the inde-
pendent voter may be, the existence of parties,

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 25

their maintenance, and their discipline are essen-
tial to the carrying on of any popular government.
The difficulty with the politics of France has fre-
quently been the inability of the leaders to form
parties large enough to maintain a government.
There are too many small groups, and the ad-
ministration is thus likely continually to change.
It is difficult to classify parties in this country
as conservative and radical, because the facts do
not always justify such a classification; but gener-
ally it will be found that the more efficient party
in administration is the more progressive and
more affirmative — more radical, therefore, in its
policies. The opposing party is usually negative,
declining to initiate new reforms, looking back to
a probably non-existent condition of simplicity
and purity and honesty in public affairs, and
offering in effect, when successful, a conservative
and do-nothing administration. Now, young men
will select their parties, other things being equal,
according to the natural tendencies of their minds.
Some men are in favor of progress, affirmative
action, and radical reforms — a change of the exist-
ing arrangements for something better. Other
men naturally prefer the ills we have than to

26 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

fly to those we know not of, and with their con-
servative tendencies they will find a home in the
more conservative party. The independent, re-
fusing to subordinate himself to the views of
either party, first votes for one ticket and then for
another, and thus seems to exercise a more de-
cisive influence than the regular members of
either party. Indeed, it is true that as a mass
the independent voters are generally of great im-
portance and influence for the betterment of po-
litical and governmental conditions. As indi-
viduals, in the exercise of individual influence and
to accomplish useful purposes, they do not play
so important a part. If a man goes into public
life and wishes to secure an influence for good,
he may properly be chary of breaking his political
ties with the party of his affiliation, because the
only real opportunity, the only real avenue that
he can follow to accomplish permanently useful re-
sults is by influencing the course and policy of his
party. As this is a party government, and as
measures are controlled by party decisions, the real
progress must be made along party lines ; and if a
man separates from his party he loses altogether
any influence he may exert in determining those

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 27

policies. I do not at all advocate that a man should
adhere to party against high principle and con-
viction, but this life is all a series of compromises
by which little by little, and step by step, progress
toward better things is made. All the good in
the world cannot be attained at one breath. We
must achieve what we can at the time we can,
and must let other aims and objects of the highest
good abide a different opportunity for their at-
tainment. While, therefore, we may not agree
with all the principles adopted into legislation or
into executive policy by a party with which we are
affiliated, we should ordinarily not destroy our
usefulness and power for good in influencing the
party in the right direction, by withdrawing from
it on issues not the most important, if, on the
whole, we believe that more good can come from
its success than from that of its opponent.

Having selected his party and found his poll-
ing-place and the place for the meeting of the
primaries, and having ascertained who are the
men in the precinct and the ward who exercise
influence over the people, the graduate of a uni-
versity who takes life as seriously as he should,
who appreciates his responsibility as a citizen, will

28 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

spend as much time as he can in learning the local
situation; in becoming acquainted with the pre-
cinct and ward leaders, in consulting them as far
as he can, in making himself acquainted not only
with the well-to-do and well-educated persons in
his precinct and ward, but also with the laborers,
the artisans, the store-keepers, the saloon-keepers,
in order that he may understand what are the con-
trolling influences in the primaries and elections
of that precinct and ward. This will bring him,
doubtless, into contact with some people whom he
would not wish to have as permanent associates
and companions. It is not generally elevating
to associate with saloon-keepers, and yet there is
a word to be said upon this subject and with
respect to them. There are among them honest,
hard-working men, rising early in the morning
and staying up late; in the great cities they are
the proprietors of the social clubs of the neigh-
borhood for the poor people, and naturally they
exercise a very considerable influence in the dis-
cussion of public matters that go on among the
wage-earners and persons of small means. The
college graduate is not made of sugar, and he
ought to be sufficiently strong to resist any evil

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 29

influence which might some time arise from such
political associations if they were to become per-
manent. But if a college graduate is to exert
any influence at all for good among the people,
especially when as a young man he can exert his
influence only or chiefly through personal con-
tact, he must convince those whose votes he wishes
to control and use for good purposes that he does
not hold himself above them; that he is a real
democrat and recognizes that he has only one vote,
as they each have but one vote, and that he has
no right to exercise influence over them except
as his opportunities for information and his
knowledge of public affairs justify him in speak-
ing on such subjects. He must stand on an
exact equality with men of less education and less
advantages and must familiarize himself with the
exact conditions that prevail in local municipal
and broader politics. In many respects the col-
lege graduate has as much to learn from the
workingman and the business man who have not
enjoyed a college education as they have to learn
from him. It cannot but broaden his sympathies
and make him understand his country and its
needs with more certainty if he associates in po-

30 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

litical and other ways with those who make up
the large body of our American citizens. He will
cease by such association to assume the attitude
of a dilettante closet critic, and will understand
the motives and the emotions and the real feel-
ings of the great mass of the American people.
As I have already suggested, there is a tendency
on the part of those having a college education,
of the class known as " the scholar in politics,"
to ignore the element of sentiment, of patriotic
emotion, and to assume that everything ought to
be and will be ultimately determined by nicely
reasoned processes like those which are often
postulated in the class-room of the professor of
economics and political economy. Now, without
in the slightest minimizing the importance of
straight thinking in accordance with the great
principles of political economy and sociology, it
seems to me wise to emphasize the necessity for
college men who wish to be useful in political life
to go into the humblest political movements and
find out the views, the prejudices it may be, and
the real needs of their less fortunate fellow-citi-
zens.

The tendency of recent years toward reorgan-

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 31

ization and the economic use of means and in-
strumentalities to secure efficiency, shown in the
production of material things, has manifested
itself in politics also, and has led to much more
effective political machines, in municipal politics
particularly, than ever existed before. There are |
in the governments of many municipalities strik-
ing examples of the use of official patronage to
establish and maintain a machine from which it
is impossible for the voters of the party to wrest
its power, and which for a time seems to be able
by the thoroughness of its organization even to
defy the people at the polls. Every once in a
while the people rise and defeat the machine
ticket and then pat themselves upon the back and
retire again, while the machine in a short time
resumes its power. It is idle to hope that the
people may be roused at every political contest
and defeat machine slates unless there are counter
organizations made up of younger men actuated
by the disinterested patriotic desire to select only
good candidates for office. Such young men, and
among them certainly ought to be all university
graduates, should maintain an organization the
year round, so that they may keep in touch with

32 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

the continually changing local situation and call
upon members for action when action is neces-
sary. Eternal vigilance is the price of good
government. The professional machine politician
is always at work, and he can be defeated and
discouraged only by an organization which can
be called together like the Minute Men, and may
know how and when to strike for good government.
Politics ought to be neither distasteful nor de-
grading, and men who enter them for the purpose
of keeping them pure and making them better
are engaged in the highest duty. "We must meet
the conditions as they exist. In this country, where
nearly every adult male has a vote and suffrage
is exercised by all sorts and conditions of men,
suitable and proper means must be used, adapted
to reach the better nature of the electors and
rouse them to their duty to secure good govern-
ment by the exercise of their suffrages at the
primary and at the polls. Organization by good
men is one of the suitable and proper means for
achieving this purpose. When the people know
that agencies exist through which they can secure
good government, they will be much more certain
to take an interest and support such agencies. I

A GRADUATE OF A UNIVERSITY 33

would not, of course, exclude men of any age
from the burden of carrying on this work of or-
ganization, but young men must naturally be more
active in it.

It will be entirely natural, especially for those
who are well-to-do and do not need to earn a
livelihood, to become candidates for public office,
and the more that such men offer themselves for
office the better for good government. Of course,
in the ideal condition of things the office should
seek the man; but we do not have an ideal con-
dition of things, and we never will have. Politics
are practical, and while it may often occur that
in an organization of good men, for the purpose of
lifting politics out of the slough, a man may bo
drafted for office against his will, it is exceptional.
There is no real objection to a good man's seeking
office when he feels himself competent to discharge
its duties, has a high ideal as to how they ought
to be discharged, and a commendable ambition
to serve his country. Certainly, men less quali-
fied and with less high ideals will seek it, and
why should the public lose the benefit of a per-
sonal motive on his part to gratify his desire to
be of use?

34 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

But I have talked longer than I ought. I close
by urging upon the men of Yale their duty, im-
mediately upon leaving college, to take a deep
interest in local politics, to learn what they are,
to study the actual conditions that prevail with
respect to the electorate, and to affiliate themselves
with local political movements in order that they
may find for themselves opportunities for useful-
ness. If the country is not to avail itself of the
intelligence, patriotism, and disinterestedness of
its educated men, and especially of those who can
devote a large part of their time to public matters,
it will lose the benefit of the progress that we hope
we are making by extended higher education.

II

THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP VIEWED PROM THE
STANDPOINT OF A JUDGE ON THE BENCH

Mr. President, and Gentlemen of Yale:

The subject for this evening is the second on
the list — The Duties of Citizenship from the
Standpoint of a Judge on the Bench.

I went on the State bench when I was twenty-
nine years old, and served three years; subse-
quently, at thirty-two, I went upon the Federal
bench, where I served for nine years. As I look
back, I am sure that my knowledge of law when
I went on the bench was very limited. I commend
to those who have an opportunity a term on the
bench as one of the best law schools I know. It
is true that in this way one gets his legal educa-
tion at the expense of the public, and tries his
" 'prentice hand " on the litigants as victims ; but
after a time, if he is at all apt and anxious and
earnest, the public makes a good judge of him.
If he can be kept on the bench after that, he

35

36 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

sometimes makes a better judge than an older
man, with much more experience at the bar; for
there are men, and not a few, who succeed ad-
mirably at the bar as counsel and advocates, but
who, when elevated to the position of a judge,
cannot drop the habits of a lifetime or forget
that they are advocates. Still, I do not urge the
appointment of young men to judicial positions,
and do not favor a system by which judges are
given their judicial learning after they are called
to the bench.

The first duty of a citizen which is impressed
on the mind of the judge of first instance, who has
to try the usual class of cases, is his duty to sit
on the jury, and to spend the time necessary,
when properly drawn, to make up the tribunal
which the common law and the Constitution make
necessary for the determination of issues of fact
in common-law civil cases and criminal cases.
Service on the jury is, of course, just as much
a part of one's public duty as the obligation to
pay taxes under the law, or the obligation to re-
spond to the call of the Government to act in the
posse of the sheriff, or to testify as a witness when
duly summoned, or to shoulder a gun when drafted

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 37

into the military service in an emergency. The
success of a jury system is utterly impossible
among a people who are not, on the average, intel-
ligent and above undue influences. Hence a jury
system must tend to failure if the intelligent and
honest men of the community regard the service
as such a burden that they evade it by excuses,
and leave for selection only the unintelligent and
those subject to venal motives.

On a pure question of fact, controverted by wit-
nesses on both sides and presented to the jury with
full argument and the comment of the court, a jury
of intelligent, conscientious men is a most satisfac-
tory tribunal. Taken from different walks of life,
containing within the panel men of experience in
many directions, united they make up a tribunal
of men of force, who are quite as well able as the
judge to make their inferences from the evidence
as it has been drawn out by examination and
cross-examination, and reach a conclusion of fact,
not necessarily unerring, but of very consider-
able accuracy and certainty. But I beg to impress
upon you the fact which seems frequently to have
been lost sight of, especially in legislation with
respect to the procedure of State courts, that the

38 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

tribunal contemplated by the common law was not
the jury alone, but it was the court and jury,
and that the ultimate decisions rested not on the
verdict of the jury only, but on the verdict as
approved by the judge holding the court. The
method of reaching a conclusion at common law
was after the hearing of the evidence and argu-
ment of counsel, and after a charge by the court;
in which the court did not hesitate to assist the
jury in commenting on the evidence, even to the
point of intimating an opinion as to the proper
conclusion to be drawn from the evidence. Thus
constituted, the jury and the court do make an
admirable tribunal, if the intelligence of the jury
is equal to the average intelligence of the com-
munity at large. There has been a dangerous
tendency in the legislation in the Southern and
Western States in regard to the control which the
judge in the court may exercise over the jury.
His instructions to the jury are frequently lim-
ited to a written charge, made before the argu-
ment of counsel on the facts, in which he is not
permitted to comment in any way on the facts or
to assist the jury, except by laying down abstract
and hypothetical questions of law. In other words,

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 39

the legislation has tended to eliminate the judge
as far as possible from the influence he was wont
to exercise in the decision of the tribunal as it
was when the Constitution made it an essential
part of our judicial system. With this change
from the old common-law use of a jury, much
greater power is vested in the panel than ever
before, and in many instances the power is abused,
because the jury takes it into its head that it is
not only a tribunal to arrive at a decision upon
a sharp issue of facts presented by the evidence,
but that it is, in a sense, a legislator to reach
natural justice without much regard to the law;
and in suits against corporations, and in many
instances in spite of the absence of legal liability
by the corporation, it will act as an almoner of
its charity, and mulct it in a large sum to meet
an alleged liability, which in fact and in law does
not exist. Under such circumstances the obliga-
tion of the good citizen to discharge his duty as a
juror is even of higher importance than when the
power of the jury was more subject to the con-
trol of the experienced judge who presided over
the trial of which it is a part. The truth is that
the law is not so carefully followed, and property

40 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

rights and other rights are not so well safeguarded,
and criminals are not punished with the same cer-
tainty as formerly in communities in which the
jury has had the reins thrown on its back, and
practically been given a discretionary power in
its decisions that was wholly wanting under the
common-law system.

The common-law system is preserved in its
purity in the Federal courts. There the judge still
maintains the power which he had at common law,
and which he exercises in English courts to-day,
not of controlling or directing the verdict, but of
aiding and instructing the jury in respect to the
decision which it should reach, in commenting on
the evidence, and in taking much more complete
control of the trial than a judge in a Western
State is now permitted to exercise. And what is
the result? It is seen that everybody in the
South and West who is anxious to have a law
enforced, and is anxious to have the guilty pun-
ished under it, devises ways and means by which
the offence can be denounced under a Federal
statute and brought for trial into the Federal
courts. There it is known that if a man is guilty
he probably will be convicted. There it is under-

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 41

stood that the wiles of the criminal lawyer, his
dramatic resources, and the obstructing policy of
delays can ordinarily not prevent the law from
overtaking the offender. Of course this distinc-
tion between State and Federal courts in the gen-
eral estimation does not obtain in the older and
more conservative States of the East, where there
is usually less departure from the common-law
system of trial than in the newer and more radical
jurisdictions. The jury system ought never to be
abolished in an Anglo-Saxon country in criminal
cases or, indeed, in sharp and simple issues of
fact in civil cases, though there are many compli-
cated issues of fact involved in accounts and other
matters (as, for instance, the question of inven-
tion in a patent) with respect to which a jury trial
is not at all useful. The great advantage of a
jury trial in a popular government is that it gives
the public confidence that in criminal cases which
involve the liberty or life of a citizen and the
public, he can be assured that there will intervene
in the consideration of his cause twelve impartial
and indifferent persons, selected by lot, as a tribu-
nal to decide upon his guilt ; and that danger from
prejudice against the accused whom the Govern-

42 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

ment is prosecuting, which might be suspected in
a judiciary appointed by the Executive of the
Government, will be eliminated. The jury sys-
tem popularizes the court, and gives the people to
understand that they have not only an interest, but
also a part in the administration of justice.

A jury system requires a panel of individuals
who are able to assume a judicial attitude on the
issue between two litigants, and to banish from
their minds all influence of prejudice of any char-
acter with respect to the parties or the subject
matter. This judicial quality, this sense of fair
play, has been developed in the Anglo-Saxon mind,
more than in any other race perhaps, by long
training in jury trials. Among the Latin people
the power of suppressing one's prejudices and
one's preconceived notions in sitting as judges to
determine an issue of fact, even under the sanc-
tion of an oath, seems not natural, and is hard to
develop. This quality is, of course, better devel-
oped, other things being equal, in a man of edu-
cation than in one who has not enjoyed that ad-
vantage ; and this suggests another reason why the
obligation on the educated man is greater than it
is in the case of his less fortunate fellow-citizens.

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 43

One of the great reasons why jury duty is
evaded by good men is because of the delay, and
unnecessary delay, that arises in the disposition
of causes in jury trials in our courts. In trying
to understand what the common-law trial was, we
may well look to the English method of disposing
of cases. Under that system the lawyers are so
well trained and the judge so skilled in pushing
the trial that cases which take in this country three
and four weeks are disposed of there in a day or
a day and a half. Lawyers are not there per-
mitted to introduce myriads of witnesses on the
same point and to be guilty of great prolixity in
their examinations or in their discussions before
the jury. The main and substantial points are
dwelt upon, both in the evidence of witnesses
and in the argument of counsel, and the counsel
are not permitted to divert the attention of the
jury to irrelevant circumstances and to absurd
theories. The judge retains control and pushes
the trial, both because it usually results in a
juster judgment and also because neither the time
of the court nor the time of the jury ought to be
taken up with the histrionic exhibitions of coun-
sel for either side, or with the dragging, tedious,

44 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

and often irrelevant and unnecessary cross-exam-
inations of supposedly important witnesses. A
juryman sitting in a panel and listening to such
drawn-out controversy, which as a business man
he thinks ought to he settled in the course of a day
or a day and a half, will, the next time he is called
upon, naturally seek to avoid a duty which is not
a pleasure, but a mere bore by reason of the pro-
lixity of the hearing.

A most important principle in the success of a
judicial system and procedure is that the adminis-
tration of justice should seem to the public and the
litigants to be impartial and righteous, as well as
that it should actually be so. Continued lack of
public confidence in the courts will sap their foun-
dations. A careful and conscientious judge will,
therefore, strive to avoid every appearance from
which the always suspicious litigants may suspect
an undue leaning toward the other side. He will
give patient hearing to counsel for each party, and
however clear the case may be to him when stated,
he will not betray his conclusion until he has heard
in full from the party whose position cannot be
supported. More than this, it not infrequently
happens, however clear his mind in the outset,

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 45

that argument, if he has not a pride of first opin-
ion that is unjudicial, may lead him to change
his view.

This same principle is one that should lead
judges not to accept courtesies like railroad passes
from persons or companies frequently litigants in
their courts. It is not that such courtesies would
really influence them to decide a case in favor of
such litigants when justice required a different
result ; hut the possible evil is that if the defeated
litigant learns of the extension of such courtesy to
the judge or the court by his opponent he cannot
be convinced that his cause was heard by an in-
different tribunal, and it weakens the authority
and the general standing of the court.

I knew of one judge who indignantly declared
that of course he accepted passes, because he would
not admit, by declining them, that such a little
consideration or favor would influence his de-
cision. But in the view I have given above a
different ground for declining them can be found
than the suggestion that such a courtesy would
really influence his judgment in a case in which
the railroad company giving the courtesy was a
party.

46 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

Another duty of citizenship which impresses
itself on the mind of the judge is that of main-
taining the supremacy of the law. Ours is a
government by law; not by rule of thumb, but
by rules of conduct which have equal applica-
tion to all. Any exception to the equal operations
of the law upon individuals is necessarily most
injurious to the future operation of that law for
the public good, because one exemption from its
operation is certain to lead to others. The public
detriment arising from violations of law, followed
by immunity from prosecution or punishment, can
hardly be overstated. It is; of course, the duty of
the legislator in the enactment of laws to con-
sider the ease or difficulty with which, by rea-
son of popular feeling or popular prejudice, laws
after being enacted can be enforced. Nothing
is more foolish, nothing more utterly at vari-
ance with sound public policy than to enact a
law which, by reason of the conditions surround-
ing the community in which it is declared to be
law, is incapable of enforcement. Such an in-
stance is sometimes presented by sumptuary laws,
by which the sale of intoxicating liquors is pro-
hibited under penalty in localities where the

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 47

public sentiment of the immediate community
does not and will not sustain the enforcement of
the law. In such cases the legislation is usually
the result of agitation by people in the country
who are determined to make their fellow-citizens
in the city better. The enactment of the law
comes through the country representatives, who
form a majority of the legislature; but the en-
forcement of the law is among the people who are
generally opposed to its enactment, and under such
circumstances the law is a dead letter. This re-
sult is the great argument in favor of so-called
local option, which is really an instrumentality
for determining whether a law can be enforced
before it is made operative. In cases where the
sale of liquor cannot be prohibited in fact, it i9
far better to regulate and diminish the evil than
to attempt to stamp it out. By the enactment of
a drastic law and the failure to enforce it there
is injected into the public mind the idea that laws
are to be observed or violated according to the will
of those affected. I need not say how altogether
pernicious such a loose theory is. General Grant
said that the way to secure the repeal of a bad
law was to enforce it. But when the part of the

48 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

community which enacts the law is not the part
affected by its enforcement, this is not a prac-
ticable method. The constant violation or neglect
of any law leads to a demoralized view of all laws,
and the choice of the laws to be enforced then
becomes as uncertain as the guess of a political
executive in respect to public opinion is likely to
make it. Such a policy constantly enlarges in the
community the class of men with whom the sacred-
ness of law does not exist.

Last June, in this very hall, I delivered an
address on the administration of the criminal law,
and attempted to point out its present inadequacy
and to explain the reasons why there was such a
discouraging failure to bring violators of the law
to justice by reason of the defects of our criminal
procedure.

I observe in the public prints a report that a
distinguished graduate of this university, in his
well-founded indignation at the present malad-
ministration or non-administration of the criminal
law in this country, is represented as justifying,
or at least as palliating, lynch law. I confess this
seems to me to be a most dangerous doctrine. It
is doubtless true that the instances of lynch law

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 49

have been prompted and greatly increased by the
defects and failures to punish malefactors under
the lawful procedure in courts. But it is far bet-
ter that violators of the law go free than that we
should introduce such a barbarous and altogether
demoralizing and uncontrollable practice; first,
because it too often results in the punishment of
innocent persons, and, second, because it makes
chaos of our government by law. ^Nothing can be
more detrimental to the public interest than for
any part of the people to take the law into their
own hands. Assembled in a mob, they soon lose
their conscience; the spirit of the mob, different
from that of any individual, enters the crowd ;
and the desire for vengeance prompts it to acts
of violence and of the most fiendish cruelty.

The only way to remedy the evil in which lynch
law is supposed to find a justification is by
strengthening the hands of the court by repealing
the absurd laws that give to every defendant too
much chance to escape just punishment and make
it as difficult as possible for the State to secure a
conviction. It should be provided, as has been
recommended a number of times, that no error in
the record of a criminal case carried to the Court

50 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

of Appeals should lead to the reversal of the judg-
ment, unless it affirmatively appears that but for
the error a different verdict would have been
reached. In the United States courts and in the
courts of England for many years there never
was an appeal allowed in a criminal case. In the
trials in the Federal court and in England there
is little opportunity for playing a game, pursued
by counsel for the defence in all courts where the
judge retains but little control of the trial. He
is not permitted to befuddle the jury and defeat
a verdict of conviction by a dramatic diversion of
the minds of the jury from the real points at
issue; nor is he permitted, after an adverse ver-
dict, to reverse the judgment of the trial court by
fine and technical points which it was impossible,
in the hurry of the trial, for the court below to
consider or properly to decide. The emotional
rand untrue doctrine that it is better that ninety-
nine guilty men should escape than that one inno-
^ cent man should be punished has done much to
make our criminal trials a farce. This has come
about through popular demand, without a full
understanding on the part of the legislatures and
the people as to its logical effect. And now that

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 51

the result has come, we find a popular tumult
on the other side in favor of lynch law because
the present criminal procedure is inadequate to
punish men who should be punished.

It is possible that a remedy for this evil may
be worked out through a development of the pres-
ent accumulation of wealth and the abuses which
have followed the concentration of much wealth in
comparatively few hands and corporations. The
arrogance that this has produced on the part of
some successful men has led them to a willingness
to evade and escape the laws of the country in
their pursuit of wealth. In what I had to say
last night in regard to the right of property and
the benefit to the world from the accumulation of
capital, I hope I will not be thought to be blind
to the abuses that grow out of the possession of
great wealth by unscrupulous men. Such men are
quite apt to think that laws are not made for the
purpose of restraining them ; that they are, in a
sense, above the law; that they can, by the em-
ployment of able and acute counsel, who shall ad-
vise just what the law is and just how its effects
can be evaded, find some way to be exempt from
its restrictions.

52 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

The Sherman anti-trust law was a law enacted
for the purpose of preventing agreements in re-
straint of interstate trade and preventing monop-
oly of trade. It was directed to the restraint of
the so-called trusts — associations of men who, by
use of various instrumentalities, constituted a sys-
tem of unfair and oppressive trade, and induced
and finally compelled the public to deal with them
rather than with their helpless competitors. The
definition of the offences described in the statute,
and the proof of the circumstances tending to
make out the offence, are both difficult; and in
meeting prosecutions against wealthy corporations
and their managers under this law, as well as
under the law with reference to interstate com-
merce forbidding discriminations and secret re-
bates in favor of certain shippers, the protection
which has long been afforded to the ordinary
criminal, and the leniency with which the law
treats an accused, have inured greatly to the bene-
fit of these wealthy and powerful violators of the
law. With the immense fund at their disposal
for the purpose of defence they are able to secure
the most acute counsel and make every possible
point that the looseness of the present criminal

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 53

procedure affords. When this occurred in the
prosecution of the ordinary criminal the public
seemed incapable of being roused to the necessity
for a change. But now that the defects in the
procedure and administration of the criminal la-w-
are becoming apparent in the case of the arrogant
and wealthy violators of the law who seem to defy
the public, we may hope that a full examination
will be made into the reason why it is that, if a
man has money enough to employ counsel, it is so
difficult to bring him to justice under the system
now in force.

May the day be speeded in the reform of our
administration of the criminal law ! If the escape
of the ordinary criminal leads to lynch law, what
may we expect from the escape of the wealthy
malefactor in these days of unrest, when the com-
plaints against accumulated wealth and its abuses
are so many, if the administration of the criminal
law fails as to them?

I do not for a moment sympathize in the view
that everything is corruption and that all the
picture should be dark and black. I think that
we have had during our last ten years a decade
of prosperity never before known in the history

54 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

of the country; and in the immense sums which
have been made for the benefit of all of us in the
prosperity that we all have enjoyed, there are
some who have taken a larger and an ill-gotten
share, and who are attempting to maintain and
increase this share by methods that should be
reprobated and punished. It is impossible that
such abuses should not have occurred in prosperity
so unprecedented. But the abuses furnish but lit-
tle reason for condemnation of the system unless
it can be first shown that the prosperity has not
been general, and unless it can be further shown
that the abuses of the concentration of much
wealth in a few hands are a greater detriment
than the general prosperity is an advantage.

Just at present we have been passing through
a siege of attacks upon our social and political
system by gentlemen whom President Koosevelt
has properly denominated "the men with the
muck-rake." Either in order that they may sell
their articles, or in order that for political pur-
poses they may stir a spirit of unrest, they ex-
aggerate the abuses thought to exist in political
and business life, and give a distorted and there-
fore a false view of actual conditions. They

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 55

attribute corrupt motives without proof; and by
dwelling only on instances of evil they destroy, or
they seek to destroy, the sense of proportion of
their hearers and readers in a general condemna-
tion of society at large. There never was a time
in the history of the world when there was more
virtue, more charity, more sense of brotherly affec-
tion, than there is to-day. Could anything be
more inspiring than the bounteous outgiving of
money, provisions, and labor for the benefit of
our fellow-men which was evoked by the dis-
aster in California? The truth is that the de-
nunciations of these muck-rakers have reached
such a point that a reaction has set in, and they
find that their wares are not as salable as they
were. They have overdone the picture. Their
eyes have become so dulled that they have not
realized that everything they say now is dis-
counted by the public, as born not of a desire to
present a just picture but of a desire to be sensa-
tional at the expense of fact and the expense of
justice. It is true that there is corruption in
many of our munipical corporations. It is true
also that there are on foot substantial and most
encouraging movements to stamp out the evils

56 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

that we find in municipal government. It is not
true that there is great corruption in the national
Government. Nearly every one who has been at
all familiar with the national capital for the last
twenty-five years will admit that there has been a
very decided improvement in the disinterestedness
of legislators and the freedom from venality and
corruption in Congress and the executive depart-
ments. But let us concede that there have been
abuses, as undoubtedly there have been, both in
the violations of law by great corporations, rail-
way and others, and in the evasion of the anti-
monopoly and trust laws. What is the remedy?
Is it not in taking measures to secure the main-
tenance and supremacy of the law? Is it not in
looking to those instrumentalities by which such
violations can be properly suppressed and pun-
ished ? And that is what so emphasizes the im-
portance of an improvement in our judicial pro-
cedure in this respect. Any suggestion that there
is any other remedy possible for preventing the
violation of law and these abuses than in the train-
ing and character of the individual on the one
hand, and in the strengthening of the arm of the
law by judicial procedure on the other, is vicious.

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 57

It may be that the enormous accumulation of
money in the hands of individuals has reached
such a point that it would be wiser to discourage
its continuance in the next generation by heavy
inheritance tax or other methods. Neither at the
common law nor under the Constitution is the
right of descent of property or of devising it an
inalienable right. It depends wholly upon the
legislature; and, therefore, if the legislature sees
fit to give a tendency to the division of fortunes,
and prevent their greater accumulation in the sec-
ond and third generations, there are ample means
under our present system, and without revolution-
ary methods, to bring this about.

But the point which I wish most to emphasize
at present is the duty of every one to discoun-
tenance at every point the suggestion that the
people at large are to take the law into their own
hands, and accomplish something by violent and
radical illegal action against the evils of present
society. This would be to substitute chaos for
a government of law. Law must be enforced
through the lawful executive and through the
lawfully constituted courts.

I fear that we must admit that there is not so

58 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

strongly developed among our people the reverence
for law and the demand for its enforcement as
there is among our Anglo-Saxon brethren across
the sea. Personal liberty and the rights of prop-
erty are rather more protected under the English
system than under ours. Newspaper libel is much
rarer in England than here, for Englishmen seem
to regard it as their duty to carry such a case into
court, and the newspaper is usually mulcted if any
license is taken with their reputations. In this
country the abuse of the privileges of the press,
in holding up to unjust criticism and sensational
condemnation many respectable members of the
community, has reached such a point that the in-
jured pass it over, accept it as a burden they must
bear, and decline to go into court. The delays
that the courts permit in working out the rights
of a litigant, and the length of time and the worry
that are taken up in litigation, all tend to frighten
the man out of court who has a just cause, and to
make him feel that it is better to abandon his
cause than to subject himself to the nervous strain
and the bitter disappointment of trying to secure
a prompt hearing and decision.

The remedy for these defects is both legislative

A JUDGE ON THE BENCH 59

and executive. The defects exist less in the Fed-
eral courts, as I have explained, than in the State
courts; and that is sufficient to indicate that the
nearer our State courts approximate to the Federal
courts in procedure and in the power of the judge,
the more certainty is there of an improvement in
the judicial administration in this country. The
courts are the background of our civilization. The
Supreme Court of the United States is the whole
background of the Government. It is the body
to determine whether Congress is acting within
its constitutional limitations; to determine wheth-
er the Executive has exceeded his legal authority.
It is the last resort and the final tribunal. Its
power rests not upon its marshals or its con-
stables, not upon an army under its control or
a navy whose battleships it may summon; but
its power and precedent rest upon the suprem-
acy of the fundamental law which it is its duty
to declare and to preserve, and whicli it is the
duty of every citizen to maintain at all hazards.
It is possible for the intelligent members of the
community to bring to bear their influence upon
legislatures to reduce, by a few well-drawn amend-
ments to the existing procedure, the chances of

60 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

escape of criminals through the technical meshes
of the law. It is possible for intelligent members
of the community to exert, at all times and every-
where, an influence against the frequently ad-
vanced proposition that lynch law is justifiable.
It is possible to create among the good men of the
community a public sentiment, expressing itself
through the ballot-box and in other ways, in favor
of the supremacy of the law and in favor of the
punishment of wrong-doers. The exercise of such
an influence is one of the highest duties of citi-
zenship.

Ill

THE DUTIES OF CITIZENSHIP VIEWED FROM
THE STANDPOINT OF COLONIAL ADMINIS-
TRATION

Me. President, and Gentlemen of Yale:

My subject to-night is, " The Duties of Citizen-
ship from the Standpoint of Colonial Administra-
tion." I shall treat this subject by reference to
the Philippine Islands, with which I am familiar,
which form the most important dependency we
have, and present the most difficult problems for
solution.

The first Americans to land in the Philippines
were the army and navy, together with those
venturesome business spirits that thrive best in
times of trouble and excitement, when the oppor-
tunities for making money quickly are good. The
experiences of our army and navy with Aguinal-
do's forces, the contempt which the Filipino army
manifested toward the American troops before the
beginning of hostilities between them, and the sub-

61

62 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

sequent guerrilla warfare, all tended to create a
bitterness of feeling on the part of our soldiers
toward their Filipino opponents that could not but
be shared by the Americans who were on the is-
lands at that time. It was natural that every
defect and every weakness of the Filipino char-
acter should be dilated upon by the American
soldiers and by those who accompanied them.
The exigencies presented by the guerrilla war-
fare required an increase in the American forces,
until in July, 1900, there were upward of
65,000 American soldiers on the islands, and they
were stationed at 500 different posts. Their pres-
ence in the islands created so large a demand
for American supplies of food and drink and
other things, that the few American merchants,
the only ones familiar with the needs and demands
of the American soldiers, found themselves with
a business on their hands that they could hardly
take care of. Their profits were large. They had
no need, therefore, to look for other trade or
patronage. The necessity for cultivating the good-
will of the Filipinos for business purposes was
wholly absent, and the fact that their profitable
patrons were deeply imbued with hostility and

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 63

contempt toward the native population put the
American merchants in the same frame of mind.
It was natural that the American newspapers,
whose editorial staffs were composed of men re-
cently in the battlefield, whose subscribers were
chiefly the soldiers, and whose advertisers were
the American merchants, should in their atti-
tude toward the Filipinos reflect the opinions of
their readers and patrons. The American soldier
knew little of the Spanish language, and still less
of the dialects of the country — the Tagalog, the
Visayan, and the Ilocano. His opportunity for
communication with the native was exceedingly
restricted. He said what he meant and meant
what he said. His manners were those of the
Anglo-Saxon, abrupt and blunt. The Filipino, on
the other hand, with a timidity born of years of
subordination under the Spanish regime, with
the Oriental tendency to speak that which his
auditor wishes to hear, and with the courtesy
which is innate in the race and has been increased
by the Spanish influence, used expressions which,
interpreted by Anglo-Saxon standards, were false
and deceitful, but which, interpreted by men
who understood the race, were nothing more than

64 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

courteous commonplace. And so it was that the
American enlisted man, together with many
American officers and merchants, looked upon
every effort to cultivate the good-will of the na-
tives as love's labor lost; and, if pursued by the
Government, as likely to result in weakness and
to invite treachery.

The progress of the army in subduing the insur-
rection and establishing civil government enabled
us in two years to reduce the American soldiers
on the islands from 65,000 to about 15,000. The
Americans on the islands, outside of the army and
the civil servants, have not increased much in
number since 1900. The demand for American
goods and supplies from merchants on the islands
has therefore been much reduced with the with-
drawal of the army. The opportunity for large
profit on the part of the American merchants, so
long content with American trade only, has passed.
The only possible source of real business and real
trade which our merchants living on the islands
can now have is with the Filipino people. The
promotion of their material and intellectual wel-
fare will necessarily develop wants on their part
for things which in times of poverty they regard

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 65

as luxuries, but which as they grow more educated
and wealthier become necessities.

The cultivation of the good-will of the Filipinos,
who thus may be made good customers, is the one
course which can create any market among the
people on the islands for American goods and
American supplies ; and, if this be true, a policy
which embitters and renders a whole people hos-
tile to the American merchants must necessarily
defeat all hopes of increasing the American busi-
ness. A merchant who sneers at his customer, who
calls him names, who turns his back upon him,
is not likely to keep him long as a customer. It
hardly needs a business man to see this ; a layman
may predict it with the utmost confidence. Under
these conditions in the Philippines it is not strange
that right under the noses of the American mer-
chants Spanish merchants, English merchants,
German merchants, and Swiss merchants do busi-
ness with the Filipinos. They are engaged in sell-
ing goods to the Filipino peoples and in exporting
their agricultural products from the islands. The
American merchants, feeling the pinch of a loss
of business, have been disposed to charge it to the
policy of the Government in declaring in favor of

66 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

the policy of " the Philippines for the Filipinos."
They have heen looking for a scapegoat for their
lack of success in business, and they have selected
the Government and its policy as the chief object
of criticism.

This condition of affairs has been held up by
anti-imperialists as evidence of the utter unfit-
ness of the American to attempt colonial admin-
istration. With the engendering of this spirit, it
is urged that we cannot hope to create the belief
among the Filipinos that we are attempting to do
them good, and that we ought to give up the experi-
ment. But while such temporary manifestations
are not encouraging, it is full of consolation to read
in the lives of Lord Macaulay and Lord John Law-
rence and Lord Canning of the very great bitter-
ness with which all their policies for the ameliora-
tion of the native Indian were attacked by the
Englishmen who had settled in Calcutta; who in
their supreme self-satisfaction regarded the inter-
est of their class, numbering not more than 4,000
or 5,000, as of much greater importance than the
interest of the 300,000,000 East Indians.

I am not, however, discouraged by this first at-
titude of the American merchants in Manila and

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 67

elsewhere on the islands toward the Filipinos, be-
cause a change to a more sensible view is already
at hand. There is now the strongest motive for
the American merchant to seek the good-will of
the Filipinos, in order to secure their business. It
is colossal egotism on the part of the American
who goes to the Philippines to suppose that the
Government of those islands must have its policy
affected solely by his interests. The United States
is attempting a solution of a most complex and
difficult problem. It has been forced into the
position of becoming a guardian of the archi-
pelago for the benefit of seven or eight millions of
people. It has felt it necessary in the discharge of
this trust to take charge of the islands and create
a government and maintain it. Its only pos-
sible justification for this course, according to its
own traditions and the principles upon which its
own structure rests, is that the people of the islands
are not now fit for self-government; that it owes
a duty to them of maintaining a government until
the time when they as a people, by actual sharing
in the government and by education, shall become
completely fitted to run their own political affairs.
In other words, the chief characteristic of the trust

68 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

which we involuntarily assumed is that we must
conduct affairs in the Philippines with a view
solely to the interest of the Filipinos.

This is as far as possible from saying that
Americans may not go to the islands, may not en-
gage in industry of any kind, may not be induced
by hope of good profits to invest as much capital
as possible in enterprises tending to develop their
resources. Such a course is in the interest of the
islands, and should be encouraged by the Filipinos
themselves; and if the American on the islands
will only see his own real interest, he will unite
with the Government in an attempt to conciliate
the Filipinos as far as possible. It of course inter-
feres with the success of the Government in con-
vincing the Filipinos that the United States is
really not moved by selfish motives, but anxious to
promote the interest of the Filipino in every way,
to have the resident representatives of that country
occupy a position of hostility and contempt toward
the natives. I should say, therefore, that the first
duty of the American citizen who goes to the
Philippine Islands and lives there is to make him-
self as well acquainted with the Filipinos as he
can; to cultivate their good-will; to have them

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 69

understand that the interests of the Filipinos are
paramount in determining the policy of the United
States toward the islands.

The next class of citizens whose duties we may
consider are the Filipinos themselves. By the
fundamental act of the Philippine Islands they
are made citizens of the Philippines. This is to
distinguish them from citizens of the United
States, who are entitled to certain constitutional
privileges for the exercise of which the Filipino
is not ready. With reference to his treatment by
every foreign government, the Filipino occupies
exactly the same position and is entitled to exactly
the same protection from our Government as an
American.

What is the duty of the Filipino citizen of the
Philippine Islands toward the insular Govern-
ment? He owes allegiance to the Government,
and is subject to the duties that citizens ordinarily
owe to the government that gives them protection
and looks after their governmental needs. It may
be admitted that there are many Filipinos who
would be very glad to have the rule of the Ameri-
can Government end, and a period of absolute
independence ensue. The people of the islands

70 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

have no disposition to come under Japanese rule,
as has sometimes been suggested. The truth is,
the unfounded report that the United States ex-
pected to sell the islands to Japan aroused such
indignation as to show that the people much pre-
ferred the United States to Japan as a guardian.
The poor and ignorant among the Filipinos, who
number in all about ninety per cent, are not par-
ticularly interested as to what kind of a govern-
ment they have, provided they be let alone. They
are easily influenced by the educated of their own
race and easily aroused to follow the teachings of
any Filipino of influence and standing. But taken
as a class, if some one does not seek to excite them
they are quiet, peaceable, law-abiding, and not
interested in politics or government.

In the other ten per cent, however, there are
to be found educated persons who deem themselves
entirely fitted to carry on a government and to rule
the ninety per cent which I have described. What
ought a citizen of the Philippine Islands, with
these views, to do in respect to the Government?
Legally, of course, there is no doubt that he ought
to support the Government, or at least not attempt
to overthrow it; but in the interest of his people,

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 71

and released from the obligations that the law
imposes upon him, how ought he to act? Is it
necessarily patriotism for him to plan to arouse
his people to an insurrection and destroy or make
as difficult as possible the government of the
islands by the United States, or is it his duty
to uphold the hands of the representatives of the
United States in doing the work which they are
sent there to do, to wit, that of guiding the islands
to peace and prosperity ? Of course it is difficult
for an Occidental to put himself in the place of
the Oriental, but I have had a good deal of
opportunity to study the Filipino people and to
understand in a dim but still somewhat compre-
hensive way the characteristics of the race. I
do not hesitate to say that the strong man among
them believes that the worst thing that could
happen to his country would be to have the United
States abandon it; that it is far better to go on
as proposed by us, under the sovereignty of the
Ignited States, with a gradual extension of the
electorate to the people who show themselves quali-
fied, and of the governing power to the electorate.
It cannot be hoped that a purely Filipino govern-
ment by the educated ten per cent would pursue

72 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

a policy to lift the other ninety per cent into the
ruling class and share with them the political power
which the educated ten per cent expect to wield.
Indeed, that is exactly what many of the educated
ten per cent wish to avoid. They are in favor of
an oligarchy.

In an examination of the committee of the
so-called Independence party, conducted by the
Senators and Congressmen who took the Philip-
pine trip last summer, the leaders did not hesitate
to say that in their judgment the Philippine
people were quite ready for self-government,
because the ninety per cent were an obedient
serving class, while the ten per cent were a direct-
ing or governing class, in every way competent
to act as such, and thus were able to carry on an
excellent government. I need hardly say that
such a government would not meet the views that
we have as to what a government ought to be.
The ninety per cent would not be educated or
trained to become self-governing citizens, but
would remain in the status which they now oc-
cupy. It is absolutely true that most of those
who advocate independence, most of those whose
voices we hear echoed in Boston and elsewhere

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 73

in the demand for freedom for the Philippines,
are persons who have not the slightest idea of
maintaining in the islands a popular government.
But it is said the oligarchical government is the
only kind of government for which the people
of the islands can ever be adapted. Even suppos-
ing this to be a plausible view, it is likewise true
that we could not depend on any stability in such
a government. The difficulty is that the govern-
ing class fall out so easily among themselves that
were we to permit the ten per cent to take charge
of the Government, we should find that there was
no cohesion in the governing class; that it would
divide up into factions; and that almost before
the Americans had left the islands there would be
internecine warfare and chaos that would require
the Americans to return. This is the reason why
the conservative members of the community are
satisfied with the fact that the American Govern-
ment has control over the islands, for they realize
that no other government in the world could be
as generous and as disinterested in its manage-
ment of the archipelago. Under such circum-
stances it seems to me to be the duty of a lover
of his race — a citizen of the Philippine Islands —

74 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

to hold up the hands of the Americans engaged in
attempting to prepare all the people for the exer-
cise of gradually increasing political control.

The truth is that even the ten per cent of the
Filipinos who long for an oligarchy are in many
respects wholly unfitted to assume the great respon-
sibilities of government. They have had very lit-
tle experience; their views are expressed in ab-
stract principles. One witness of this class,
whom I summoned early in the days of our stay
on the islands, I asked to assist us in the mat-
ter of the tax laws and to say from what par-
ticular class and out of what particular prop-
erty taxes ought to be raised. He said he had
never given any consideration to that subject,
because he considered it a mere detail. Another
body of men of the Independence party, some
of whom appeared before the Congressmen, had
at an earlier day come to see me to secure per-
mission to organize a party for the obtaining of
independence by peaceable means. I attempted
to dissuade them from the task at that time be-
cause there were still guerrillas and robbers in
the field. I was afraid that in the organization
of such a party a great many physical-force men

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 75

would become incorporated as members, and that
ultimately these very good gentlemen who made
the proposition to me might be brought under sus-
picion of the Department of Justice. They said
to me that they desired to present an argument
in favor of their plan of independence. They said,
in writing, that they were fit for self-government
because they had counted over the number of
offices — central, provincial, and municipal — and
had found that while the number was great, they
were able to select from the people of the islands
enough educated men to fill every office twice;
in other words, that if one shift failed for any
reasons to meet the requirements of office, then
there was another shift that could take their
places ; and with these two shifts they regarded it
as entirely practicable to carry on any sort of a
complicated government. The force of a sound,
safe public opinion they regarded as of slight
importance.

The men who are in favor of independence
are not the practical Filipinos. Ordinarily, men
of property, men of business, men who by the
virtues of providence and self-restraint and fore-
sight have succeeded in laying up fortunes, are

76 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

convinced, as I have said, that it would be the
worst blow possible to the islands to have the
Americans leave them now. But the uncertainty
in this country as to what course the Government
intends to pursue — the impression in the islands
that the opposition party intends, when it gets
into control of this Government, to let the islands
go — has the effect of making every native in the
islands, who would otherwise speak out in favor
of a continuance of the present arrangement, anx-
ious lest a change may occur, and fearful of tak-
ing such a position that he may suffer when
independence is granted.

Finally I come to the question, What is the
duty toward the Philippine Islands of the Ameri-
can citizens making up the American electorate?
I have heard it stated that our people are get-
ting tired of the burden of governing those isl-
ands ; that the business which has come from them
has not been sufficient to justify the outlay that
we have made; and that any method of rid-
ding us of the responsibility for their govern-
ment will be adopted by the people. I differ
from this view. I think the American people
know that they did not seek the burden of carry-

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 77

ing on the government of the Philippine Islands,
but that circumstances were such that they
could not escape it, and that their honor as a
people requires that they discharge the duties that
it involves. We are a great and a prosperous
nation. Here are eight millions of people in the
tropics, differing very much from our own, yet
with a capacity for development that justifies our
making the experiment of educating them — of
leading them on in governmental practice to see
if they cannot at length safely walk alone.

We have already done a great deal for the
Filipinos. We have organized a good government
there ; we have given them partial representation
in it, and we expect to give them a larger repre-
sentation next year by the election of a popular
assembly which shall be one branch of the gov-
erning legislature; we have been educating and
are now educating in the English language a half
million of the youth of the islands; we have
introduced health laws and enforced them; we
have suppressed ladronism, which was the bane
of the islands in Spanish days; we have elimi-
nated the question of the friars' lands. Owing
to causes beyond our control, we have not been

78 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

able to bring about a period of great prosperity-
there; and of course in hard times it is difficult
to convince the people that the Government is
not in some way responsible for this. But we have
given the islands a good sound gold-standard cur-
rency; we have given them extended telegraph
and mail communications; and we are just now
about to begin, with Government encouragement,
the construction of some seven or eight hundred
miles of railway.

It is the duty of the citizen to look at this
experiment from the right standpoint; to under-
stand that we are not in the Philippines for the
purpose of making trade, but that we are there
to discharge the highest duty that one nation
can toward another people. It is very probable
that the trade between the Philippines and the
United States will increase to such proportions
as to make that particular trade useful to both
countries. But we cannot base our conduct or
action on such a motive. What we do in the
Philippines must rest on our national duty — a
duty which is the greater because of our pros-
perity and ability to discharge it.

This policy has been sustained in two national

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 79

elections, and the question therefore arises, "What
is the duty of the other citizens of the United
States who have heretofore held aloof from such a
policy and denounced it ? Ought they not now to
hold up the hands of the Government and assist in
every way to make the experiment which, against
their will and against their express vote, the Gov-
ernment entered upon? Why should the anti-
imperialists, so called, now attempt to make what
we do in the Philippines a failure? Is it not
a small policy and an unpatriotic one? In the
beginning the attitude of the anti-imperialists and
their extreme statements and their apparent re-
joicing at American defeats undoubtedly con-
tinued the war of the insurrection a number of
months and probably a year beyond what it would
have been had the insurgents thought the whole
people was behind the Government.

It is frequently said that Congress cannot give
the time necessary for governing the Philippines ;
that it cannot consider their many needs; and
therefore that our government is not one adapted
to governing dependencies. I differ from this
view; and certainly the conduct of Congress
toward the Philippines does not justify the criti-

SO FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

cism. A number of important acts have been
passed which have conferred power to govern the
islands on the Philippine Commission, subject
only to supervision by the Secretary of War. Con-
gress has been generally wise to put the power
where it ought to be — in Manila.

The truth is, considering the many obstructions
which we have had to overcome in building up
the Philippine Government and the Philippine
people, considering the dreadful agricultural de-
pression in the islands and the consequent finan-
cial depression, the present condition of the
islands is remarkable. One cannot hope to be
successful in government unless there comes every
little while a period of prosperity. We have not
had such a period since we have been in the
islands. One must feed a man's belly before he
develops his mind or gives him political rights.
The pendulum must swing in favor of the islands
and prosperity of some kind must come. It will
be greatly aided if free trade between the United
States and the islands should be established.
Whether this will happen in the present Con-
gress, I do not know. That it will come ulti-
mately, I am confident. That it ought to come

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 81

at once, I am sure. When it does come, the
people of the islands will realize how much
America has done for them. Until that time we
must expect to be blamed for everything in the
shape of ill that comes to the islands and we
must expect to encounter complaints and criti-
cism from the Filipinos. But their attitude ought
not in the slightest degree to affect ours or to take
from us the sense of obligation that we should
put them on their feet.

The great principle to guide us is that we are
to govern the Philippine Islands in accordance
with the maxim " the Philippines for the Fili-
pinos." If in the course of a decade or a quarter
of a century an examination of all the legislation
of Congress shall reveal, as I hope it may, that
this was the motive which governed substantially
every act passed by that body, then it will form
a great exception in the history of the control of
dependent possessions by great nations. No one
has more admiration than I have for the thorough
and effective method of government pursued by
England with respect to her colonies, both those
which are quasi-independent and those which are
crown colonies absolutely under the control of an

82 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

appointed government. But generally it will be
found that in those governments England has pur-
sued a policy of enlightened selfishness; has, so
far as she could, recouped herself for any expendi-
tures by the home Government; and has held
them primarily with a view to the improvement
of English trade. Her opium policy with respect
to Oriental colonies has not been controlled by
the highest and purest motives; and a large
part of the income which has done so much to im-
prove their material conditions, to build roads and
construct public works, can be traced directly to
this source. The spread of the use of opium
among her Oriental subjects is quite discourag-
ing, and a change in that part of her policy
ought to made. I do not mean to say that Eng-
land has not generally looked well after the ma-
terial comfort and growth and prosperity of her
subjects in tropical colonies, or that her govern-
ments have not always made for better civili-
zation, justice, and security of life and property.
She has established and conducted excellent gov-
ernments, maintained fine order, built magnificent
roads, and in every way made her countries fair
to look upon. I think it can hardly be said,

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 83

however, that she has given great time to the
improvement of the individual among her tropical
peoples. She has not devoted as much money
or as much time as she should have devoted to
the education of her subjects and their prepara-
tion to take part in governmental matters. In
this respect her policy is exactly the opposite of
that which we have pursued in the Philippines;
and it is supported by the argument, drawn
from the experiences of men long accustomed to
deal with tropical races, that it is much wiser to
keep them in ignorance, to keep them subject to
control, than to give them by education ideas of
taking part in the government, which will merely
foment discussion and agitation which do not
work for the good of the whole number.

The most altruistic experiment which England
has attempted in the management of tropical races
is what she has done in Egypt, under Lord Cromer ;
and there she has worked wonders for the people
of Egypt. She has improved marvellously the
prosperity of the fellaheen by public works; she
has encouraged agriculture; she has introduced
schools and made some attempt at the education
of the Egyptians. The admiration of people who

84 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

have visited Egypt for Lord Cromer's policy and
methods is certainly no greater than has been
justly deserved; but in the Philippines the prin-
ciple of our policy is far more advanced than that
of Lord Cromer's or of England's anywhere. It
may be that it is too far advanced ; it may be that
it is an experiment that is doomed to failure ; but
at any rate it is an experiment that it is wise for
us to make. We can afford to make it ; and if it
be a failure, we can afford to accept the responsi-
bility for the failure. That experiment is the
preparation, by education and by the gradual ex-
tension of practice in governmental matters, of a
tropical people who heretofore have not had any
practical experience in saying how they shall
themselves be governed. In beginning this experi-
ment and carrying it on, it must be understood
that there are certain things very much in our
favor, and that there are others which constitute
very serious obstacles to our success.

In the first place, we have a people, a tropical
people, to deal with, who as a people are the only
Christians in the Orient. That is, there are
seven millions out of eight millions who are Chris-
tians, and have been Christians under the influ-

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 85

ence of Spain and the Roman Catholic Church
for upward of 250 years. This fact turns them
naturally to Europe and to America for their
ideals of virtue and of thought, and for their aims
and ambitions. This makes them far more sub-
ject to Western influence than the Mohammedans
or the Buddhists, both of whom regard the Chris-
tian religion with contempt and are to that ex-
tent proof against the civilizing ideas of modern
Europe and America.

Secondly, though the people are in a state of
Christian pupilage, of almost total ignorance, they
have an ambition, that it is easy to cultivate, to
take advantage of education. Nothing is more
inspiring, nothing gives more hope of the success
of what we are doing, than the interest which the
poor Filipinos, the " taos " as they are called,
manifest in having their children receive an edu-
cation in English. We have not now funds en-
abling us to educate more than twenty-five per
cent of the youth of school age in the islands;
but I am hoping that prosperity will increase the
funds available for education, and that Congress,
out of the abundance of this country, will be will-
ing to contribute as much as the Philippine Gov-

86 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

ernment itself contributes, thus doubling the edu-
cational facilities. The great needs are primary
education and industrial education. Industrial
education is of greater importance there than in
this country, because it has a tendency to correct
a feeling which was left by the civilization of
Spain, and which is the greatest obstacle that has
to be overcome — the idea that labor is degrading
and an evidence of slavery. Industrial education
dignifies labor.

The parts of the earth which have been re-
tarded, the places where there is the greatest field
for progressive work, both material, intellectual,
and moral, are in the tropical countries. The
discoveries of medical science, the knowledge of
conditions that promote health, have improved to
such a point that it is much more practicable now
for people of the temperate zone to live an ex-
tended period in the tropics without injury to
health than it was a decade or two decades ago.
The land of the temperate zones is rapidly being
absorbed. Profit lies in the improvement of the
tropical countries; agriculture, mines, and other
sources of revenue are there; and it is inevitable
that in the next century the great progress of

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 87

the world is to be made among tropical peoples
and in tropical countries. Therefore what we are
doing in the Philippines is merely a precursor
of what will be done in other lands near the
equator ; and if we demonstrate that it is possible
for people purely tropical to be educated and
lifted above the temptations to idleness and sav-
agery and cruelty and torpor that have thus far
retarded the races born under the equatorial sun,
we shall be pointing another important way to
improve the civilization of the world.

Hence it is that the value of the work we are
doing in the Philippines rises far above the mere
question of what the total of our exports and im-
ports may be for this year or for next year or
hereafter, or whether they are at present a burden.
The Philippine question is, Can the dominion of
a great and prosperous civilized nation in the tem-
perate zone exercise a healthful and positively
beneficial influence upon the growth and develop-
ment of a tropical people? What we have to do
is in a sense to change their nature ; it is to fur-
nish, by developing their physical and intellectual
wants, a motive for doing work which does not
exist under their present conditions. That this

88 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

can be done I have no doubt, from what has al-
ready been done in the islands. But it is a ques-
tion of time and patience. The tropical peoples
cannot lift themselves as the Anglo-Saxons and
other peoples of the cold and temperate zones,
where the inclemency and rigors of the climate
demand effort and require labor, have lifted them-
selves. The struggle that these tropical peoples
must go through in reaching better things is far
more difficult; and its outcome must depend, in
my judgment, on the outside aid of friendly and
guiding nations. The principle which our anti-
imperialists seek to apply, that people must acquire
knowledge of self-government by independence, is
not applicable to a tropical people. We cannot
set them going in a decade and look to their future
progress as certain. We must have them for a
generation or two generations, or perhaps even
three, in order that our experiment with reference
to education, primary and industrial, shall have
its effect, and that our guiding hand, in teaching
them commonsense views of government, shall give
them the needed direction. It is supposed that if
the Democratic party comes into power it will give
up the islands and turn them over to the control

COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION 89

of the people who inhabit them. I venture to pre-
dict— although prediction is dangerous — that the
Democratic party, should it come into power,
would not assume this responsibility, but would
proceed on practically the same lines as have been
followed hitherto. Such a result would be de-
sirable, because then it would be shown that both
political parties were in favor of the policy which
has been instituted, and that the people of our
country would unite in a great and successful
effort for the benefit of humanity.

IV

THE DUTIES OP CITIZENSHIP VIEWED FROM
THE STANDPOINT OP THE NATIONAL
EXECUTIVE

Mk. Peesident, and Gentlemen of Yaee :

The subject of my remarks this evening is,
" The Duties of Citizenship from the Standpoint
of the National Executive."

The administration — the President and his
cabinet officers and others who are part of it —
naturally thinks that the first duty of a citizen
with reference to the national Executive is to hold
up its hands and support all of its policies, and
be properly tender and gentle in dealing with its
defects, suspected or proven. It is easy for the
administration to fall into the view that criti-
cisms of its policy and misrepresentations with re-
spect to what it has done, or has not done, seri-
ously affect the work of the Government and
interfere with doing it well. When a man has
great executive responsibility, and finds that his

90

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 91

plans are more or less interfered with by "what ho
regards as the extravagances and injustices of the
press, there is an unconscious disposition on his
part to believe that a restriction of the license
of the press would be a very excellent thing, and
that it would prevent the driving away from his
moral support of the sympathy and assistance of
the public, which are essential to the ultimate
success of the plans that he has made for the pub-
lic good. These demands for restriction of the
press are likely to be more unreasonable and ex-
treme in such a place as the Philippines or Porto
Rico, where misrepresentations and criticisms are
of vastly more importance, because in those places
the views of the native population of particular
matters affect the success of governmental meas-
ures more directly than they can in this country.
We are anxious, of course, to impress the Filipinos
with our disinterestedness and desire for their
good. The American press of Manila has fre-
quently been bitter in its denunciation of the en-
tire Philippine people, and has stirred up among
them a feeling that we are hypocrites, and that
there is no real friendliness on our part toward
them. Yet every effort to secure by legal proceed-

92 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

ings a restraint of the license of the press, or the
extravagances and misrepresentations of an ir-
responsible editor or newspaper proprietor in
Manila, is a great deal worse than the evil from
which the complaint arises; because it dignifies
the issue at once into that of freedom of the press,
and makes the man who is prosecuted or in any
way brought into court a martyr for the cause of
free speech. It is vastly better, if the Executive
only realizes the truth, that the injustice, com-
ment, and unjust criticism, and the deliberate
misrepresentations that sometimes do characterize
articles in the newspapers, should be left to lose
their effect by the gradual discovery of the ac-
tual facts, and of the injustice of the criticism,
in the events which follow. This duty of citi-
zenship not to criticise public servants unjustly
and not to misrepresent the character of their
commissions and omissions is of course an im-
portant one; a violation of it is frequently a
serious hindrance to the accomplishment of valu-
able results from a patriotic and governmental
standpoint; but while headlines seem outrageous,
and while articles seem to be fraught with great
and vicious results, because they are untruthful

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 93

and exaggerated and sensational, the evil neutral-
izes itself. Our people are intelligent and keen.
They are ahle after experience to gauge the impor-
tance to be attached and the confidence to be ac-
corded to statements so extreme that they bear
between their lines the refutation of what they
express. The press is essential to our civilization
and plays an unofficial but vital role in the affairs
of government. The discipline of a fear of pub-
licity, the restraining and correcting influence of
the prospect of fearless criticism, are of much
value in securing a proper administration of pub-
lic affairs. The exercise of power without danger
of criticism produces an irresponsibility in a pub-
lic officer which, even if his motives are pure,
tends to negligence in some cases and arbitrary
action in others.

Speaking from a Washington standpoint, the
standard of newspaper correspondents at the na-
tional capital, representing all the great dailies
and all the press associations, is on the whole a
high one ; higher, I think, than that of any other
newspaper men, as a class, that I know. Such
men, when they have established the right to have
it, as most of them have, share the confidence of

94 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

Senators, of the leading members of Congress, of
the Cabinet, and even of the President himself;
and they are most careful to observe the lines
which are laid down in these confidences, re-
straining the extent of their publication. The
amount of information that the Washington cor-
respondents have which they do not give to the
public would surprise most men not familiar with
affairs in the nation's capital. The truth is that
the partisan character of despatches that are seen
in some newspapers is determined rather by in-
structions from headquarters that by any dis-
position of the correspondents themselves to give
a colored account of the facts.

Another topic that perhaps deserves considera-
tion here, in discussing the duty of the citizen
toward the national administration, is the suppres-
sion of personal feelings in questions of foreign
policy. How far, when this nation is dealing with
other nations, either in making treaties, or in mat-
ters likely to lead to a war, or in actual war, ought
a citizen, disregarding all party considerations, to
stand by his own government and hold up its hands
in achieving a successful result? It would be
going very far to say that no matter how unjust

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 95

a war there ought to be no criticism by American
people of the conduct of the administration in
such a crisis. In a free government the right
and duty to criticise that which is plainly wrong
obtain and ought to obtain, no matter how critical
the situation with respect to an international
controversy. But I submit that the natural atti-
tude of the partisan toward the administration, at
times when the country's welfare in war or in
approaching war is at stake, should be laid aside ;
that the presumption should be indulged that
our country is right in its contentions and that
its opponent is wrong, unless the attitude of our
country is so indefensible that it is impossible
to avoid condemnation of those who are respon-
sible for it. Nothing so interferes with the suc-
cess of a nation in carrying out international
matters as a fire in the rear by part of its own
people. Everything that is said of that char-
acter is at once repeated in the newspapers and
public prints of the opposing nation, and strength-
ens it in its unyielding attitude toward our con-
tentions. I remember that in an article on this
subject Secretary Olney deprecated the spirit of
partisanship that was developed in many of the

96 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

newspapers and magazines of this country in in-
ternational matters as compared with the conduct
of opposition newspapers in such crises in Eng-
land. Of a similar character is the position taken
by some with respect to our attempt to set up and
maintain a government for the benefit of the
Filipinos in the Philippines. This I mentioned
last night. If our policy there is to be unsuc-
cessful— as I hope and believe it will not be —
this result can be charged largely to the agita-
tion, unreasonable, bitter, partisan, altogether un-
just, of the so-called anti-imperialists; who seek
not merely to criticise and bring to the public
mind most unfair statements of the defects of
our policy and its failure, but deliberately to
embarrass us with the people of the Philippine
Islands in everything that we attempt to do.
There are instances in which the spirit of op-
position to the policy of the Government was
originally roused by entirely sincere and proper
motives, but in which there has been developed
a bitterness of feeling until all fair judgment has
disappeared and there is substituted an intense
desire that the arguments in opposition to the
policy shall be vindicated by the proof of abuses

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 97

and by failure of the policy. This attitude, which
I may call unjudicial and unpatriotic, interferes
materially with our success in conciliating the
Filipino people, because they are very responsive
to any report and have no sense of proportion in
judging of the credibility and weight to be given
to such partisan statements. In this country any
such attitude or course of conduct is unpopular,
and is generally rebuked at the polls.

One of the chief reasons for the misjudging
of the characters of rulers of nations is the
failure of the critics, the historians, and the peo-
ple themselves fully to appreciate the actual limi-
tations and restrictions upon the exercise of a sup-
posedly unlimited governing power. The most
absolute monarch has limitations upon his freedom
of action that are little understood except by those
who are on the ground and close enough to him
and his daily walks of life to understand how
the circumstances hem in the exercise of his
discretion, limit him in that which he would like
to do, and prevent absolutely his carrying out
the ideals which as a free man he would be
glad to follow. The same thing is in a much
greater degree true of the power of the Presi-

98 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

dent and of the members of the administration.
Take for instance the appointing power. A mem-
ber of a community remote from the capital,
studying politics from the standpoint of entire
indifference, with the critical faculty well de-
veloped, wonders that a president, with high
ideals and professions of a desire to keep the
government pure and have efficient public ser-
vants, can appoint to an important local office
a man of mediocre talent and of no particular
prominence or standing or character in the com-
munity. Of course the President cannot make
himself aware of just what standing the official
appointed has. He cannot visit the district; he
cannot determine by personal examination the
fitness of the appointee. He must depend upon
the recommendations of others ; and in matters of
recommendations as indeed of obtaining office,
frequently it is leg muscle and lack of modesty
which win, rather than fitness and character. The
President has assistance in making his selection,
furnished by the Congressmen and the Senators
from the locality in which the office is to be filled ;
and he is naturally quite dependent on such
advice and recommendation. He is made the

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 99

more dependent on this because the Senate, by
the Constitution, shares with him the appointing
power. It is true that strictly and technically
speaking he has the initiative and the Senate only
the ratifying or confirming power ; but practically,
because of the knowledge of the Senators of the
locality, the appointing power is in effect in
their hands subject only to a veto by the Presi-
dent; and the Senators in turn are hampered,
first, by the fact that many competent and prom-
inent men will not accept the places, and again
by the fact that under our political system there
is much pressure on them to recognize the party
services of men who are more active as politicians
than they are successful as business men. On
the whole, I think the character of the Federal
employees the country over is excellent; but of
course there are exceptions, and it is the ex-
ceptions upon which the criticism of an admin-
istration is based, and properly based, because the
number of the exceptions determines the care
with which all such appointments are made.

This naturally leads to the consideration of
a limitation upon the policies which the President
may favor or undertake. Under our system of

100 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

politics the President is the head of the party
which elected him, and cannot escape responsi-
bility either for his own executive work or for
the legislative policy of his party in both Houses.
He is, under the Constitution, himself a part
of the legislature in so far as he is called upon
to approve or disapprove acts of Congress. A
president who took no interest in legislation,
who sought to exercise no influence to formulate
measures, who altogether ignored his responsi-
bility as the head of the party for carrying out
ante-election promises in the matter of new laws,
would not be doing what is expected of him by
the people. In the discharge of all his duties,
executive or otherwise, he is bound to a certain
extent to consult the wishes and even the preju-
dices of the members of his party in both Houses,
in order that there shall be secured a unity of
action by which necessary progress may be made
and needed measures adopted. I need hardly
point out, for I have already referred to it in my
first lecture, the absolute necessity of parties in
a popular government, and the fact that efficiency
of government, other things being equal, is greatly
promoted by party uniformity and solidarity of

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 101

opinion. In order to attain this unity of party
action, in order to make any progress for the
better, the administration is obliged to give up or
hold in abeyance measures that it would, other
things being equal, heartily approve; and, in a
series of compromises, it is bound to sacrifice some
of its aims in order to accomplish others more
important. Now it by no means follows that
this is on the whole not a useful condition in
government. \ Popular government must be a
series of compromises. I The resultant mean is
often better than the extreme which would be
reached if an administration were able to carry
out all its views. A conservative course is the
result of the very limitation imposed on the pro-
jected policies of the administration by the neces-
sity for conciliating the many different people
and interests that constitute controlling factors in
a party. It is doubtless true that under our gov-
ernment of the people things are not done that
ought to be done ; but on the other hand, if these
restraining influences were absent, we might be
led into extreme measures which would be disas-
trous in their results.l

The policy of those responsible for the national

102 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

administration in any respect must be judged as
a whole, after sufficient time has elapsed to meas-
ure properly what has been done. It is a very
unsafe and unfair thing to judge a single act and
its probable bearing on the rest of a policy of the
administration; and fortunately the people under-
stand this fact. In the end, the judgment of the
people is probably as safe and fair as any judg-
ment could be, for they take the administration
of public affairs by and large; and while they do
not always credit men with the highest and purest
motives, and recognize that there is much human
nature in man, they are not searching for reasons
for distrusting the good faith and the desire for
good government in their public servants.

One of the encouraging experiences of men who
live in Washington and are close to the main-
springs of national policy, both in Congress and
in the Executive, is to find how much less in-
fluential are private interests in the matter of
legislation and executive action than is generally
held by critics who are not familiar with the
situation. The hard work that is done by men
whose bugles are not blown, the effort that there
is on the part of legislators and executive officials

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 103

to subserve the public interest, cannot be known
except by intimacy with public affairs. I do not
mean to deny that at times private and special
interests do, in fact, exercise an influence to the
extent of defeating needed legislation; but in the
end, though it may take one or two or three Con-
gresses, the sense of public duty and the clearness
of vision that discussion and deliberation give
ultimately bring about the kind of legislation
which the people want, formulated by those whose
interest in the public welfare is sincere.

Of course there is a kind of influence at Wash-
ington that disfigures legislation and retards exec-
utive action of general importance and interest;
an influence exercised by those who prefer what
they suppose to be the interest of a locality or dis-
trict to the interest of the nation at large. The
people of congressional districts and of States
compete with each other through their representa-
tives in Congress and in the Senate to shape na-
tional legislation for local advantage; to secure
the investment of national funds in public works
and the construction of military posts and other
great governmental institutions in one part of the
country instead of another. It is impossible that

104 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

these influences should not be exerted, and they
do more or less affect the efficacy of measures
adopted for a national purpose. But these are
incidents inevitable in the character of the gov-
ernment that we have; they are inherent in our
system; and with the great benefits that proceed
from the popular basis of our government, we may
well put up with some inconveniences and minor
obstacles to the most efficient national administra-
tion.

One of the facts that is not often made prom-
inent is that in our Government at Washington
there is an entity distinct in many ways from
the President and Cabinet officers charged with
the responsibility of the executive policies, and
distinct from Congress charged with the respon-
sibility of the legislative policies. For one hun-
dred and thirty years, since the beginning of the
Constitution, we have been perfecting the admin-
istrative departments of the Government. Most
of the positions in these departments now are
filled by selection under the civil-service law or
by promotions from positions thus filled. We have
a complicated structure, which has grown with
the needs of the Government; it is an enor-

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 105

mous machine, so officered and adjusted that it
would run itself with great efficiency without a
President and without a Cabinet and without
Congress, except for the lack of the appropriation
of the money necessary to pay the cost. It is an
organization whose members have been trained by
long experience, and now, under the civil-service
law which prevents their being made the foot-
ball of politics and secures to them a permanent
tenure of office, are put in a position of im-
partiality and indifference to other considerations
than those of the efficiency of governmental work.
They are, it is true, affected more perhaps than
they need be by the traditions as to how govern-
mental work has been done from the beginning,
but my experience with this machine in two de-
partments is that generally this routine part of
the life of the Government (and it makes up
> ninety-five hundredths of that life) is carried on
by men who have an eye single to the interests
of the Government and to the conduct of its
affairs according to law and according to the pub-
lic interests. The civil-service law has now been
in operation more than a quarter of a century,
and, although violated at first, it has come to be

106 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

more and more regarded as essential to the life
of the Government; and it has finally made the
organization to which I refer indifferent to party-
changes and unaffected by them, and has greatly
increased the certainty of proper administra-
tion.

I do not mean by what I have said to mini-
mize the importance of the position of the Presi-
dent or of the heads of the departments in the
administration of public affairs. The heads have
to determine in many instances important ques-
tions of broad policy; but the aggregate of these
questions is quite small in proportion to those
which arise every day and have to be decided by
men who from long training are even better able
to decide them than their superiors who control
the administration. Of course the influence that
the heads of an administration may have upon
the whole civil service is very great, if the de-
termination of the heads of the Government that
the administration shall be pure and shall not
be affected injuriously by partisan or other undue
influence is well understood. It strengthens the
body of permanent civil servants in their good
work and secures from them a closer adherence to

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 107

the public interests and to the best traditions of
the service.

This Government, as you know, is divided into

three departments — the executive, the legislative,

and the judicial. It is frequently charged that

the tendency of the modern Executive is to usurp

the functions of Congress by seeking to control

and influence legislation in violation of the spirit

of the Constitution. I have already pointed out

the constitutional participation in legislation by

communications to Congress and by the exercise

of the veto power, with which the Executive is

expressly vested; and I have also attempted to

show what, under our system of politics, are

the position and obligation of the President as

head of the party through whose instrumentality

he must accomplish any progress dependent on

affirmative legislation. The party traditions not

only justify but require him to take an active

interest in it, and so to unify the members of his

party as to secure that solidarity without which

initiative for good is quite impracticable.

History does not bear out the charge that there
is any usurpation by the Executive of legislative
functions. On the contrary the tendency is ex-

108 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

actly the other way. Congress in its legislation
has frequently failed to recognize a thing which
the Constitution certainly intended, to wit: free-
dom of discretion in executive matters for the
Chief Magistrate and his subordinates. I need
not go back of the Tenure of Office Act, passed
by Congress in the administration of President
'Johnson, by which it was attempted to limit ma-
terially the power of appointment that the Presi-
dent certainly has under the Constitution. The
act was repealed after Mr. Johnson went out of
office, and I think it is generally recognized now
that it was an undue stretch of legislative power.
I do not mean to deny that the line between
proper legislative limitation upon the mode of
exercise of executive power and unconstitutional
restriction is sometimes very difficult to draw;
but the danger that the Executive will ever exceed
his authority is much less than the danger that
the Legislature will exceed its jurisdiction. The
Commons of England won freedom and brought
about a popular government through its insist-
ence upon holding the purse-strings ; and the Con-
gress of the United States has exactly that con-
trol over the Executive which enables it at all

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 109

times to restrain the exercise of executive power
by withholding the appropriations absolutely nec-
essary to the exercise of executive power at all.
With that dependence upon Congress, the execu-
tive branch can never be untrammelled in the
conduct of public affairs. It is always respon-
sible to Congress to explain what it has done with
the money already appropriated, and it must al-
ways make a showing of the money needed for
executive work during the next ensuing year. In
other words, the Executive is always a petitioner
at the door of Congress for the money necessary
to carry on public affairs; and as long as that
relation exists the frequently expressed fear that
the Executive is overshadowing the Legislature is
merely imaginative — useful for glowing periods
and party platforms, but for nothing else.

Life in Washington leads most men who are
impartial and who take broad views of affairs
to a condition of reasonable optimism as to the
progress toward better things. The account that
one receives of the defects of earlier administra-
tions and the corruption that at times prevailed
shows that we have made great improvement ; and
it is not unfair to say that there is a high standard

110 FOUR ASPECTS OF CIVIC DUTY

of morality and public conduct throughout all the
departments and the executive and legislative
branches of the Government. I do not mean to
deny that there are individual instances of neglect
of public duty and possibly of corrupt methods;
but, on the whole, one who is familiar with the
workings of the Government at Washington may
well take heart and courage at the general level of
good and honest legislation. Efficiency of adminis-
tration has been greatly promoted by the widening
of the application of the civil-service law; which
has so reduced the calls upon the time of the heads
of the departments and the President that they are
able to give to matters of public interest a great
deal of time which before the enactment of this
law was taken up in discussing the merest details
as to the selection of clerks.

There has been a question mooted whether it
would not be wiser to allow Cabinet officers to take
part in the debates of Congress, as do the Eng-
lish parliamentary executive leaders, who are
really elected as legislators to begin with and are
selected as executives afterward. I am inclined
to think that it might aid much the deliberations
of Congress if such a policy were adopted, but

THE NATIONAL EXECUTIVE 111

there are inconveniences connected with it that
perhaps will forever prevent a change of this
character.

The disposition of the Legislature to investi-
gate and criticise executive action is one of the
most important influences toward a better gov-
ernment that exists in our system. Investiga-
ting committees of Congress are always at work;
and the fear of such investigations, the fear of
just criticisms on the floor of either House, has
a most salutary and restraining effect upon the
naturally wasteful and somewhat arbitrary dis-
position of human nature in the exercise of power.
On the whole, when one looks into the system of
government at Washington and regards it from
the standpoint of an impartial, tolerant citizen and
critic, taking into consideration all the limitations
of structure and constitution which prevent any
government from becoming a perfect machine, he
cannot but reach the conclusion that we are a for-
tunate people, who have progressed far in the
development of an efficient public service and
in vindicating the theory of popular sovereignty.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles

This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

1Q72

MAR 1 9 1972

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