A Preface to Politics | Page 9

to death.
What the methodically-minded do not see is that the sterility of a
routine is far more appalling. Not everyone may feel that to push out
into the untried, and take risks for big prizes, is worth while. Men will
tell you that government has no business to undertake an adventure, to
make experiments. They think that safety lies in repetition, that if you
do nothing, nothing will be done to you. It's a mistake due to poverty of
imagination and inability to learn from experience. Even the timidest
soul dare not "stand pat." The indictment against mere routine in
government is a staggering one.
For while statesmen are pottering along doing the same thing year in,
year out, putting up the tariff one year and down the next, passing
appropriation bills and recodifying laws, the real forces in the country
do not stand still. Vast changes, economic and psychological, take
place, and these changes demand new guidance. But the routineers are
always unprepared. It has become one of the grim trade jokes of
innovators that the one thing you can count upon is that the rulers will
come to think that they are the apex of human development. For a
queer effect of responsibility on men is that it makes them try to be as
much like machines as possible. Tammany itself becomes rigid when it
is too successful, and only defeat seems to give it new life. Success
makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other
virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about
conservatism. But conditions change whether statesmen wish them to
or not; society must have new institutions to fit new wants, and all that
rigid conservatism can do is to make the transitions difficult. Violent
revolutions may be charged up to the unreadiness of statesmen. It is
because they will not see, or cannot see, that feudalism is dead, that
chattel slavery is antiquated; it is because they have not the wisdom and
the audacity to anticipate these great social changes; it is because they
insist upon standing pat that we have French Revolutions and Civil
Wars.

But statesmen who had decided that at last men were to be the masters
of their own history, instead of its victims, would face politics in a truly
revolutionary manner. It would give a new outlook to statesmanship,
turning it from the mere preservation of order, the administration of
political machinery and the guarding of ancient privilege to the
invention of new political forms, the prevision of social wants, and the
preparation for new economic growths.
Such a statesmanship would in the '80's have prepared for the trust
movement. There would have been nothing miraculous in such
foresight. Standard Oil was dominant by the beginning of the '80's, and
concentration had begun in sugar, steel and other basic industries. Here
was an economic tendency of revolutionary significance--the
organization of business in a way that was bound to change the outlook
of a whole nation. It had vast potentialities for good and evil--all it
wanted was harnessing and directing. But the new thing did not fit into
the little outlines and verbosities which served as a philosophy for our
political hacks. So they gaped at it and let it run wild, called it names,
and threw stones at it. And by that time the force was too big for them.
An alert statesmanship would have facilitated the process of
concentration; would have made provision for those who were cast
aside; would have been an ally of trust building, and by that very fact it
would have had an internal grip on the trust--it would have kept the
trust's inner workings public; it could have bent the trust to social uses.
This is not mere wisdom after the event. In the '80's there were
hundreds of thousands of people in the world who understood that the
trust was a natural economic growth. Karl Marx had proclaimed it
some thirty years before, and it was a widely circulated idea. Is it
asking too much of a statesman if we expect him to know political
theory and to balance it with the facts he sees? By the '90's surely, the
egregious folly of a Sherman Anti-Trust Law should have been evident
to any man who pretended to political leadership. Yet here it is the year
1912 and that monument of economic ignorance and superstition is still
worshiped with the lips by two out of the three big national parties.
Another movement--like that of the trust--is gathering strength to-day.

It is the unification of wage-workers. We stand in relation to it as the
men of the '80's did to the trusts. It is the complement of that problem.
It also has vast potentialities for good and