Modern American Prose Selections | Page 7

many questions;
that we are unwilling to accept anything as settled; that we are curious,
distrustful, and as relentlessly logical as a child.
For what are we but creatures of the night Led forth by day, Who needs
must falter, and with stammering steps Spell out our paths in syllables
of pain?
There are no grown-ups in this new world of democracy. We are trying
an experiment such as the world has never seen. Here we are, so many
million people at work making a living as best we can; 90,000,000
people covering half a continent--rich, respected, feared. Is that all we
are? Is that why we are? To be rich, respected, feared? Or have we
some part to play in working out the problems of this world? Why
should one man have so much and many so little? How may the many
secure a larger share in the wealth which they create without destroying
individual initiative or blasting individual capacity and imagination? It
was inevitable that these questions should be asked when this republic
was established. Man has been struggling to have the right to ask these
questions for 4,000 years; and now that he has the right to ask any
questions surely we may not with reason expect him to be silent. It is
no answer to make that men were not asking these questions a hundred
years ago. So great has been our physical endowment that until the
most recent years we have been indifferent as to the share which each
received of the wealth produced. We could then accept cheerfully the

coldest and most logical of economic theories. But now men are
wondering as to the future. There may be much of envy and more of
malice in current thought; but underneath it all there is the feeling that
if a nation is to have a full life it must devise methods by which its
citizens shall be insured against monopoly of opportunity. This is the
meaning of many policies the full philosophy of which is not generally
grasped--the regulation of railroads and other public service
corporations, the conservation of natural resources, the leasing of
public lands and waterpowers, the control of great combinations of
wealth. How these movements will eventually express themselves none
can foretell, but in the process there will be some who will
dogmatically contend that "Whatever is, is right," and others who will
march under the red flag of revenge and exspoliation. And in that day
we must look for men to meet the false cry of both sides--"gentlemen
unafraid" who will neither be the money-hired butlers of the rich nor
power-loving panderers to the poor.
Assume the right of self-government and society becomes the scene of
an heroic struggle for the realization of justice. Take from the one
strong man the right to rule and make others serve, the right to take all
and hold all, the power to grant or to withhold, and you have set all
men to asking, "What should I have, and what should my children
have?" and with this come all the perils of innovation and the hazards
of revolution.
To meet such a situation the traditionalist who believes that the last
word in politics or in economics was uttered a century ago is as far
from the truth as he who holds that the temporary emotion of the public
is the stone-carved word from Sinai.
A railroad people are not to be controlled by ox-team theories, declaims
the young enthusiast for change. An age that dares to tell of what the
stars are made; that weighs the very suns in its balances; that mocks the
birds in their flight through the air, and the fish in their dart through the
sea; that transforms the falling stream into fire, light, and music; that
embalms upon a piece of plate the tenderest tones of the human voice;
that treats disease with disease; that supplies a new ear with the same

facility that it replaces a blown-out tire; that reaches into the very grave
itself and starts again the silent heart--surely such an age may be
allowed to think for itself somewhat upon questions of politics.
Yet with our searchings and our probings, who knows more of the
human heart to-day than the old Psalmist? And what is the problem of
government but one of human nature? What Burbank has as yet made
grapes to grow on thorns or figs on thistles? The riddle of the universe
is no nearer solution than it was when the Sphinx first looked upon the
Nile. The one constant and inconstant quantity with which man must
deal is man. Human nature responds so far as we can see to the same
magnetic pull and push that moved it in the days of Abraham and