10
recent book by a notable English Liberal leader, Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, there occurs the following sentences dealing with this subject:
“Labor itself had experienced the full brunt of the attack. It had come, not from the politicians, but from the judges; but in this country we have to realize that within wide limits the judges are in effect legislators, and legislators with a certain persistent bent which can be held in check only by the constant vigilance and repeated efforts of the recognized organ for the making and repeal of law.”
It thus appears that even in England it is necessary to exercise vigilance in order to prevent reactionary thwarting of the popular will by courts that are subject to the power of the Legislature. In the United States, where the courts are supreme over the Legislature, it is vital that the people should keep in their own hands the right of interpreting their own Constitution when their public servants differ as to the interpretation.
I am well aware that every upholder of privilege, every hired agent or beneficiary of the special interests, including many well-meaning parlor reformers, will denounce all this as “Socialism” or “anarchy”—the same terms they used in the past in denouncing the movements to control the railways and to control public utilities. As a matter of fact, the propositions I make constitute neither anarchy nor Socialism, but, on the contrary, a corrective to Socialism and an antidote to anarchy.
SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE TO THE WAGE-WORKERS
I especially challenge the attention of the people to the need of dealing in far-reaching fashion with our human recources, and therefore our labor power. In a century and a quarter as a nation the American people have subdued and settled the vast reaches of a continent; ahead lies the greater task of building upon this foundation, by themselves, for themselves, and with themselves, an American commonwealth which in its social and economic structure shall be four square with democracy. With England striving to make good the human wreckage to which a scrapheap scheme of industrialism has relegated her, with Germany putting the painstaking resources of an Empire at the work of developing her crafts and industrial sciences, with the Far East placing in the hands of its millions the tools invented and fashioned by Western civilization, it behooves Americans to keep abreast of the great industrial changes and to show that the people themselves,through popular self-government, can meet an age of crisis with wisdom and strength.
In the last twenty years an increasing percentage of our people have come to depend on industry for their livelihood, so that to-day the wage-workers in industry rank in importance side by side with the tillers of the soil. As a people we cannot afford to let any group of citizens or any individual citizen live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency. We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure.
