Life — March 18, 1915 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MARCH 18, 1915 “While there is Life there's Hope”* Published by J. A. Mireneee, Pres’t. LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY A. Mututr, Sec’y and Treas. 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Office, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E. C. OST of the obituary notices of the Sixty- third Congress ran on into summaries and reviews of the first half-term of President Wilson's administration, Mak- ing allowances for the snorts of Republican pa- pers who have to adduce some reasons for a change, = the notices were not so bad. No one who wants to speak hand- somely of President Wilson has far to seek for a basis for his remarks, and when said they sound better and carry more conviction than most of the un- handsome things said of him, We need to recall now and then what he is trying to do and what he has to contend with. He is trying to arrest or restrict the control of human life in this country by too few people who have acquired too much power. Almost any intglligent, observant per- son will agree that this desired restric- tion of the power of property and business has come to be necessary. Or- ganization, stimulated and extended by all the mechanical inventions, has made life a new problem, and one that it is very difficult to work out. Mr. Wil- son is trying to do his share of the work of solving it, and the Democrats, in the main, are with him. Plenty of people realize the need of limiting the power of property so long as the idea is general and the property affected belongs to some one else. But when the idea becomes concrete, and “especially when some of the property belongs to themselves, the idea of limit- ing its powers begins to look “ vision- ary”. The Republican party, if it stands for anything just now, stands for the protection of the rights and privileges of property. It may admit— probably would—that business needs watching, and perhaps even regulation, but it does not want it to be watched or regulated to its detriment by anybody, nor by Democrats, even to its good. O Mr. Wilson and the Democrats in their efforts are up against a great deal of property and the votes and newspapers that represent it. And they are also up against loyalty to the existing order. This loyalty of hundreds of thousands of citizens to existing order is almost the same as loyalty to a king or a kaiser. In some persons it is a policy based con- sciously on self-interest, but in lots of others it is a sentiment. The main thing a king represents is the established order. Good people have often stuck to bad kings for no better reason than that what they were used to seemed right to them. And for the same rea- son they will stick to bad practices in railroads, trusts, public utility com- panies and banking combinations, bad habits of business and bad laws. They are honest people and they hate to sec anybody’s belongings, no matter how acquired, taken away from them. Their instinct of fidelity prompts them just as surely to side with the New York Central in New York or the Pennsyl- vania Railroad in Pennsylvania as the same instinct prompted the Jacobites to side with the Stuarts. Honest people of this sort are what give stability to political institutions. The Jacobin temperament is useful when things have got so bad that they are due to blow up, but when you have a going machine that only needs tinker- ing, the Jacobite, hold-fast tempera- ment has its abundant value. Mr. Wilson has enough Jacobin in him for present political neces- sities, but he also has a substantial infu- sion of hold-fast. He does not want to destroy the existing order. He wants to save it by a necessary medication. It is certain that he will make mistakes and likely that he will make blunders, but there is a better quality of political hope in him than in anyone else at present visible in cither party. We had to put the Democrats in power, because the Republicans did not have it in them to do what the country needed. Mr. Wilson was far and away the best visible Democrat to be Presi- dent. He has done some wonderfully good things, and he is likely to do more, He has in him the capacity to do them. If he has also in him the capacity to get in wrong on occasion. That is to be expected and is no more than the legitimate cost of having him for President. In the end he ought to get with him his full share of the hon- est people who are loyal to existing order and don’t want anybody to lose property except by due process of just laws. USINESS is reported to be nervous about the gentlemen appointed members of the new Federal Trade Commission. Business doubts that they are equal to their duties, is uncertain what their duties are, and dubious whether it is better for business that they should be equal to them or other- wise. It is disappointed because more men of high reputation as business men are not members of the commission. That business should not like its doctor at first sight is not altogether surprising. It would prefer to put the patients in charge of the treatment; but, after all, that is not the way doc- toring is done. Its representative news- papers say the new board is a political creation for political ends. But the 5