No one doubts, I think, that but for the thing we call the “corporation,” the relation of the corporation to the people, and the questions that such relationship raises, there would have been no New York campaign last fall on the lines that the New York campaign followed, and no results so full of question marks.

Mr. Hughes stood in the State for what Mr. Roosevelt stands in the Nation — the policy of holding the corporations to a strict accountability to law; a policy chiefly carried out through the medium of lawsuits. True, some amendment to the law, as it heretofore existed, has been made, and other amendments are suggested; but the main proposition in the programme of the progressive wing of the Republican party is that the law, as it stands, is almost if not quite sufficient — that the chief thing needed is to compel the corporations, as they now exist, to obey the law.

Mr. Hearst stood for the same things, nominal at least, but with this addendum: That he was in dead earnest, while the Republicans were not — that, if successful, he would rescue government from corporation control, while the Republican party is so subject to corporate influence that it cannot rescue itself from corporate control. And on this issue, in the main, he pushed his canvass to a conclusion that brought to the ticket headed by him recruits enough from the Republican ranks to divide with the Republican ticket, almost equally, the vote of the great State of New York.

Now, with Mr. Bryan’s announced policy, also before us, that the thing to do is to dig up the big corporations, root and branch — nothing different thus far being offered by any National political leader for the consideration of the people — the political weather for 1908 can be pretty fairly foretold. We may have a Presidential campaign not fought out on clear, high lines, on an issue upon which the people will be called upon to say aye and nay, but degenerated into a political mêlée, wherein the louder the denunciation of the corporation and all who are allied with it, the more likely will be the prospects of victory.

Thus confronted, is it not high time that the conservative intelligence and conscience of the country should look the situation squarely in the face? Are we indeed on the right track? Is reformation by denunciation the only cure? Is reformation by lawsuits the only cure, or the best cure? Is not the disease deeper, and must not, therefore, the cure go deeper into conditions as they exist to-day?

To answer these inquiries requires that we take a look backward, to the end, say of the Civil War closed, which was the beginning, in a general way, of the new industrial era.

When the Civil War closed, we were still an agricultural people. The property of the country was still in a very large measure the land of the country. The farmer’s boy still lived on the lands. Railways there were, but not the great railways of the present day; manufactures there were, but not the great so-called trusts; mercantile establishments, but not the great department store.

Since Lee’s surrender to Grant all of this has been transformed. The farmer’s boy is no longer in the country; he is in the great centers working for the corporation. The clerk in the mercantile establishment no longer looks forward to an individual career — he is the employee of a great corporation. The towns have grown, while the country has stood still; the corporation has grown, while individual careers in business and labor have become almost obsolete. During the period from 1865 to 1906 nearly every species of property, except land, has gone under corporate ownership and control.

I do not complain of this. I only put it before the reader as a fact. What I wish to set alongside of this fact, however, is the other fact — without which Mr. Hearst would have had no ground on which to build his appeal to human nature; without which Mr. Bryan and Mr. Roosevelt would have to rest their careers on other issues — the fact that the ownership and control of the property of the country, almost as fast as it passed into corporate form, passed away from the people. The causes I do not now discuss. I am only stating the fact. In the old industrial life, when agriculture was the largest interest of the country, the farms were owned by the people who occupied them. The farmer’s boys remained at home until the married; then they became owners of farms of their own, either in the neighborhood or further West. Indeed, the one great ideal of the statesmanship of that day was to distribute the lands to those who would occupy them — to divide up the proprietorship of the land among those who did the farming. In the new industrial life into which we have come, the farmer’s boy is in the towns, still contributing his help toward farming the lands, but from the machine shops and manufactories that turn out agricultural implements. And in these great industrial enterprises, all of them in corporate form, he has no interest as owner, and no prospect of such an interest. Through this channel alone — the draining of the farmer’s boy into the towns — one-fourth of our population, perhaps, has been turned away from the institution of private property as a National interest that concerns them.

In the old industrial life the merchandising of the country was carried on by individuals and small firms — each man behind the counter either owning an interest in the business, or looking forward to the time when he would own an interest in a similar business. The small merchant is no more. The salesman looking forward to ownership is no more — another mighty army added to those already named, who have been turned away from private property as a National interest that concerns them.

In the old industrial life the artisan owned his shop, and the journeyman and the apprentices worked for the day when they, too, would be independent proprietors. That day has gone. There are now no proprietor artisans, no expectant journeymen and apprentices — another mighty army added to those who have been turned away from the institution of private property as a National interest that concerns them.

The savings of a people are their uninvested surplus — the sums that the depositors have gathered together for which they have not found a satisfactory investment. In the old industrial life these savings went into proprietorship of one kind or another. They created the new enterprises that became the competitors of the old. They constituted then, as they constitute now, almost the sole capital available for the purposes of competition. But in the new industrial life, though the savings have greatly increased, the people invest, for themselves, little if any of their savings; nor do the people exercise any influence on how such savings shall be invested. Depositing them in some local financial institution, the depositors give the matter no further thought. The deposits, of course, are not inactive. Put upon the financial streams that converge in the great money centers, these deposits constitute almost the sole capital available to start new enterprises — the difference between the old life and the new being that in the old this available capital was still at the call of competition, while in the new it is within the control solely of those who own the present enterprises and are therefore interested in keeping out competition. A mighty shift, this, from the ideals that lie at the basis of the institution of private property under republican institutions. A mighty strain upon the patience and patriotism to which alone we can look for the maintenance of that institution. So that when you ask me where Mr. Hearst got his following, my answer is that a large part of his following was ready made for him in the conditions I have just stated.

With this, the underlying effect of the transformation from the old life into the new, before us, and remembering that human nature cannot be repealed, let us ask ourselves again, What is the thing to be done? Mr. Roosevelt, thus far, has confined himself to the enforcement of the law as it now exists. He is aiming, unless it be indirectly, at nothing calculated to bring back the people into the ownership of the country’s property — nothing calculated to counteract the system whereby the available capital of the country is placed at the disposition of those who already own the enterprises of the country. Is that to be the alpha and omega of the present corporation agitation?

Mr. Bryan follows closely along the same lines. To his vision the corporation does not loom up the necessary embodiment of the new industrial life — the form that in the very nature of things that new life was bound to take on. His vision, and the vision of those who see with him, is confined rather to the corporation as the embodiment of tendencies that necessarily must be oppressive. Governed by feelings like that, the corporation can never be made to be what it ought to be — a republican institution of republican government; an institution of the people, for the people. Governed by feelings like that, the corporation can never be made to be what our schools are, what our laws relating to real estate are, what our other institutions are — something that is ours and that concerns us because it is ours. On the contrary, under that kind of perspective the corporation appears as an alien, an outsider, a stranger with whom the great body of the people can have no relation other than that of strangers with a stranger. Is that to be the beginning and the end of the great awakening? Is it to be the permanent policy of the country that the corporation shall be isolated — put under the ban, as a house where smallpox has broken out is put under the ban? Or shall the house be cleaned up, remodeled, if necessary rebuilt on lines of conservatism, fidelity to trust, and honesty that will invite back into the new industrial life of the country the people of the country?

Will this policy of isolating the corporation — leaving it untouched except by denunciation or lawsuits — prevent monopoly? It has not thus far, in a single instance that I know of, broken up a monopoly. It has enjoined, by court decree, separate corporations from conspiring with one another to fix prices; but it has not prevented them from uniting in one large corporation, and in that way controlling prices.

Will this policy of isolation — leaving the corporation untouched except by lawsuits — restore competition? To restore competition there must be raised up competitors; and to raise up competitors requires that the capital of the country be available, not solely to those who already have the field, but to those who contemplate entering the field. Under the present policy governing corporations, the capital of the country is not thus available. Capital exists, exists in abundance, exists as the wealth, too, not of those whom we call the rich, but of the people at large. But it is not available to raise up competitors; for the competitor of the corporation must be itself a corporation, and under the free and easy, go-as-you-please present corporation policy of the country, the peo-ple at large do not directly invest their wealth in cor-porate enterprise of any kind. They prefer to intrust it rather to the financial institutions; and thus de-posited, it flows to those who own existing corpora-tions, and who on that account are interested, not in raising up competitors, but in suppressing them. No policy that keeps asunder the institutions that wield the capital of the country and the people who fur-nish it will succeed in restoring to industry the bal-ancing effects of competition. To raise up competi-tors, the instrumentality that utilizes capital, and the people who furnish it, must be brought together.

Will this policy of isolating the corporation — leaving it untouched except by lawsuits — bring peace to our country; satisfy the human instinct that lies at the bottom of all this unrest? Here is America our aim has been to create as much as we can. To that end every incentive has been offered, and every protection thrown around, the creation of new property. Here in America our aim has been to divide with labor, as equitably as can be done, the immediate profits of enterprise. To that end we have protected our workers against the leveling effects of work done in foreign lands, and have legalized the organizations that enable the workers, in dealing with capital, to deal with the strength of united interest. But beyond that point, except in the case of the public lands, we have not gone. We have taken no pains to furnish the worker with any instrumentality through which he might with reasonable safety, transmute a part of his day’s profits into a permanent property interest. We have taken no pains to interest him as proprietor at all. We have done nothing to furnish the people at large with an instrumentality through which their individual capital might be transmuted into permanent property interests. We have done nothing in that direction at all. The one instrumentality in which the new industrial life embodied itself, and in the nature of things was compelled to embody itself, though State-created, has thus far been left a shell, under whose roof and behind whose walls every form of treachery and nearly every form of theft were given free rein.

Instinctively the American seeks the ownership of property. It was the prospect of a property independence that brought the first Americans over the sea. It is that instinct that took their children to the West. Congress appealed to that instinct in the homestead and pre-emption acts, and the appeal has been responded to by more than a million and a half of American families. A policy that leaves that instinct unsatisfied — that appeals, not to the individual, his hope and prospect in life, but solely to that quality in human nature that gets satisfaction out of making others, who happen to be more fortunate, obey the law, laudable as that kind of satisfaction is, will bring no lasting peace. There can be in this country, permanently, no such thing as an exclusive proprietary class. Flesh and blood will not stand it. Intelligence and conscience rebel against it. The American voter, even now, in a blind way, is rising up against it. Sound economic judgment tells us that, compared with private enterprise, government ownership is a failure. Sound economic judgment tells us that, compared with private enterprise, government ownership would put skilled labor where neither organization nor skill would do the laborer much good; for let the labor market slip from those who possess it by organization and merit, to the wide expanses of politics, and all the advantages that organization and merit now hold would soon be leveled. Sound economic judgment tells us that the prosperity of America is due to the fact that the men who can invent are inventing; that the men who can think things out are thinking things out; that the men who can organize are organizing; that the men who can do the best things with their hands are doing the best things — each according to his individual gift; and that government ownership would upset all this — turn prosperity over to the keeping of pull or chance. But of what avail is sound economic judgment on this or any other subject when it runs counter to human nature? It is not because the wife in the market pays more than she has been accustomed to pay for the necessaries of life that the country is in a state of unrest. It is not because the husband gets less wages than he would like to get that this unrest exists. The unrest springs from that instinct in human nature that inspires every manly heart with an ambition to have some individual part in the achievements of his time; so that the question always remains, What will hold back the American people when they come to the point where they must choose, finally, between a system of private property in which they have come to feel they have no individual part, and property owned by the Nation of which they are a part? Will human nature suppress itself? Or will it be the institution, that no longer engages their interest, that will be engulfed?

The great Democratic party was founded as guardian to the individual man. Why does it not accept, intelligently accept, the economic destiny that has created the corporation, turning its energies to such corporate reformation as would bring back into industrial life, in the full enjoyment of what was meant to be his appointed portion, the individual man? The Republican party has shown its capacity to be a true friend of the people at the same time that it is a true friend of property — a true friend of property at the same time that it is a true friend of the people. It was the Republican party that put into the Constitution of the Nation the guaranty, the greatest that private property has to-day, that it should not be taken or abridged except under due process of law; along with the guaranty, the greatest that the humblest of our people have to-day, that life and liberty should ever be under the protection of national law. It was the Republican party that distributed the Western country into millions of farms, each the possession of some hopeful family of Americans; not fearing, however, to utilize the “corporation” to push through to the Pacific coast those hands of steel that, binding the old States into the new, made over these farms into populous States.

It is the Republican party that, through its tariff policy, claims to be securing to the worker with his hands the largest possible share in the division of the profits of enterprise. Why will not the Republican party, true to these inspiring ideals, put its mighty power behind the new ideal?

But what, you ask me, can these parties do? What can the people do to arrest the stream before it reaches the rapids — to substitute for the process that is now concentrating into the hands of the few the proprietorship and control of the incorporated life of the country, a process that will set out to widen and republicanize that life?

My answer is: Remove the causes. Thirty years ago the German people went through corporation experiences much like our own. There, as here, the corporation, as originally designed, was a mere shell. There, as here, under the shelter of that shell, the property of the country was being transferred from the German people at large, even the little they had, to the few. There, thirty years ago, as here now, great corporate scandals were exposed. And there, as here, the human nature that is everywhere behind civilization eventually began to recoil. It began there before it began here, only because conditions reached a climax there earlier than here, and because we as a people were too prosperous and too busy to look even a little way beneath the surface of things.

But when the work of reform did come there, it was a genuine reform. It did not content itself with indiscriminate denunciation, or with mere lawsuits. Nor did it die out, leaving the door still open to every character of corporation the cunning of men might conceive. Before a corporation can be organized in that country, it must prove, as in a court proceeding, its rightful title to a corporate existence. In the same way it must establish the amount and the character of the capitalization it is allowed to put out. When property is turned in, its value must be judicially ascertained. Upon officers and directors is not conferred supreme power; in the German corporation the shareholders’ meeting is the counterpart of our New England town meetings — a genuine assembly intended to do something more than pass resolutions of approval. And every violation of trust, not merely to the public, but to the shareholder as well, is quickly punished with punishment that smarts. There is in the German corporation no room for one to do, with impunity, in his capacity as a corporation officer or promoter, what if done individually would land him in the penitentiary.

I am not holding up the industrial life of the Germans as an example of what our own should be, or their corporation as an institution to be followed, line by line, in our own work of reconstruction. We have found for our workman ways for increasing his share in the division of the profits of enterprise that the German workman does not enjoy. What the American in the ordinary walks of life could lay by for investment is larger, happily much larger, than anything the German can lay by. But the example is none the less valuable; for it, on such conditions, the German corporation could be reconstructed on lines that have successfully interested, as proprietors, to the extent of their means, the German people at large — resulting in the fact that it is not upon her corporate industries, but upon her unjust landed proprietorship alone, that the forces of German Socialism are directed — what may not be expected in America when the work of corporation reform, in the true spirit of reform, is undertaken and accomplished.

But while I am not attempting in detail to point out the exact structure of the American corporation as it should stand when reconstructed, some of the principles on which the reconstruction should take place can be particularized. The reconstructed corporation, for instance, must have no place in it for those schemes of spoliation that, within or without, plunder the people whose capital has created it and whose patronage must support it. In the reconstructed corporation the securities issued must be related in some way to the values actually put in. In the reconstructed corporation, not only must the officers be trustees of the stockholders, held to the strict accountability to which individual trustees are now held, and denied the privilege, as individual trustees are now denied, of making profit out of their trust; but the administration of the trust, as in the case of individual trustees, must be constantly kept under the eye of some tribunal of the Government. And in the reconstructed corporation tangible inducements ought to be given to the workman, the clerk, the employee of every kind, to secure proprietorship.

I shall not attempt to point out, in detail, how existing corporations shall be brought into the new régime. Considering, however, that existing corporations depend largely on the public, from time to time, to take their securities, especially their bonded securities, the probability is that, as a matter of self-interest — in many cases of life or death — existing corporations would be compelled to conform their organization to the reconstructed organization prescribed by government; for otherwise they would brand themselves as suspects. Then, too, within the respective powers of the nation and States, to prescribe the kind of collateral that banks, insurance companies, and savings institutions shall not take for loans, the Nation and States could exert a leverage toward the new order of things that could not be resisted; for nearly every great corporation is a heavy borrower from these financial reservoirs of the people’s wealth.

But the purpose of this article does not require that I go far into details. That is not the first task to be accomplished. The first duty and the first task is to get the thought of the country turned from the by-roads of corporate reform to the main road — from aims that lead nowhere to a determined aim that will lead to practical results. No one who has observed carefully the workings of public ownership wishes public ownership, at least to any widespread degree; in no other way could the prosperity of the country — the individual prosperity of every man and woman of the country — be so quickly sunk. No help is in sight, as the Wisconsin Commissioner of Labor has just pointed out, from the so-called “co-operative” undertakings; the plain reason being that in this, as in public ownership, the undertakings are never conducted on business principles — never suitably manned. To be conducted on business principles — to be suitably manned — a business undertaking must start and grow in the natural order of things — manned usually by the men who build them up or by men who, in the natural order of business selection, must come to take their places.

The corporation, indeed, is the only form of proprietorship in sight in which our great new industrial life can embody itself, and maintain its vitality. But the corporation itself, as now constructed, looked at as I have tried to point out, from the standpoint of universal human nature (and by that standard it is bound to be judged), is built upon the sands. The duty and the task of this generation of Americans is to put it on the solid-ground of human interest — to so rebuild it that, as the antithesis of public ownership, it will present also a countenance that is human — to make for our incorporated industrial life a name that, along with the other great names of American achievement, can be put on our flag in the contest that is bound some day to come between the civilization of to-day, the product of what has been best in the exertions of mankind, and a civilization that would sink us to the level of what is the worst that mankind can endure. And some day, to some man, will be given the strength successfully to summon to this great task the good sense and the conscience of the American people.