Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/73

 States and cities was given by Ostrogorski in his Democracy (1912), where the operations of the party and electoral system in the hands of business interests were set. forth with an abundance of detailed evidence that was convincing. The early history of the Standard Oil Trust, by my friend Henry D. Lloyd of Chicago, accompanied by Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities, helped to reveal those weaknesses in American institutions, and my personal talks with these and other “muck-rakers” (as they were termed by the Press of the profiteers) gave me a clearer understanding of the defects of a political democracy divorced from the terms of economic equality that are essential to its equitable working.

Repeated visits to America during the past half- century have perhaps taught me more of the ethics and politics of the economic system in its modern capitalistic shape and development than any experience available in England, where the play of social-economic forces is more obscure and more impeded by traditional and humane considerations. This contrast appears most striking in the recent American efforts to achieve the elements of political control over unemployment, destitution, and conditions of labour, which have long been established as accepted factors in the working of our own economic system.

Before leaving the American scene I should acknowledge the deep debt I owe to several economic and political teachers with whom I was brought into close