Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 22.pdf/690

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THE “NEW POLITICS" HAT the United States is in a stage of transition,and that a great change in economic conditions is forcing the American people, at the beginning of the twentieth cen tury, to face new social and political problems in a constructive spirit, is the theme of Wil

liam Garrott Brown's article in the North American Review on “The New Politics." Mr. Brown opens with two striking quotations, one from James Bryce, the other from Macaulay. Mr. Bryce predicted twenty years ago that with the disappearance of the West ern frontier and the expansion of American industry to ﬁll up ﬁelds not yet occupied, the price of food would come to advance, pauper ism and unemployment would become more prevalent, and the ills of European society would appear on our soil. Over eighty years ago Macaulay wrote that as this country be came older, and the great majority of its population came to live from hand to mouth, vast wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few, the populace would be much more strongly tempted to spoliate the rich than under a simpler, more primitive régime. In Mr. Brown’s opinion, the time to which Mr. Bryce and Lord Macaulay looked forward is already upon us, and we are taking up new problems, new issues, all of them at bottom economic in their nature. The particular issue on which we can get the most guidance from the experience of Europe, he says, is that of conservation. Germany and France have furnished the object-lesson of scientiﬁc forestry, and Switzerland has shown what can be done in the national con servation of water-power, a great part of the light, heat and power used by the Swiss people being furnished by the government from this source. There really is not any question here:— No one, I suppose, would have the hardihood to affirm that we ought to waste our patrimony instead of husbanding it, or that we ought to con

sume those natural resources which, like the forests and the soil's energy, are capable of self-mainte nance and of increase, faster than they can be re stored. The only question should be of ways and means.

Is, then, the only question of conservation one of ways and means? In our judgment, Mr. Brown greatly underrates the diﬂiculty of this problem. For the discovery of the most desirable "ways and means" itself involves the settlement of momentous issues. Are the forests and water-powers to be preserved as a part of the public domain, or are they to be allowed to pass into the possession of private interests under an adequate system of public regulation? The vast issue clumsily termed that of "democracy vs. privilege" is involved. But this is not the only moment ous problem to be faced. Shall the future of the forests be determined by the people of the United States or by the people of the separate states; shall local autonomy be sacri

ﬁced to the centralizing tendencies of the American nation? These are surely not mere questions of "ways and means," for they aﬁ'ect the very warp and woof of American political and economic institutions. Passing from the issue of conservation, Mr. Brown next considers that presented by the suppression of competition by the growth of powerful industrial combinations. This he considers the chief of the new issues. To quote: We are confronted, let us say, with the problem of adapting the democratic principle to conditions that did not exist when our American democracy arose in the world: that is to say, to a ﬁeld no longer unlimited, to opportunities no longer bound less, and to an industrial order in which competition is no longer the controlling principle, an industrial order which is, therefore, no longer democratic, but increasingly oligarchical,-which may even become, in a way, monarchical, dynastic. To save itself politically. democracy must therefore become aggres sively industrial; it must somehow extend itself into that ﬁeld. Plainly, therefore, "laissez-fai'n" can no longer be its watchword. That was the

watchword of the végime of competition.

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