The Government of the Free

...The answer is to be found on the lips of those engaged in the industrial battle...

...and neither its difficulties nor its dividends can be surrendered, without the gravest violation of both sense and justice, to the dominion of outsiders...

...And yet there is certainly a legitimate sphere for the operation of government in the task of promoting human welfare...

...There is no publicity value in being a private lover, and so their love is proclaimed loudly...

...how far aloof even an honest legislative body is from an understanding of the actual industrial scene...

...and it makes federal law inoperative in so far as final settlement is concerned...

...If wooden pegs specified in the contract were to be six inches long, what could be done if upon delivery most ©f them proved a millimetre shorter...

...The scope of government regulation has expanded so far during recent years that instead of affording, as it is supposed to, harmonious interaction between the various groups and interests of the population, it practically brings human traffic to a standstill wherever it acts with real efficiency...

...Time has proved how impossible it is to correlate legal enactment and economic change...

...It authorizes arbitration on the basis of a code formulated and adopted by railway employees and owners...

...At least two very recent incidents have indicated the soundness of this view...

...The first thing they do is to convince the public of their general love for humanity...

...it appeals for a decision to boards comprised of men from within the industry...

...No one need wonder that students of politics are more and more insistently calling attention to the weakness of the democratic hypothesis that government is a rubber-stamp remedy for the ills of man...

...The abiding chaos of the machinery which presumes to govern traffic in alcohol is, perhaps, the most widely advertised objectlesson ; but the disarray is scarcely less great in a multitude of other cases where rules are expected to control vital, and therefore constantly changing, economic and domestic activities...

...For these two decades, whatever else they may have failed to accomplish for human welfare, have completely knocked in the head the romantic fetish of sacrosanct and inviolable state control...

...By virtue of authority granted to it by cooperative consent wholly within industry, the Standards Committee and its subsidiaries now settle all such differences in conformity with an intelligent and constantly improving code...

...What is really astonishing is the continued plea for more laws, more civic supervision, which is voiced by certain organizations...

...and how difficult it is for anything but a hard-fisted lobby to put even a harmless measure through a committee...

...It assumes that the training of the young is not the burning business of those who have the only legitimate title to the young, but to the state and its bureaucracies...

...One might almost say that the old Railroad Labor Board was the critical test of what government could do in the regulation of industry...

...When we recall to what extent the socialist program— which was merely a chain of accurate deductions from the premise of an all-wise government—had colored all plans for social reform at the opening of the century, we seem to be thinking about an era far distant from our own...

...The future may, therefore, witness an improved state action for the guarantee of the public social welfare, provided sufficiently energetic leadership for sound principles can be found...

...Manufacturing depends for its success upon how much purchasing power there may be to dispose of the product...

...We can no more afford government regulation of mind and character formation than we can afford the iron monotony of politics in business life...

...Generally, their plan follows the Episcopal marriage ceremony or Mrs...

...The attempt to find an answer by appealing to the courts resulted in an almost infinite wrangling with no prospect for definite settlement...

...We are beginning to see, for example, that the relation between production and the cost of living is not so much a matter of battle between a greedy employer and a needy worker as it is an affair of stable monetary value...

...Its affiliations are all with the antiquated socialistic mind...

...The next thing to do is to have a plan or to offer their good offices...

...We might add to these two achievements others of more remote but scarcely less significant interest...

...The situation indicated in his warning happens to be very soberly and gauntly typical...

...THE GOVERNMENT OF THE FREE THE chief of police caused a stir of some amplitude in Washington society by predicting that, if the present rate of arrests were kept up, more than a quarter of the city's total population would be summoned to court during the current year...

...And it must be admitted that it was Mr...

...And this is only one instance of the rapidly growing consciousness of industry that its problems are its own, and that an appeal to outside jurisdiction is both costly and futile...

...Does this exist today...

...If we may return to a problem of especial importance to the readers of this magazine, it is patent that the present effort to monopolize the system of public education in the United States is decidedly not in line with advanced, practical thought concerning the proper sphere of federal influence...

...For instance, the development of industrial standardization into the work now being accomplished by the American Engineering Standards Committee is probably one of the most important economic accomplishments of our time...

...Perhaps the heart of the educational controversy might not unfairly be stated in this fashion: The family is the noblest and most important of industrial enterprises, because its product is men and women...

...standards of living depend almost entirely upon how much produce can be obtained with the available purchase power...

...The very background of political control has collapsed...

...He was not amusing himself with a caricature...

...And certainly it is of interest to see how the problems of agriculture are now being linked up with credit— not wages—in such schemes as the organization of cooperative marketing...

...This bill might almost be termed, from the modern point of view, an exemplary measure for the regulation of economic differences...

...To a large extent its failure may be traced, not so much to dishonesty or incapacity, as to the failure to grasp a sound philosophy of action...

...It developed out of public experience with the management of traffic, and to some extent it dovetailed into the functions of the Interstate Commerce Commission...

...Rorer's Cook Book...

...for if it had solid support at all, that was public confidence...

...The first was the settlement of the anthracite strike through the agency of Mr...

...Although Americans had grown accustomed to such constructive industrial developments as the Baltimore and Ohio plan for "union management cooperation," the stand outlined in the Watson-Parker bill for the abandonment of the Railroad Labor Board was none the less novel...

...This is done so that when the strike is settled they can point with pride to their helpfulness...

...Richard F. Grant, who voiced the growing repudiation of government control in the following picturesque diction: "When a coal strike develops, many champions of the people with political hopes start to develop ways and means to capitalize the situation for their own benefit...

...In announcing the new policy of the American Federation of Labor, President Green last year stressed the necessity for looking ahead to a time when workingmen would share the 562 THE COMMONWEAL March 31, 1926 responsibilities of management and would bargain squarely on their own feet...

...Indeed, we can afford it far less, because we live by the hope that our children shall be citizens, indeed, but also shadows of ourselves and, however distantly, mirrors reflecting the noble freedom of Divinity...

...These, in spite of their occasional valuable moral earnestness, seem to be distinguished first of all by a Rip Van Winkleish indifference to the last twenty years...

...The second incident is probably still more significant...

...In other words, government has been misled in its social efforts by the more or less conscious assumption that the Marxian analysis of economics was correct...

...That it should now be repudiated is no less crucial an indication of which way affairs and opinion are moving...

...Mass production made it practically impossible to avoid continuous disputes about the relative accuracy with which contracts were carried out, either between employer and employee, or between producer and purchaser...

...Grant and his associated conferenciers who ended the disastrous coal war, while Washington stood looking on with its hands tied...