GOV. HUGHES ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
Johnston, Charles
GOV. HUGHES ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Do the Revelations of Graft Show Any Deep-Seated Unsoundness in the Life of the American People? Mr. Hughes Thinks Not By CHARLES JOHNSTON I FIRST saw Mr....
...Hughes consider the matter, with a great deal of understanding and real breadth of view...
...I was struck with the equal balance of his mind, its strong judicial power...
...They would, perhaps, prefer to have acted differently in their relations with laws and lawgivers...
...The character of Mr...
...With notable quietness of voice and act, urbane, good-natured, patient, he seized with marvelous quickness the loose end of some financial tangle, and inch by inch drew the knots forth into the light and unraveled them...
...something worse than a common crime...
...and especially of the strong, successful men whose acts had been brought forth into the limelight...
...Whoever is involved in acts of this underhand character should feel that he is guilty of a traitorous act...
...So they reached a general laxity of view, and came to do as a matter of course very many things they would have flatly disapproved of, could they have seen them in their true light, as cutting at the root of liberty and justice...
...debt at the rate of a hundred millions a year...
...One recognized a mind at once practical and philosophical...
...Far from palliating or excusing lawlessness, we ought to feel, and all Americans ought to feel, that in entering these devious ways, we are gravely guilty...
...Largely through the newness of the country, its very rapid development, and the rawness which goes with sudden growth...
...Men of great inherent force were born in the era of rapid westward expansion...
...any general drift away from the ideals of our earlier days, the great days when the Republic was founded...
...something more than a misdemeanor...
...How Civic Corruption Developed I THINK Mr...
...Law must be held supreme, and must be loyally obeyed, most of all in a democracy, where there are no agencies of conservation to fill its place...
...How then have the conditions so widely exploited, and so notorious, arisen...
...They had no very high opinion of those who made the laws or of those who Such oblique approaches to our legislatures as have recently been uncovered, should be given their true name,—treason: treason to the principles of liberty, to the principles on which our state is built...
...I think he believes heartily in the American people, in American ideals, and in the soundness of heart and principle of the great majority of his fellow-countrymen...
...something worse than a common crime...
...So it happened that, if these vigorous explorers and pioneers found themselves thwarted by legislative obstacles, they were tempted to cut a path through these obstacles, forcing themselves ahead, without too nice a regard for law...
...something more than a misdemeanor...
...Hughes is convinced that they do not...
...We need, therefore, a deeper reverence for law...
...Whoever is involved in acts of this underhand character should feel that he is guilty of a traitorous act...
...If they could not untie the legislative knot, they were always ready to cut it...
...Such oblique approaches to our legislatures as have recently been uncovered, should be given their true name,—treason...
...We spoke at some length of the recent revelations of the obliquity of corporations, and Mr...
...Hughes spoke with the deepest conviction and seriousness of the lasting obligation of obedience to law...
...He met the strong men of finance openly, squarely, above all fairly and temperately, and it was his patient open-mindedness, not less than his intellectual force, that enabled him to bring his work to so triumphant a conclusion...
...But we must not for a moment think that, because he could thus take into account the circumstances which made the habit of law-breaking so easy, that he therefore in any way condoned or palliated that law-breaking...
...and the even-handed justice of his reasoning, neither falling into unmeasured condemnation, nor palliating sins against the law...
...He neither railed nor stormed nor denounced...
...We need, therefore, a deeper reverence for law...
...Hughes towards the close of the great Insurance investigation...
...Do these revelations of wholesale graft and undue influence show any deep-seated unsoundness in the life of the American people...
...a realization of the truth that to corrupt the fountain of law is treason...
...They strode forth on the path to success, and with a single eye to the goal they had set before them...
...treason to the principles of liberty, to the principles on which our state is built...
...Thus did Mr...
...The seventeen miners killed last week in Birmingham, Alabama, were probably the victims of those "safe" explosives which have been found by government tests to be about as safe as a candle in an acetylene tank...
...Some time after that, I had an opportunity to talk the matter over with Mr...
...a realization of the truth that to corrupt the fountain of law is treason...
...This disregard for law and legal restrictions, which has come to be so general, so unhappily characteristic of our country, is also due, in a large degree, to the very imperfect way in which our laws are often administered, and to the manifold imperfections in the laws themselves...
...Hughes expressed itself clearly in his attitude...
...Hughes had many clear and penetrating things to say...
...That Panama libel hasn't hurt our credit very much after all...
...When our very successful men reach the goal, they doubtless look back over the way they have trodden with entire satisfaction, and without any grave twinges of conscience...
...Yet they do not take their obliquity very deeply to heart, nor does it spoil their self-complacency...
...With the energy of young giants, they hewed their way through jungles of obstacles and opposition, taking little care for the nature and source of that opposition and these obstacles, or of the principles on which opposition might be based...
...For the first time, the greatest combinations of capital, aggregating billions of dollars, were brought before the bar of justice, and effectively checked...
...On the contrary, Mr...
...The investigation was held in one of the courtrooms of the City Hall, and for weeks the force and penetration of the future Governor of New York State made that court room the center of American life and thought...
...The United States is running in...
...Law must be held supreme, and must be loyally obeyed, most of all in a democracy, where there are no agencies of conservation to fill its place...
...Hughes, and to ask him what conclusions he drew from his investigations, and from the revelations of that inquiry, as to the general moral tone and character of the American people...
...and, had conditions been different, they probably would have acted differently...
...able to lay hold of the deep principles of human life, and at the same time familiar with the facts of the market-place...
...administered them, and looked on them very much as they looked on obstinate and hostile competitors, as something to be got out of the way, by any and all available means...
...With fifty legislatures working year in and year out, besides the Federal Congress, it is no great wonder that our legislators spin a tangled web...
Vol. 1 • February 1909 • No. 7
