Ethics in Service Part 2

The time taken up in the consideration of minor appointments by executive officers, the President and Cabinet officers especially, is a great waste and no one can know the nervous vitality that can be expended upon them until he has had actual experience.

Of course they lead to some amusing experiences, for there is nothing which gives such a chance for the play of human impulse as office-seeking. I remember having a lady come into my office when I was Secretary of War. Her boy had pa.s.sed the examination for West Point, but a medical board had examined him and found that his chest did not measure enough for his height. She came in to urge me to waive that defect. I explained to her the necessity for great care in the appointment of army officers, because if, after being commissioned, they had any organic trouble, they were disqualified for further discharge of their duty, and would be retired on three-fourths pay without rendering any real service to the government. She listened with gloom to my explanation, and asked me to look at the papers. I took them in her presence and went through them. I found that the young man had, on the basis of 100, made 93 per cent in all his mental examinations. That isn't done by every candidate for West Point, and there is no reason why we should not have brains as well as brawn in army officers. So I looked again at the measurements and concluded he was a man we ought not to lose. I told her: "Madam, I did not have so much difficulty in filling out my chest measurement. Your boy shows such general intelligence that I have no doubt he will have sense enough to pursue a regimen that will make him sufficiently enlarge his chest measurement, so I am going to waive the objection and let him in." She had not expected so quick a decision in her favor, and was taken back a little. She hesitated a minute, and then, with an angelic smile, she said to me, "Mr. Secretary, you are not nearly so fat as they say you are."

Then I had another experience. A lady in Washington, whose husband had some political influence, came and labored with me for six weeks or more to appoint her son to a position. She secured the aid of Senators and Congressmen in formidable number and came with them to see that they spoke with emphasis. The place was one requiring technical qualification, and following the recommendation of the head of the Bureau, I appointed somebody else. I then received a letter from the mother, saying that I was most ungrateful, since I declined to make her a happy woman as I could have done by a turn of my hand. She complained further that she had labored with her state delegation and got all the votes for an administration bill in which I was especially interested and this was the way I had rewarded her.

When you get a letter like that, the first thing you do is to think how you can be severe with a person who has committed an impropriety, or even been a little impertinent. Then you may compose an answer. Then if you are wise, you will put the letter in a drawer and lock the drawer.

Take it out in the course of two days--such communications will always bear two days' delay in answering--and when you take it out after that interval, you will not send it. That is just the course I took. After that, I sat down and wrote her just as polite a letter as I could, telling her I realized a mother's disappointment under such circ.u.mstances, but that really the appointment was not left to my mere personal preference, that I had to select a man with technical qualifications, and had, therefore, to follow the recommendation of the head of the Bureau. I expressed the hope that her son would go on to accomplish what she had hoped for him in the position which he then had.

That mollified her and she wrote me a note saying she was sorry she had written as she had.

But the appointment I sent in was not confirmed at once and after an interval I received a letter which purported to come from her husband, though it was in the same handwriting as all the others. I was therein advised that, due to the nervous prostration that had followed her disappointment in this case, she had to take to her bed and had developed a most serious case of cancer of the stomach. Would I not restore her to health by withdrawing the first name and replacing it by her son's? I had to write another letter, this one to the husband, to say that I hoped the diagnosis would prove to be inaccurate, that I sympathized with him in the sorrow he must have in the serious illness of his wife, but that it was impossible to withdraw the name sent in.

The man whom I appointed was confirmed, and within two days after I received that letter, we gave a musicale at the White House. The first two people to greet Mrs. Taft and me were this husband and wife, though the wife had so recently been _in articulo mortis_.

Another great power of the President is his control of our foreign relations. In domestic matters, the Federal government shares every field, executive, judicial and legislative, with the states, but in foreign affairs, the whole governmental control is with the President, the Senate and Congress. The states have nothing to do with it. The President initiates a treaty and the Senate confirms it. The Senate, however, cannot initiate a treaty, the President alone can do that.

Congress' powers to declare war and regulate our foreign commerce are its chief powers in respect to our foreign relations. So that, except in ratifying treaties, in regulating commerce and in declaring war, the President guides our whole foreign policy.

Through the State Department he conducts all negotiation and correspondence with other governments and according to the Const.i.tution he receives amba.s.sadors and foreign ministers. Now you might possibly think that that meant only that he must have a flunky at the White House to take their cards--but it means a good deal more. He appoints amba.s.sadors and ministers to other countries and instructs them. He receives the diplomatic representatives from other countries and does business with them. He construes treaties and a.s.serts the rights of our government and our citizens under them. He considers and decides the rights of other governments and their subjects in a way which practically binds our government and people. And in order to receive amba.s.sadors and ministers, he must determine whether they have been properly accredited, so that they have the proper authority to act for the country they claim to represent.

When there is a dispute as to what person is the chief executive of a foreign country and therefore ent.i.tled to send an amba.s.sador or minister, the President must decide it. In other words, he alone can exercise the power of recognition. How important a power this is, we may know from our recent experiences with Mexico, for President Wilson, by withholding recognition from General Huerta, was able to render his longer tenure as chief executive impossible.

In our foreign relations it is often the President's duty to formulate the national claim of sovereignty over territory whose ownership is in dispute. This is a political question and his decision or claim in regard to it is taken as final by the Supreme Court.

In the Fur-Seal Controversy, Mr. Blaine took the position that our jurisdiction reached out over the Bering Sea. The question was contested in the Supreme Court by the British and the Canadian governments. The Supreme Court said: "We cannot determine this. It is a political question and must, therefore, be decided by the President through his Secretary of State." We then submitted the issue to an international tribunal, and the decision was against us.

Another great power of the President is the power of pardons and reprieves. This is not to be determined by rules of law nor indeed by absolute rules of any kind and must, therefore, be wielded skilfully lest it destroy the prestige and supremacy of law. Sometimes one is deceived. I was. Two men were brought before me, both of whom were represented as dying. When a convict is near his end, it has been the custom to send him home to die. So, after having all the surgeons in the War Department examine them to see that the statements made to me about them were correct, I exercised the pardoning power in their favor. Well, one of them kept his contract and died, but the other seems to be one of the healthiest men in the community today.

The President is also the t.i.tular head of a party and ought to have a large influence in legislation. He is made responsible to the country for his party's majority in Congress, and does thereby have some voice in legislation. Some Presidents have more control than others, but all Presidents find as the patronage is distributed, and as the term goes on, that the influence and power that they have over legislation rapidly diminishes. In fact, when there are no more offices to distribute and somebody else comes into view as the next President, the authority of the inc.u.mbent becomes strictly limited to his const.i.tutional functions.

All of this tends to show that a President who seeks legislative changes and reforms should begin early.

The people think that the Presidency gives a man an opportunity to make a lot of personal appointments. I can recall some of these personal appointments, but I tell you they are very few. There are certain political obligations involving the recognition of party leaders which he has to take into consideration with reference to some appointments.

But when it comes to purely personal appointments, one can count them on the fingers of one hand. It is well that it is so. A President with his proper sense of duty finds many men in office whom he ought to let continue and the question of friendship for others can play no part in displacing them.

The social influence of the President in Washington is not much. I think perhaps it might be useful if it were a little more, for the question of precedence, which makes everybody outside of Washington laugh, sometimes becomes a very serious matter. As the French amba.s.sador once said, when there are three hundred people, they cannot all go through the door at one time. Somebody has to go first, therefore it is most important to fix who that somebody shall be. But n.o.body in Washington has the authority to say. If only the army and navy were concerned, the matter would be easy enough, because they are controlled by the President and he can issue orders that they must respect, but with civil officers he has no such authority. Congress could, of course, provide rules of social and official precedence, either by legislation or executive order, as is done in all European countries. But here such a proposal would be laughed out of Congressional halls, though it would be a wise measure to prevent confusion, unnecessary friction and heartburning.

The very men who make most fun of such matters and profess to despise their consideration are in actual practice the most unreasonable as to their own places at functions. The House of Representatives is supposed to be the embodiment of democracy and contempt for social distinctions, yet of all the people in the world who have made a fuss over the matter of precedence, speakers of the House of Representatives have been the most insistent on their proper place at official dinners. The speaker says: "I represent the body of the people who come from the soil and the people who make this country. Therefore, I decline to sit after the presiding officer of the Senate." An amba.s.sador says: "I am the personal representative of my sovereign. If he were here in Washington, he would sit next to the President." The Cabinet officer says: "The President is the head. I am connected with him as Secretary of War, the Cabinet is a small body and the Senate is a large body. Therefore, we are bigger men than the Senate and we ought to have precedence." In fact, the head of a scientific bureau came in to see me one day and said, "I think you ought to put me after the Supreme Court." He even filed a brief with me on the subject, to the effect that "I run an independent department. The judges represent the judicial branch, and the President the executive branch, and the heads of the two Houses, the legislative branch, while I represent the scientific branch." Indeed, the matter of procedure is not such a joke as it seems outside. It is not so important as to who comes first as that their order of precedence should be once determined.

The President is made responsible for everything, especially for hard times. Of course his supporters claim credit for good crops, so that perhaps it is not so unfair to charge him with responsibility for bad crops and for everything else that happens wrong during his term. Every President strives to do the best he can for the country. It is a great task, one of the heaviest in the world. A man does not really know, until he gets out of the office, what the strain is. And, therefore, knowing that he is struggling to do the best he can, while he may differ with you, while he may do things that seem to you absurd, consider that he is there, elected by the American people, as your representative, and remember that while he is in office he is ent.i.tled to your respect. Now, don't be flippant in regard to him. Don't think it shows you to be a big man to criticise him or speak contemptuously of him. You may differ with his policy, but always maintain a profound respect for a man who represents the majesty and the sovereignty of the American people.

CHAPTER IV

THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES

We are living at a time when political and social conditions are a bit chaotic, and it is a little difficult to distinguish between the symptoms that are ephemeral and those which are permanent. What we must do is to try to make things better and to save from the past the things which are good. It is often true that a movement that is excessive and destructive in one way, ends by being the basis of great progress after reaction from its excesses has left what is valuable in it.

Our American Revolution, which we are accustomed to regard as quite important--and it was for us--did not really represent a great world change such as was represented in the French Revolution. It grew out of a very unwise, selfish colonial policy on the part of Great Britain. We were right and wise in putting it through, and our ancestors demonstrated great courage and great tenacity in fighting it. It certainly gave us independence and an opportunity for expansion that we should not otherwise have had. But the pap that we have been brought up on with respect to the tremendous outrages which Great Britain inflicted on us was sweetened a little bit. If you would see the other side, read Trevelyan's "American Revolution." In this you will see that while the right was certainly with us, we were not quite so much outraged as it seemed in our earlier childhood studies. The American Revolution did as much good for England as it did for us, because it taught her proper colonial policy, and today the colonial policy of Great Britain is one of the greatest instances of statesmanship in history. In her dealing with Canada, with Australia and with the South African Republic, she has given them such self-government that, far from wishing to sever the bond with the mother country, they cherish it.

The French Revolution indicated a very much more important movement among peoples. It developed awful excesses. The wild declarations and extremes practiced by the Committee of Safety in the French Revolution were revolting to any man affected by ordinary humane considerations and had in fact a remarkable effect in strengthening conservatism in England. Indeed, they caused the issue and the bitter personal quarrel between the one-time warm a.s.sociates, Burke and Fox. The natural result of those excesses was to be expected. It took the shape of the man on horseback. The imperial control of Napoleon led the French people into a military waste of strength which has affected the French race even down to the present time. Yet Napoleon, by building up his Code Napoleon, and by spreading over Europe the idea that the people were the basis of government, profoundly affected political conceptions and conditions. There followed a reaction in the Holy Alliance, which was a combination to maintain the Divine Right of Kings, and then the spirit of the French Revolution rea.s.serted itself in 1830. In fact from then on until now the movement toward more and more popular government has gone on continuously in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere. It is spreading today even more widely than it ever did before, and every country, even Russia, has to count the cost with respect to the will of the people.

When I went through Russia after the Russian-j.a.panese War, I met one of the leading diplomats of that country who greeted me with, "Well, how do you like it?" "How do I like what?" I asked. "How do you like helping j.a.pan to lick Russia?" Those were the homely expressions that he used.

To which I replied, "We did not help j.a.pan to lick Russia." "But," he said, "you did in effect. Your people and your press sympathized and they expressed the kindly sympathy that counts for so much at such a time." "The government cannot control our people," I responded. "They think for themselves and express themselves as they see fit. We cannot control the press in our country, but we have observed all the laws of neutrality with respect to the war, and if some of the people expressed themselves in favor of j.a.pan, it was only because they were in favor of the under dog in the fight." "Why did you give up?" I inquired further; "You were getting stronger and stronger." "Yes," he said, "we had to fight at the end of a 5,000-mile, single-track railway, but handicapped as we were, we got our forces out there ready to fight and we could have gone in and beaten the j.a.panese." "Why didn't you?" I asked. "Why did you make peace?" "The trouble is," he explained, "we were living on a volcano at home. Our people were opposed to the war, and we did not go on, lest the throne would be a forfeit." This is only an indication that even in the country that is supposed to represent the most absolute of empires, the people are manifesting a control. The Douma was given too much power at first, so that universal suffrage was necessarily a failure in the condition of the people at that time. But the Douma now is gradually acquiring useful power and in the course of the next twenty-five or fifty years Russia will probably have a popular const.i.tutional government. We have had democracy in this country for one hundred and twenty-five years, or indeed for two hundred and twenty-five years. It is now proposed to have more democracy to supply the present defects of our existing democracy. This is one phase of the present situation that I wish to discuss. Another is the spread of the fraternal spirit, the desire of one to help another, the actual improvement and increase in the brotherhood of man which we are seeing in society, and a third is trades-unionism, its essence and what is to be hoped for or feared from it.

If you will read a book like Chamberlain on "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century," especially the preface, which is written by a man who uses a better style than Chamberlain, you will find that he attempts to summarize the progress of the previous eighteen centuries as a predicate for the strides of human civilization in the nineteenth. As he minimizes the effect of one century and then another, you note how few centuries, in his judgment, play any part in the onward march, and you are discouraged as to what one man can do to help along any movement that shall really be world-wide or permanent.

The effect is much the same upon your personal hope of accomplishing some good in the world as when a professor of astronomy takes you over to the observatory, lets you look through the telescope, tells you that light takes something like eight minutes to come the 95,000,000 miles from the sun to the earth, and then says that the sun after all is a pretty poor thing considered in connection with what other suns there are. When you find furthermore that some stars are so far distant that the light you are now receiving on your retina started from them centuries ago, you say to yourself: "Well, what's the use? If we are such atoms and so unimportant in the general result, what's the use?"

Still if you study Chamberlain's history of the eighteen centuries you will find that, after all, the men who were real factors in the world civilization were the geniuses who were able to interpret and enforce what was inchoate in the minds of all but had no definite expression and led to no useful action. Each atom counts something, two make a molecule and the world is made up of them--at least it was in my college days.

Therefore, what we are here for is to make the best possible effort to help along the general weal, and it is no excuse, because we cannot play a large part, that we should play no part at all and should feel no sense of responsibility for what we can do.

What then of conditions of civilization in our country in the last half-century? The Civil War grew out of a great moral and social issue.

It was a moral issue on the part of the North and a social issue on the part of the South. Material considerations were subordinated. After the war we had a pretty hard time in getting over its immediate effects. The panic of 1873, which prostrated all business, was the result of the excesses of the war, the overissue of legal tender and the feverish, unhealthy expansion that followed. In 1878, we resumed specie payments.

I presume no country in the world ever showed such an enormous expansion and such material growth as ours between 1878 and 1907. It was shown in the useful inventions. Steam had been invented before, but it was increased in its uses, and electricity was made the tool of man. Now it is easy to follow that kind of material expansion. We can count the growth in wealth and trace the effect of it on the people, for they all got into the chase for the dollar.

In the West, the pioneer spirit was so strong that they were glad to have anything in the way of development at any cost. Counties would issue railroad bonds to build railroads and would give the bonds to the railroads. They would give franchises of all sorts and do everything that they thought would help open the country. There was a most substantial increase in the average income, and the average comfort, especially in the bodily comfort, of everyone. Have you ever thought that today the humblest workman has more bodily comfort in many ways than Queen Elizabeth or even George III? We had learned the advantage of combination in machinery and we adopted it in business.

This brought about great combinations of plant and capital which reduced the cost of producing commodities necessary to man to a price never conceived of before. I do not wish to depreciate the value or importance of improvement in material comfort. When you hear a man denounce it, you may know that either he is not a clear, calm thinker, or else he is a demagogue. Material growth and material comfort are essential for the development of mental and spiritual activities. The result of this combination and material expansion, however, was to create great corporations which began to get control of things. The same spirit of combination entered into politics and we had machines and bosses which lent their hand to, and furnished a complacent instrument for, corporations. Time was when they ordered delegates in a convention with the same degree of certainty that the order would be supplied, as they did steel rails or any other commodity. That time has pa.s.sed and why?

Because the danger of plutocracy forced itself on the people. Leaders took it up and showed it to them; and in the last ten years we have had a great movement to eliminate corporate and money control in politics.

Great statutes have been pa.s.sed--the anti-trust law, the interstate commerce law, the statutes against the use of contributions from corporations in politics, the statutes requiring the showing of the electoral expenses, have all been brought about in response to a popular demand.

The people failed to scrutinize before, but now that they are aroused and have taken matters in their own hands, they have brought about reform. The fact that he is supported by bosses is now generally enough to defeat a man, and the charge that he has a machine with him is enough to interfere with his electoral success. Organization is necessary for political success; even reformers find that out after they get into politics, but today there is an unreasonable prejudice against it. The great and good effect of the reform, however, is that corporations are no longer in politics. Of course corruption is not all gone, but it is largely stayed, and there is no longer any chance that corporations can control as they did.

But the leviathan of the people cannot be aroused in this way and his movement stopped at the median line. We must expect unwise excess.

Sincere reformers have reasoned that because we had the representative form of government during this corrupt period, it is the representative form of government which is responsible. Because we had courts during the corrupt period, the courts are responsible for the corruption.

Therefore we must change the representative system by injecting more democracy into it and we must change the courts by injecting more democracy into them and require the people at an election to decide cases instead of judges on the Bench. These are the excesses to which we trend.

We are a pretty great people. We admit it. We have great confidence in what we can do, and when we are set, neither an economic law drawn from political science nor experience seems a very formidable objection. We are a successful people in machinery, and so we take our a.n.a.logy for political reforms from machinery. We found that by uniting various mechanical elements we could make machines which would do as much as one hundred or one thousand men in the same time. So we think that if we are only acute enough to devise a governmental machine which will work without effort on the part of the people, we can sit at home while elections run themselves so well that only what the good people desire in political action will necessarily result. We want the equivalent of what, in the slang of practical mechanics, we call a fool-proof machine, because anybody can run it and no fool can interfere with its normal operation. So these political reformers are hunting a corrupt-politician-proof machine for government. It does not and cannot exist. No government can exist which does not depend upon the activity, the honesty and the intelligence of those who form it. The initiative, the referendum and the recall have been urged and in many states adopted, as a machine which no boss or corrupt politician can prevent from producing honest, effective political results. They are expected to reform everything and those who doubt their wisdom are, for the time being, in the minds of many enthusiasts, public enemies.

The representative system, on the contrary, recognizes that government, in the actual execution of governmental measures, and in the actual detailed preparation of governmental measures, is an expert matter. To attempt to devise and adopt detailed legislative measures to accomplish the general purpose of the people through a ma.s.s vote at a popular election is just as absurd as it would be for all those present at a town meeting to say, "We will all of us now go out and build a bridge, or we will use a theodolite." Thus to say that by injecting more democracy you can cure the defects of our present democracy is to express one of those epigrams that, like many of its kind, is either not true at all or is only partly true and is even more deceptive than if it were wholly untrue.

Take the power of appointment in executive work. You elect officers, choosing men of character, intelligence, and experience for a few great offices, and then what do you do under the Federal Const.i.tution? You turn over to the President the appointment of great officers because he needs intelligence, knowledge and skill to make their selections.

Consider the system of general direct primaries in the selection of judges. There is a ticket at the primaries on which something like twenty or thirty lawyers run for the Supreme Bench. Some of them go around and tell the electors how they will decide on questions after they get in. The qualifications of most of them as lawyers and as men are not known to the people. Some of them are prominent because they have been in the headlines of newspapers as figuring in sensational cases. Others have political prominence but no public experience to test their judicial capacity. Do you think this method of selection by the people would lead to the choice of a learned, skilled lawyer with that experience, courage and fine judicial quality that are to make him a great judge? Of course it would not. It has been my duty to select more judges in a term of four years than any other President, and I have had to look into and compare the results of selection of judicial candidates by popular general primary and by convention, so that I know what I am talking about when I say that the primary system has greatly injured the average capacity of our elective judiciary.

Why should we not use common sense in matters of government just as we use common sense in our own business? Why should we be afraid to tell the people that they are not fitted to select high judicial officers?

They are not. You know you are not. You could not tell me who would be good judges for Connecticut, or for any state in the Union where you happen to live unless you went about and investigated the matter. If you are put in a position of responsibility, you have sense enough to know where to find out the facts and then to make the selection, but the people lack that opportunity. So how is the question to be solved? By electing a Chief Executive and charging him with the responsibility of selecting competent men to act as judges. That is what is meant by the short ballot.

Reformers-for-politics-only include as many vote-getting planks in a platform as they can get in it without regard to their consistency or inconsistency. They sometimes combine the short ballot with the initiative, referendum and recall though they are utterly at variance.

The referendum is the submission of every issue to the people.

The short ballot, on the contrary, means putting up one or two men whose names shall not enc.u.mber the ballot. Have you ever seen these ballots?

They are a yard long and a yard wide. They have a hundred and twenty names on them and the people are expected to make a selection. They are to make a selection of ten out of fifty or one hundred names. Why, it would seem to be mathematically demonstrable that that is absurd. But when some men get into politics and talk about the people, it seems as if they had to abandon ordinary logic. I am just as much in favor of popular government as anybody, but I am in favor of popular government as a means to attain good government, not in order to go upon the stump and say, "Vote for me because I am in favor of the people. The people are all wise and never make a mistake."

Now what is the initiative? In practice, it means that if 5 per cent of the electorate can get together and agree on a measure, they shall compel all the rest of the electorate to vote as to whether it shall become law or not. There is no opportunity for amendment, or for discussion. The whole legislative program is put into one act to be voted on by the people. Speakers will get up and claim that the millennium will be brought about by some measure that they advocate.

Suppose it is voted in? It never has had the test of discussion and amendment that every law ought to have. I am not complaining of the movement that brings about this initiative and referendum, for that is prompted by a desire to clinch the movement against corruption, on the theory that you cannot corrupt the whole people and that the initiative and referendum mean detailed and direct government by the whole people.

But the theory is erroneous. The whole people will not vote at an election, much less at a primary. When the people are thus represented at the polls by a small minority there is nothing that the politicians will not be able to do with that minority when they get their hands in.