in the opposing party. But he received only 42 per cent. of the vote of the country, although his electoral vote was overwhelming. Wilson did not reveal himself fully during the campaign. His speeches showed a thoughtful, cautious mind, not sure how far his countrymen wished to go. Roosevelt seemed to be the real radical. Was Wilson to revert to the "safe and sane" ways of Cleveland or did he really understand? Those are questions which his measures, not his speeches, must show. At any rate, a new man was about to become president.

Ogg, "National Progress,” pp. 198-208.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROBLEM

THERE was indeed a new man in the White House in March, 1913. There was need of a new man. The country had been under agitation since 1893. But during the whole Taft presidency the public excitement had been intense. The Lorimer scandal of 1910-11 was followed closely by an exposé of the mismanagement of the Department of the Interior. The methods of the tariff legislation of the same session of Congress were hardly less offensive to large elements of the country. And in 1912 a series of investigations of former election campaigns showed the utmost cynicism on the part of party leaders and great business men1 in regard to the relations of men of wealth to the officers of government. On the very eve of President Wilson's inauguration, the Pugo committee of the House of Representatives showed how nearly a few great bankers of New York controlled the credit operations of the nation.

Men were everywhere intensely anxious about the growing power of corporations and individual capitalists over the common life of the people. The railroads, with their intimate connections with all business affairs, were under the guidance of a few bankers in New York City; all the greater steamship lines to foreign countries were similarly directed from New York or London; one third of the bank deposits

Testimony of ex-President Roosevelt and others before committees of Congress in 1912 made this perfectly plain.

of the United States was likewise under the same control, while five sixths of all the bank deposits of the country were lodged in the cities of the industrial district; the steel business, the cotton and woollen manufacturers, and practically all of the vast oil properties of the continent received orders from New York overlords./Every great business organization, like the American Bankers' Association or the Anthracite Coal Carriers, had its head; while all the better-organized undertakings, uniting with the various chambers of commerce of all the cities, had just formed a United States Chamber of Commerce, the better to guide and regulate business of every sort and bring pressure to bear upon government. Mr. Wilson himself said during the campaign of 1912 that "a comparatively small number of men control the raw material, the water-power, the railroads, the larger credits of the country and, by agreements handed around among themselves, they control prices." There was nowhere else in the world such a powerful industrial and financial group. William II of Germany was not so much more powerful than J. P. Morgan of New York. And everywhere in the world business men and governments respected, even feared, the leaders of American industrial life.

Smaller folk in the United States had long been accustomed to a similar respect or fear. Whether village bankers wished or not, they kept balances in New York. Southern cotton brokers and Western buyers of pigs instinctively knew the value of a fair name in Wall Street. Men might not like the régime, but they knew that American business had far outstripped all other business in the world. Any limiting of its influence or breaking of its power they feared as an ancient liege man feared an attack upon his lord. Not only village and city business folk feared the powers that could make or

Woodrow Wilson, "The New Freedom," New York, 189.

unmake men at will, successful lawyers who filled the industrial centres held a like view. They did not practise before petit juries. They drew contracts and argued before legislatures; they advised powerful clients how far they might go in their contempt of law, and they sought safe investment for retired millionaires. They, too, waited upon business.

Of course the universities were measurably free. But they were free only in the sense that Southern colleges were free in 1860 to explain facts contrary to the wishes of the owners of slaves, free to teach unwelcomed truth and take the consequences. Science was the very mother of industry, the instructress of modern materialism, and her votaries were welcome co-workers in the business world. In the rarest instances did the universities encourage men to indulge in criticism of things as they were. Nor was it different with the clergy. Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Parker had no successors in the churches of the industrial centres of the North. Only the obscure, and perhaps Dr. Washington Gladden and Shailer Mathews among the eminent, thought of playing the rôle of Nathan, the prophet. Nothing succeeds like success.

And where such amazing success as all the Northern states of the American Union had known since 1866 prevailed how was university or church protest to be effective? The older elements of the life of the East, the Middle States, and the Near West, had grown rich, had made themselves comfortable homes with baths in them; they carried their coupons to the banks for collection and contented themselves with the good things that came in consequence. They were still Protestant in religion but not Puritan; they gave liberally to the work of Church or charities, but did not wish to hear too many sermons or to be bothered with vital reforms. Back Bay or Euclid Avenue or the Northshore Drive was

good enough for them and indeed these were clean and delightful places, just the kind of places where children should play. But these good descendants of Puritan New England did not have many children. Children gave too much trouble. The dominant element of the industrial North was in fact already decadent and there was instant need of a new gospel, if men only knew it.

But they did not know it. In the vast tenement districts of New York and Chicago there swarmed millions of dirty children and women, the families of the foreign-born workers in mills. Their streets were filthy and their houses grimy. Germans, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs, ignorant alike of the English language and of American institutions, made the basis upon which the industrial prosperity of the United States depended. They did the heavy work of American industry. More skilled men-native, foreign, or sons of foreigners-did. the higher grades of work and organized to protect themselves against the cheaper labour of their unfortunate brethren. But organized Labour was never successful in its struggles with employers so long as five hundred thousand immigrants arrived each year.1

This vast mass of poor folk, the foreign- and the nativeborn, made a North that was complex. How could a declining native American stock long maintain its control over these multiplying hordes that had never heard of birth control or race suicide? The first agency was the Catholic Church, to which most of them owed allegiance. In the land of Puritanism, Catholic priests said masses and Catholic prelates held sway quite as sovereign as the best of governors.2

Wages were indeed increased and maintained at a high level in comparison with wages in Europe; but the increase was promptly added to the prices of commodities and the community as a whole bore the burden.

"It is not many years since an archbishop of Boston refused to take second place at a dinner where the Governor of Massachusetts had the seat of honour.

Bias