York Central, the Erie, the Pennsylvania, and the Baltimore and Ohio-to pool their freights, although this in effect "makes the four great railroad corporations one so far as the trading public are concerned." I agreed with Charles Francis Adams that "such a combination is less injurious to the public than the ruinous competition which is the only alternative." The brief sentence which I had written in Terre Haute in 1865, "Individualism is the characteristic of simple barbarism, not of republican civilization," has ever since guided me through all the mazes of a complicated, always perplexing, and often heated public debate.

Henry Ward Beecher was an individualist of the old school, passionately devoted to the freedom of the individual, and for that reason averse to any increase in the powers of government. Although I was in practical control of the paper during our joint editorship, I carefully refrained from taking any editorial position on public questions to which I thought he would object.. Still, in 1881, the year before the change in ownership made me editor-in-chief, I suggested Government control of the railways. May it not be found," I said, "that by relying upon the two powers [State and Federal] a systematic, comprehensive railroad law might be framed by the General Government which will be sati factory to the people, and would reconcile the rival interests which are now on the verge of conflict?" Two years later I suggested the right of the Government to fix a maximum rate for both freight and passengers, or to organize a railway commission with supervisory and semi-judicial powers, as in Great Britain. The following year. that of the Blaine-Cleveland campaign, in calling for a new political party I proposed, as one of its planks, "the control by Government of the great highways, whether of communication or commerce, whether by wire, rail, or water." Two years later, in an editorial contrasting "the old democracy and the new," I extended this platform to include in the function of the State" Government control of all corporations not subject to the law of competition." In the following year the first Inter-State Commerce Bill was passed by the United States Senate, a bill which I interpreted to mean that "the people of the United States have decided that the railroads of this country shall be public highways, not private turnpikes." From that fundamental position the Nation has never receded.

Since that time the question has been, not, Shall the people control the railways? but, How shall that control be exercised? And I have. steadfastly advocated the doctrine that not only the railways, but the mines, the forests, the waterways-in short, the land and its contents must be brought under Government regulation, State or National, and that this regulation must be extended to all forms of business-including the regulation of food, beverages, and drugs-as fast and as far as is necessary to conserve the public welfare.

Two occasions of special interest have been afforded me for putting this fundamental view of the function of government before the public. One was when I was invited to address the Legislature of Oklahoma. Two currents of political opinion were very apparent in this new State at that time, one progressive from the West, the other conservative from the South. Assuming the old. Southern view, as interpreted by the Alabama Constitution, quoted later in this chapter, that the function of government is the protection of property, I urged that it is as much the duty of government to protect the property of the public as the property of the individual, and applied this principle in urging the State to preserve for the people the forests, the rivers, and the water power. The other occasion was furnished when I was invited in 1912 to present my views to a Senate committee at Washington. This I did in a paper subsequently published in The Outlook, i urging that the experience of the Nation had demonstrated that regulation, not disorganization, of big business is desirable; that Congress had tried regulation in the case of foods. and drugs and had succeeded, and had tried disorganization in the case of the Standard Oil Company and the Tobacco Trust and had failed.

When, in 1902, at the commencement of his second term of office, President Roosevelt made his famous addresses on "Big Corporations Commonly Called Trusts," I was delighted, and The Outlook obtained his permission to publish these addresses in their authorized form in The Outlook. Here was a voice to which the whole Nation would listen urging on the people that policy of government regulation of great organized industries which The Outlook had been urging for years. And when President Roosevelt's term expired and he was about to return to the quiet of private life, I eagerly welcomed the suggestion of my son Lawrence that we

invite Mr. Roosevelt to join our editorial staff as a Contributing Editor. I have recently in the pages of The Outlook, and on two separate occasions, given my estimate of Mr. Roosevelt, and need not repeat it here. It must suffice to say that during the five years of our association he proved himself an ideal exemplar of the spirit and value of team work, that he was a cordial collaborator with his fellow-editors, that he never sought to impose upon us the authority which his reputation and his position had given him, that he was the friend of every one in the office, and that when the exigency of his political life made him the leader of a political party, so that it was no longer possible for him to occupy the position of even a Contributing Editor of an independent, non-partisan journal, we all felt that we had lost in his withdrawal from the staff association with an honored friend and a wise counselor. This chapter will have failed of a part of its purpose if it has not made clear to the reader that The Outlook could not do otherwise than support what are popularly known as the Roosevelt policies without repudiating the political principles which it had been advocating for more than a score of years.

Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, the English historian, writing in 1896, declares that the Constitution of Alabama expresses admirably the best spirit of American statesmanship when it states that "the sole and only legitimate end of

government is to protect the citizen in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and when the government assumes other functions it is usurpation and oppression." This may have been the best spirit of American statesmanship when the Constitution of Alabama was adopted, but it is not the spirit of the American people to-day. The conservative is quite right in saying that we have departed from the traditions of our fathers. In my lifetime I have seen the American Government become a great builder of public works, a great financial institution, a great educational institution, a great benevolent institution, a great administrator of public utilities, and a protector of the rights and property of the public as well as of the rights and property of private individuals.

In 1860 President Buchanan refused his assent to a bill for removing obstructions at the mouth of the Mississippi River on the ground that the Federal Government has no right to use Federal moneys except for distinctly Federal purposes. In 1915 we have built by

In

In my

Government money on territory which we have purchased from a foreign nation an interoceanic canal for the benefit of all the nations of the world on equal terms. 1861 banking was a purely private business, under no Federal control and often under little or no State control. Every shopkeeper had a "Bank Note Detector," issued, I believe, every fortnight, which he constantly consulted in order to know the value of the bills offered to him by the purchaser. We now have a Federal-guarded currency of equal value in every part of the country, and often taken at par in foreign lands. boyhood in half of the Nation there were no public schools, and in the other half the public school system was defended on the ground that education is a cheap way to protect the community from crime. American law now tacitly recognizes, what English law has explicitly affirmed, that the children in the State are the children of the State, and to them the State owes, not only protection, but opportunity for education. It is said that Thomas Jefferson doubted the propriety of a National Post-Office, questioning whether it were not better to leave the carriage of letters to private enterprise. Now our Post-Office is the exclusive carrier of our letters, and is also a National savings bank and a National express company. For the doctrine that government must do nothing but govern, we have substituted, almost without knowing it, the doctrine that the people may do by means of their government anything which they can do better than it will be done for them by private enterprise. I have been a sympathetic interpreter of this pacific revolution, and in interpreting have done something to promote it.

I have faith in my fellow-men. I believe in their honesty of purpose and their competency of judgment. I have seen them take up great questions of National policy, one after another, and decide them aright, sometimes overriding their leaders in so doing. They have endured four years of terrible self-sacrifice in order to preserve the Nation intact and set it free from bondage; they have given away millions of acres of their lands to foreign immigrants who promised to dwell upon and cultivate them, recognizing the truth that the wealth of a nation consists not in its soil but in its people; they have denied themselves the right to purchase their goods in the cheapest market that they might make America an industrially independent Nation; they

have voted to pay the Nation's debts in gold when, without breaking the letter of their bond, they could have saved millions of dollars by paying them in silver; they have taxed themselves year after year for an expensive system of public education, because they recognize the value to the Nation of. brain power in its humblest and lowliest citizens; they have voted to carry on a war for the succor of a feeble neighbor, and have brushed aside impatiently the protests alike of materialists, who argued that it did not pay, and of timid idealists, who feared that it would convert the Republic into an empire; they have perceived the perils of the country in a growing plutocracy, and have entered on the task of bringing the aristocracy of wealth under the control of the democracy of industry. I have been personally, though not intimately, acquainted with eight Presidents-Grant, the soldier; Hayes, the peacemaker; Garfield, the orator; Cleveland, the administrator; McKinley, the cautious; Roosevelt, the courageous; Taft, the lawyer;

Wilson, the scholar. And I have known enough of other men in public life-Senators, Representatives, Governors, Mayors, and their subordinates-to know that while some politicians are unscrupulous self-seekers in America as in other countries, America has her share of public men as true, as pure, as self-denying, as are to be found anywhere in the world. My faith in my fellow-men has been strengthened by my lifelong study of our National life. The evils from which we have suffered have been caused, not by too great a trust, but by too great a distrust of the people; and I repeat again, as my wellconsidered conclusion from such life study, what I have often repeated in public speech: The remedy for the ills of democracy is more democracy.

The revolution which I have seen in industry and in politics could not have taken place had it not been accompanied by a revolution. in religious thought and life. To a description of that revolution my next chapter will be devoted.

W

E visited one summer on a hill overlooking a tiny Eastern village of a hundred or so inhabitants. It was in an inland county far off the beaten track. The railway service was infrequent and bad-they called it the "peanut road;" public education was limited and prosperity was merely intermittent. As a consequence the people were wrapped in an impervious conservatism. An important election that was coming on stirred only the faintest interest-all the voters would vote as they always had and as their fathers had before them.

Almost before we had unpacked, the minister of the nearest church came to call. He was not a young man nor new to his charge; he did not seem remarkable in any way-certainly not a revolutionist. When he

said, "I hope you will come to our church to-morrow, we supposed it to be the perfunctory invitation given to all newcomers, and began some practiced temporizing. But the minister interrupted:

"I know, I know! I'm not surprised that you don't intend going to church when you've come here to rest. You can hear far better preachers than I am, but I wish you'd There's something I've been thinking of doing for a long time, and-well, I'd like to have you there."

come.

So on Sunday morning we settled ourselves near the back of the church and watched the good husbands and fathers, the industrious farmers and fair-dealing storekeepers, with their faithful wives and obedient children, enter, complacent and serene.

dens were weeded, their barns were clean, their children well clad and sent to school, their debts paid. No man ran away with his neighbor's wife or beat his own. They settled their accustomed backs into the pews. To each day its special duty-this was the time for church!

The minister prayed that the three per cent deficit in the contribution to the missions in India might be made up, and with equal voice that the higher criticism might be refuted; then he paused for a moment, and we had our surprise-he prayed that they might vote as Christians!

If he had stopped with that the congregation probably wouldn't have got it at all, but when he came to his sermon he spoke, not of what might have happened in Judea or Rome or Greece, but of what was about to happen there in central New York. Good, straight political doctrine he gave them about one candidate and another, about what the parties stood for-not in the past or in the Nation at large, but right then and there in their township-and he showed as clearly as he knew how just what voting like a Christian meant. He might have been one of his predecessors, those great country preachers the Hebrew prophets, who made a practice of pointing out the duty of their hearers in such concrete form that there was no misunderstanding them. The congregation began to stir and really listen, it moved in its seats, one man got up and went out. Their trusted pastor, whose sermons had sat as easily upon them as old clothes, had shocked them!

This was something we had not seen before a beginning of the new religious reformation. All over the country we had found it in different stages of development, but here in this little backwater it had just cracked the shell. This isolated clergyman. had heard the demand that righteousness operate through the franchise, that neighborliness dominate big business, that brotherly love function through the tilling of the soil, and had begun to preach a new gospel.

That the Church should shift her emphasis from individual to community virtues, should hold up the ideal of the good citizen before the ideal of the good man, implies a great internal revolution. But it is this ability to change that constitutes the indestructible persistence of the religious instinct by virtue of which the Church has survived every social or economic upheaval. In the recent past— that past which is still present in many parts

of the country-the rural church had begun to`assume that it did not bear any relation to the social customs of the people or their state of culture, their economic life or their political organization. But the threat of diminishing membership, of falling contributions and loss of prestige, came before it, and everywhere appeared the beginnings of the reformation through which it is fitting itself to our swelling democracy.

Out on the western edge of Iowa we made friends with a little dried-up pastor and persuaded him to motor about with us through the rich corn lands. Our driver knew the country well, and now and again he would tell us how this one had bought Jack Day's farm, or that one had rented his south fifty to a man who'd come over from Tennessee. At last he stopped the car at the top of a little rise and pointed to a broad green sweep. 'Say, Mr. Harden, that owns this place, he's kept buying and buying till I don't know how much he's got; but it's more than eight hundred acres, I guess."

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"Does he work it all?" asked the minister. "Why, he can't begin to do that—he just lets most of it lie."

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Well," cried the parson, angrily, "that's not owning land like a Christian-no, nor treating it like a good citizen either !"

As we whirled on through the rich farming territory he gave us a wonderful sermon on the land as a religious problem, and farming as a function of citizenship. Later we went down into his parish and found that he was the motive power of a live church in which the new reformation was flowering rapidly. He preached here the doctrine that no man could reconcile with the teachings of Christ the holding of more land than he could use.

And I ain't at all sure the parson ain't right," one deacon said, reflectively. "When you get right down to looking at things, it does seem as if we was just taking work out of men's hands and the food out of their mouths, and that's just as bad as stealing or killing or anything else that the law don't allow. Of course, after you've spent all your life getting your farm and paying for it you may have some trouble seeing it the way he says and I ain't sure I do; but, anyway, he's made it something to think about."

All through the Southwest where they quoted to us, "Unless a man is a better farmer for being a Christian, his religion will die," they are taking pains to reduce religious

"I have just revisited the church where I was pastor eight years," he told us. - "Since I left them I have been in a more prosperous and enlightened neighborhood, and it seemed that I might speak to these old friends about some of the better methods of agriculture that I had seen practiced. But it was not a successful experiment. The church felt that new ways of cultivating potatoes should not be talked about in the pulpit. I fear that I disappointed them-and I know they disappointed me. I had spent many years helping them to be good men; now when I tried to help them to be good farmers also they would not receive my teachings.' The good man was sore and a little bitter from his contact with the individualism of the farmer, which is the biggest obstacle the country church has to overcome. For the farmer still feels that the way he sows and reaps, packs and ships, buys and sells, is his own business. To himself he seems still an independent man pitted against, instead of with, the world. The practical brotherliness for which modern citizenship is only another name, and for the lack of which the cities and the farms have both suffered, is outside his mental horizon. The idea that the health of the city children depends on the purity of the country milk, and that this can be assured only by a rigid inspection of farm conditions, has been met with violent objection. The farmer could not see that his responsibility went beyond the milking of his cows, nor that the packing of the small apples at the bottom of the barrel was an unchristian act.

In northern Missouri after a church had been addressed at a week-day meeting by a particularly able agriculturist on the interdependence of the farm and the town, and the need that each should deal generously with the other, we saw a great brown farmer get defiantly on his feet and insist that such talk was all nonsense. Was not the farmer the only independent man? Couldn't he get along without the city man? Then why should he treat him any better than he had a mind to? The minister rose and denounced such ideas as unchristian and unpatriotic, but he hadn't by any means the sympathy of his entire audience.

It was as though their hereditary enemy were being filched from them and they bitterly resented the theft. The idea that he might become a friend was not to be accepted lightly. As a Michigan woman wrote us: "The best thing the farmer can do is to stop the city man getting his money away from him. The city man always has cheated him and been against him, and he always will."

And yet the new country church which is making it its business to produce good citizens can and does get the farmers to accept the idea of kinship with the outside world. In a New England section which is just being redeveloped into a fruit-growing region we came upon a meeting of church people called by the ministers of two different denominations to hear a graduate of the Agricultural Department of Cornell University tell them how to pack apples "so that the consumer would receive them in the best condition," emphasizing under the sanction of the church the city man's right to good food at the farmer's hands as well as the latter's right to demand fair treatment in return.

At a conference of country ministers in Richmond, Virginia, we heard the morals of vegetable shipping discussed, the religious value of co-operation, and a prayer offered: "That we may lead our flocks to till the land like Christian men." The metaphor may have been mixed, but the meaning wasn't.

This new religious doctrine preached here. and there is causing the country to say, timidly and often with reluctance, to the rest of the world." We be of one blood, thou and I"-which is a pretty good text from which to preach Christian citizenship.

The country church is putting itself by a conscious effort into the warp and woof of social progress. It was at a great conference of country ministers and school-teachers that we heard the problems of rural credit dis