The True Principles of National Life

Mr. President and Gentlemen,-

You have a most happy habit in this beautiful Dominion of getting together to talk things over, and you think enough of exchanging thoughts to take a little time from your business occasionally to do so. The average business man in the United States would no more thinly of holding a gathering like this at lunch-time than he would think of knocking the knot-hole out of his cash drawer. It is one of the misfortunes of an age marked by the most marvelous of material development that the reaction from the stimulus of tremendous industry has tended to materialize the mind.

Because I have occasion to devote much of my time and thought to the condition and discussion 'of questions arising from the relations between employer and employee, and the relations of both to the State, and because I have chosen and have thought conscientiously that I ought to criticize certain activities of organized labour, as of organized capital, I am represented as one who is an enemy of organized labour because I criticize those things in which I deem ' it wrong, although I never hesitate to approve it in all those things in which I think it right. And I have the further difficulty of being always presented as one who possibly cannot discuss anything except industrial questions, and who is not concerned in any issue that is before the people of Canada or the United States except the, relation of capital and labour, if I may use those terms which are so frequently applied to these two great collective camps.

Why, gentlemen, I do hope that I can sometimes think of other things than the Labour question, but I must confess that it is a weakness of my mind that it has rather concentrated upon certain relations, not merely of organizations of labour, but of all organizations in the State of which their members are citizens; that I have been chiefly concerned with the proper relation of organizations, not alone of labour, but equally of capital, not alone of employees, but equally of employers, to the State in which they are both citizens; and, living in an age of organization, I have been very much impressed with the fact that consolidation or organization has its dangers no less than its benefits, and that, in regard to this great period of the race's growth, in which its tendencies are all turned to secure consolidation of human effort for the multiplication of human energy, that there are serious evils and temptations in collective action by human beings, just as there are tremendous benefits to themselves and to their race; and because I believe these things I have been the critic of what I believe to be the ,dangers, the abuses, and the excesses of organization, believing that one of the greatest issues of our day is to square the organization of individual human beings with the principles which your blood and mine represent in civil government.

We are all parts of civil society. We did not get into society, abstractly speaking, from choice-we woke up and found ourselves there without any wish on our part, or exercise of will. We can choose the form of society under which we live, but we cannot help living in some kind of society, and we have chosen, on account of our blood, on account of our belief in certain things for which the form of society in which we live stands, to live under the flag of England, or the United States, or the Empire, because we believe that the type of government that that flag calls for represents the highest development and flower of humanized effort in civil institutions. You have organized in this Dominion the Empire Club. As the citizens of a new land you look with affection and gratitude back to the mother that bore you, back to the land whose traditions, whose laws, whose spirit, and whose principles are the foundation of your own. You realize that with the tremendous development of the material sources which civilization is daily uncovering, with the power which we possess to make servants of all the physical forces about us, with the investigations which science and scholarship and learning and technical skill are daily unrolling for the benefit of the race, that we are subduing more and more the wonderful physical forces that surround us in every part, and we are making them the handmaids and servants of men to do their bidding, to follow their word, to start under their impulse, to stop at their command; and we realize that vaster sums of capital than our fathers ever dreamed of are necessary not only to develop still further these wonderful things we perceive about us, but to maintain the very system of industry which is now a part of our life.

We have builded up a great framework of material and moral civilization. It is our part, not only to add to it, but to keep strong and firm the, pillars that support its foundations, and we realize, gentlemen, men of your type, men of mine, that there is absolutely no security for material institutions, except they be based upon sound moral principles; that neither in business nor in government is there success for individuals or for collective effort unless it be founded upon the acceptance of certain fixed, ineradicable, inalienable natural moral truths, for one thing is not true in morals and false in physical fact. There is a perfect complement between truth in every department of human activity. What is true in physics is not less true than that which is true in moral-, and in mind. You cannot have a thing true in industry and have it false under the Decalogue, because the whole motion of human progress rests upon the impulses of original moral principles. If you glance over the nations of the earth you find that they all started from a common stock, have achieved various goals, and represent various phases of civilization, various industrial activities, various commercial successes or failures, various forms of government, various valuations of the human individual; and we see one nation standing practically where it was when the creating word fell from the lips of the Almighty; another, half-way on the pathway of what we fix as the standard of modern progress; and we find still another nation is moving hand in hand with morals and industries side by side, developing the material forces of , their national life, upholding and straining to uphold still p higher the ideals of civil government under which that j commercial progress is being made.

There must be something other than native ability that makes the Turk a failure, the Chinaman a huge, isolated, local, insulated spectacle of civilization that seems to have never started and never reached anywhere; that makes the American, the Englishman, the Canadian, the Frenchman and the German, the men of what we may say, if not common blood, at, least of common ideas, the rulers of the world. It, is not physical energy that brought us there. The Chinaman, whose civilization you smile at, had a refinement of mind, a delicate power of finger, a subtlety of construction, equalled only by the Moor and the Turk and some of the so-called barbaric races; and yet with his mental refinement, with his mental dexterity, with his power to produce a handiwork that the most skilled artisans of England or the United States cannot equal, he has stood on a rock while the current of civilization has flowed past him, untouched by contact with this stream, unmoved by the rapid flow of its movement, learning nothing from what he saw reflected there. Is he physically our inferior? Is he mentally our subordinate? The Chinaman had a civilized system, viewed from a material standpoint, when your fathers and mine were shirtless barbarians in the forests of Germany; but, gentlemen, he never had what we have today-a moral code that fixed the valuation of a human being, and made individual liberty and individual opportunity the steppingstones of progress and the elementary standards by which the advance of a people was to be measured. He had mentality, he had physical dexterity, he had principles, he had wealth, power; but he never had moral principles such as have been the stimulus of the English-speaking races.

The difference between us then has been moral, not mental, unless it be a difference of mind. When the protection of the root things upon which that advancement is predicated and without which it would be impossible.

The moral things that we hold in civil government, were not easily obtained. They were not the gifts of a Creator which came to us with a miraculous transfusion of light that gave to each individual man that perceived them the knowledge that they were the most sacred things the Almighty could grant. They are things that the human race has learned to value by the struggle through which they went to get them, a struggle that has been marked upon every footstep of its progress with the blood of martyrs as the seed of civilization; a progress that has had to have its gallows, its stake, its prison, that men might learn by the suffering of others the value of the things which they won for them. And the power of England and the United States today does not lie in armies, nor in ships of steel, but in the omnipotence of their civilization and omnipresence of their principles. There must always be lands we cannot own, kingdoms we cannot subordinate, islands we cannot control, continents that we cannot make tributary provinces; but there is not a land upon the face of this earth, nor a nation before which our flags can float, that we cannot make allies on our side, tributaries beneath our banner, followers in the progress of our power, by the magic words " Be free."

Now institutions that possess a principle like that are things worth guarding, but they are institutions, gentlemen, that are the most easy subjects of corroding influences. They are not easily attacked from without, because the enemy from without finds a united front in a people who perceive an alien foe. The glint of weapons in the distance, the flash of cannon in the sun, the word

of defiance, of insult, of attack, rouse a people to a common sense of collective wrong. But it is the foe working in your midst, insidiously striving to undermine the institutions that are the support of all the things upon which your civilization rests-the ignorant, who, by lifting a sluice-gate, might give Holland to the sea; the charlatan, who, to advance himself, may tamper with the pillars of your temple; the weak, short-sighted coward in political life that, for his personal advancement, will sacrifice the very principles of the Government whose servant he is; the citizen in every branch of life who does not realize that he is not only a manufacturer, nor an employer, nor an employee, nor a workingman, nor a working-woman, nor a capitalist, rich or poor, low or high, but is before all these things a citizen, and that the success of the industry in which he is engaged depends not merely on his citizenship, but on the citizenship of every man engaged in industry with him.

The common principles that he accepts as a citizen are at once his shield and his sword. They are his safeguard; they are the principles that move him along the way of advancement to profit and to power and to influence. And the difficulty in our day and in your country and in mine is the failure of all classes of citizens to perceive their common interest in the Empire or the Republic; who cannot take to themselves with an analogy the words of the Redeemer himself, " Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all things else shall come after." Seek first the principles of the Empire's life; seek first the principles upon which her success is based; seek first the things that have lifted her out of feudalism and barbarism into civilization. Then all things come to her people in every department of her life.

Now those principles have been the subject of attack in every age and every hour, sometimes by the unscrupulous, sometimes by the ambitious, sometimes by the thoughtless, sometimes by the ignorant, sometimes by the deluded. And, gentlemen, there is nothing in a community that can give it so much cause for alarm as a good man moving under the impulse of bad principles. He is the most dangerous factor in the life of a nation. If he is a bad character, if he lack virtue, if he lack sincerity, if he lack any of those qualities that men esteem, and it is known, he carries with him in his own person something that discounts his utterance. But when he is a man whose private life is irreproachable, whose public conduct always seems commendable, if he is under the impulse of the wrong kind of a principle, he becomes the most dangerous factor in the community, because his private virtue wins followers for his public error.

Now this thing is true, gentlemen, not merely of political parties, but it is true of those things which are every day with us, in the every-day life of our nations. The time comes when nations need men to die for them, and those occasions are rare; but the time is always at hand when they need men to live for them; and that is now. It, of course, takes courage, under the waving flag of your country, with the flashing steel of your fellow-citizens by your side, with the commands of your general ringing in your cars, and all the pageantry and pomp of war, to lead a man into the magnificence of that patriotic enthusiasm that gives life as a privilege rather than an offering; but in the quiet of your every-day life, at your desk, in the street, in the councils of your fellow-men, and the daily attitude of your private life, and of all those relations that make up the humdrum of every-day existence, it takes more moral courage to do the right thing that may be the subject of public comment, than it does to give your life upon the battlefield under the ensanguined flag of your country. Nations are not builded by war, but by peace. The struggles that, count are the struggles of daily civilized life.

So--it happens, too, that the least of a country's foes come from without. Her most serious objects of consideration when she is what we are, nations that represent democratic institutions builded upon the value of the individual human being, those are the institutions that are always threatened from within, corrupted, weakened by the most insidious and sometimes by the most difficult of attacks to discern and perceive. But if each citizen only holds firmly to a few simple principles, the ones upon which his nation is predicated, he has in his hand the sword that guards her against every enemy. He has a decalogue by which he is able to measure the standard of every act proposed for his approval or disapproval. If he stands upon his rights, if, in the language of Herbert Spencer, commenting on the American Republic, "democratic institutions can be successfully worked only by men who are jealous of their own rights and sympathetically jealous of the rights of others, who will neither aggress upon others in great things or small, not permit others to aggress upon them," then that is the framework of progressive institutions everywhere.

In an age of organization it is but natural that there should come in their progress collisions between the organizations of men within the State and the State itself. The natural result of accumulation of power is a temptation to misuse it. That is true on account of the very nature of the human being himself, and it is a fact that is confirmed by every observation of history. It brought Napoleon tumbling from a throne at the height of his power, and has ruined more men and more women, caused wreck and injury to more kingdoms and more states, than all the other temptations, probably, to which individual rulers have been subject. It is natural that the corporation accumulating influence and power and money should be tempted, for its own advantage, to use, when it finds its way blocked, the very thing that has accumulated, to secure direct contact with the things for which it seeks. It is but natural that organizations of men, on the other hand, engaged in protecting and selling their labour, should be tempted, with sudden accretions of power, with the rise of strength of which they never dreamed, with the acceptance and recognition of an influence which they never imagined they would wield, with the kow-towing of politicians, with the bending of public backs, with the accepted recognition of a minority of the community organized as representative of the majority of the community unorganized, should meet the temptation to misuse and abuse the power that comes to them for their protection alone; and it is against just those misuses and abuses as being one of the most insidious and dangerous weapons which can be turned against representative institutions, that I would especially warn you. I say so out of no unkindness to organized labour. I say it out of no lack of respect to those advantages which civilization possesses, because of the splendid leadership and the daring boldness of organized capital, which risked much to gain for itself, and, in so gaining, to give benefit to many. The whole difficulty with which we are face to face today is to demand of the organizations of either capital or labour that they shall measure themselves and be obligated by the very thing which we demand of individuals; that is, that they shall exercise no power without some corresponding responsibility.

Irresponsible wealth would be the most dangerous weapon that could be turned against a representative democracy. Irresponsible power would be the most serious thing that could be placed in the hands of an organization of workingmen. Keep the two within the limit of this law, measured by the decalogue of your representative institutions; keep their men measured by the moral law that you have set up as the foundations of your government; insist that when they attempt to exercise power they shall also assume corresponding responsibility, and realize that there cannot be inside of the State any organization of men that is not subordinate to the State in every stage of its progress and of your progress. I honestly believe, gentlemen, that considering the activity of the two phases of organization to which I call your attention, and which are the great features of industrial life in our day, pressing them to an acknowledged acceptance and action within the limits of responsibility and law, making them realize that there can be no government unless there is obedience and no civil institutions without recognition of those elementary principles that are at the basis of civil institutions, allowing that as the standard, making the rich man bow to it as you make the poor man acknowledge it, you have set up for yourselves a principle that in industry, in business, in morals, in every department of the various activities in your nation and in mine will be a safeguard which can wrap itself forever about the institutions we revere and that can alone insure their successful perpetuation.