If a public man is willing
to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich
corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity
comes he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the
interest of a corporation.
But, in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make a
public man useful if that man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed
zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we strive for reform we find
that it is not at all merely the case of a long uphill pull. On the
contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work;
to depend only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway and an
upset. The men of wealth who to-day are trying to prevent the regulation
and control of their business in the interest of the public by the
proper Government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in
checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they
would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the
whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which
accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural
growth.
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