THE CRADLE OF THE TRUST.
We look to the political parties and the legislatures for remedies against every social ill. We are apt to forget the fact that political parties and persons, in the nature of things, are more or less demagogic, more or less inclined to flatter their constituents by the assertion that enactment of a law is sufficient medicine for the complaint, while the truth that hard, incessant work—eternal vigilance—is the only satisfactory remedy is overlooked or forgotten. We are forgetting that it is necessary, whenever important topics are under debate, to let the politicians' flattery pass by unnoticed, and instead of listening examine into our own—the nation's, the people's, the citizens'—responsibility as above and below the political struggle, to see if no serious defects there ought to be repaired before we can take time to listen to the stump speeches calling upon the federal government for treatment.
The trust, the all-absorbing social and political topic of our time, appears as a climax of our Anglo-Saxon individualism, social and industrial, and our efforts must therefore naturally be directed toward a regulation of this individualism, or its effects, in cases where these conflict with the interests of the people at large. Other nations also, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, have to contend with this same problem, but in a form less grave than ours. Their scant political freedom, their more communistic and less individualistic social conditions, have made it possible for them, less distracted as they are by political agitation, to follow the economical evolution with a keener sense of its importance as a base for the national life, and to support this evolution with constructive technical appurtenances when deemed necessary or desirable.
As the social value of the man, the individual, is higher in this than in any other country, and as this worth may be supposed to furnish the individual with a personal feeling of power, with practically unlimited field of work, it is but natural to con-
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