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No. 93 "The Redistribution of Power" Speech of John W. Davis before the New York State Bar Association, January 24, 1936. American Liberty League. 400dpi TIFF G4 page images Digital Library Services, University of Kentucky Libraries Lexington, Kentucky Am_Lib_Leag_93 These pages may freely searched and displayed. Permission must be received for subsequent distribution in print or electronically. No. 93 "The Redistribution of Power" Speech of John W. Davis before the New York State Bar Association, January 24, 1936. American Liberty League. American Liberty League. Washington, D.C. 1936. This electronic text file was created by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). No corrections have been made to the OCR-ed text and no editing has been done to the content of the original document. Encoding has been done through an automated process using the recommendations for Level 1 of the TEI in Libraries Guidelines. Digital page images are linked to the text file. AN INVITATION TO JOIN THE AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE We extend to every American citizen who believes in the fundamental principles which gave birth to the Constitution of the United States an invitation to become a member of the American Liberty League. You may indicate your acceptance of this invitation by filling in the necessary information as to your name and address on the enrollment blank below and mailing it to American Liberty League, National Press Building, Washington, D. C. There are no fees or dues. If you are willing and able to give monetary help for the League's support your contribution will be appreciated, as our activities are supported entirely by the voluntary gifts of our members. ENROLLMENT BLANK Date ___________ I favor the principles and purposes of the American Liberty League and request that I be enrolled as a | regular 1 member. [ 'contributing J *Ab a contributing member I desire to give $_ to help support the activities of the League: Cash here- ★ ★ The Redistribution of Power ★ ★ ★ Speech of JOHN W. DAVIS Member of the National Executive Committee of the American Liberty League New York State Bar Association New York City January 24, 1936 AMERICAN LIBERTY LEAGUE National Headquarters NATIONAL PRESS BUILDING WASHINGTON, D. C. Document No. 93 The Redistribution of Power HEN you have finished with this pamphlet please pass it on to some friend or acquaintance who might be interested, calling his attention to the membership blank on page 24. ★ ThERE is a popular impression that lawyers are men of strife and thrive upon contention. "You and I know" to borrow an idiom from an exalted source that nothing could be further from the truth. We are pre-eminently friends and lovers of peace, even when we have to fight for it. While we worship liberty, we also admire order and rely upon the power of established rules and principles to maintain and preserve them both. From this serene and detached height we look down on the dissensions of mankind, intervening now and then only to compose their differences. It is startling to men so tranquilly disposed to find that the battle has suddenly surged in their direction and that, instead of being mere onlookers, they are not only surrounded by the fray, but are in the very thick of it. Yet this has happened. Weapons are waving around us; hoarse cries are resounding; neo-barbarians are pressing in on every side. In such a posture of affairs nothing is left for us peace-loving lawyers but to seek safety in flight or join in the encounter, giving and taking blows in our turn. Craven or combatant there is no other choice. This is where we find ourselves. If my figure of speech needs interpretation, it may be taken to signify a deep conviction that the contentious problems of this day and hour make a greater demand upon the wisdom, self-sacrifice, and courage of the American Bar than any others that have arisen in the life of any man here present. No more compelling call has come to any generation of American lawyers. The problems to which I refer have to do with the scope and definition of those powers which any government may rightfully exercise over its citizens and, so far as America is concerned, with the distribution or redistribution of those powers among the departments of our government and between the States and nation under our federal system. These are not questions for lawyers alone, but they lie within our accustomed field. On such matters we are presumed to be competent to form and express an opinion; and if the Bar fails now to give to the country the guidance it is equipped to furnish, it will justly forfeit its chief claim to public respect and confidence. Perhaps we are to blame for not foreseeing this abrupt shift of the battle in our direction. It may be that in our easy-going way we had taken things too much for granted. We believed that certain things had settled into the minds and hearts of the American people too firmly for any gust of passion to dislodge. The basic propositions on which our whole scheme of government and law is built seemed so thoroughly established that only outright revolution, as we thought, would dare to challenge them. In the light of established doctrine and decision, it did not occur to us that anyone could be found to dispute, either in theory or in practice, certain fundamental axioms. Among these I name the following: First: That the Federal Government is one of limited powers, having only those given to it expressly or by necessary implication in the Constitution; and that all powers not so delegated are reserved to the States or to the people; Second: That the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial departments are, and must remain, separate and distinct and that the powers of no one of them can be surrendered to or exercised by another; Third: That every governmental power of whatever sort is subject in its exercise to the limitations fixed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that action which oversteps these bounds is void; and, finally, Fourth: That where a constitution and a statute, State or Federal, are in conflict, it is the high and solemn duty of the courts to pronounce between the two just as it is the equal 4 duty of the Legislative and Executive branches to accept their ruling. It WOULD be wasted time to undertake a demonstration of these propositions to a gathering of American lawyers, or of informed American laymen for that matter. To do so would be too much like expounding to a body of mathematicians the accuracy of the multiplication table. It is not easy to see, therefore, why anyone familiar with our plan of government should have been surprised or disappointed or irritated when the Supreme Court, in passing upon recent laws, laid its course by the Constitutional landmarks that have guided the Republic since its voyage first began. In honor and conscience it could not do otherwise. For I think we can agree "you and I" on a fifth controlling axiom; namely, That an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, or any oath in similar form, whether taken by Presidents, Members of Congress, or Judges on their induction into office or even by humble lawyers like ourselves on our admission to the Bar binds the conscience and the honor of him who takes it to do nothing of himself which violates the law of the Constitution and not to permit the doing of the same by another if within his power to prevent. It may seem a slender reed, this appeal by public oath to the consciences of men, but in the last analysis it is the chief, if not the sole, reliance of all free government. Just as the obligatory force of contracts is the prop of our whole social order, so the solemn promise of a public officer to keep within the law that makes him is the cement that holds all free government together. To violate this oath or to treat it lightly is surely the mortal sin. For liberty, it has been well said, is possible only when the sovereign power is made to obey the law. With every recognition of room for doubts or differences of opinion where the question is nicely 5 balanced, it still remains true that a willful violation of the Constitution or a willful usurpation of power by any official, high or low, is an offense that no man who loves his country can pardon or condone. Guilt in such things is guilt and it cannot be covered by bland excuses or pious aspirations. "In vain we call old notions fudge And suit our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge And stealing will continue stealing." Such is our law; and if we have lived to grieve at the passage of not one, but a whole series of statutes passed in bold defiance of its basic principles, we have also lived to rejoice that in the courts of the country the law has found its champions and defenders. The irritation of which I speak does not vent itself upon court decisions alone. I read, for instance, a declaration by one official of a farmers' organization, that all those who brought suit against the A.A.A. are "enemies of the Republic." And warnings are given here and there that it is dangerous to insist upon rights guaranteed by the Constitution as it is, lest as a result of such insistence radical changes may occur and worse things still may come upon us. Submit, they say, to the burden laid on you today or we will load you with a heavier one tomorrow; I presume some would even write it "and/or we will load you with a heavier one tomorrow." i cannot accept this reasoning. The Constitution and the rights of the citizen may be changed quite as effectively by gradual encroachment as by direct attack. And there is no surer way for men or nations to lose their rights than by failing to assert them. Far better is it to have amendments openly proposed and publicly debated than to have creeping changes wrought without notice of their coming. With this in mind, I wish tonight to leave the courts to their appointed mission and dis- cuss with you proposals made by those more candid souls who are not willing to engage in guerrilla warfare on the Constitution, subverting it by the process of stealthy and gradual invasion, but who boldly call for its amendment. They tell us openly that the Federal Government needs more power than it has; that the States have more power than they need; that Congress is too ignorant or too busy or too indolent to make the laws without executive assistance; and that having emerged from the "Horse and Buggy Age" of our ancestors into the complexities of the modern world, many things heretofore entirely outside the orbit of any governmental power whatever must now be brought within its scope. These ideas, whenever they are put in concrete and understandable terms, are entitled to a respectful hearing and to an answer on the merits. No reproach can be leveled at any man who thinks our frame of government can be bettered by amendment and who gives his reasons for saying so. Obviously he starts with the odds against him; for the conspicuous success our plan has won at home, all Jeremiahs to the contrary notwithstanding, and the frightful object lessons furnished in the modern world by countries where a different scheme has been followed, offer of themselves strong arguments against any change. But I doubt whether those who would amend the Constitution are sufficiently answered merely by praise of the Constitution as it is, sound and well-merited as I believe such praise to be. When panaceas are offered on the one side, only to be answered by panegyrics on the other, the argument lacks in conclusiveness. We must plead the case to issue. So FAR, I submit, those who offer panaceas have done very little in spite of much fervent oratory to make their position clear. It is aU very well to say that law is a part of the life of a people and must change with their changing lives; that the Constitution itself is not an iron framework, fixed and immutable, but a plan of government subject to alteration by the popular will that gave it birth. But when it is indicted for its supposed insufficiencies, the bill of particulars is extremely vague. When new patent medicine is offered, the patient is entitled at least to have the formula printed on the outside of the bottle. Perhaps we should not take too seriously those trial balloons which were sent up in the last Congress in the form of resolutions proposing Constitutional amendments. One of these, however, strikes my fancy by its all-inclusive-ness. It is H.J.Res. 316, offered by Mr. Keller of Illinois, to the effect that "The Congress shall have power to make all laws which in its judgment shall be necessary to provide for the general welfare of the people." This is disarming by its very simplicity. All that is needed to render it complete is to add a judicial clause following the lines of the law promulgated by the German Government last summer which admonishes the courts that where offenses are not punishable under the Penal Code, they shall he punished when they deserve it "according to the underlying idea of a penal code or according to healthy public sentiment." With courts and Congress so furnished, constitutional questions would become of no further consequence. Without spending time on the form of other proposals, consider for a moment some of the subjects which men in high places, as well as out of them, seek to put within the reach of the Federal power a power, by the way, which always advances and never retreats. They would give to Congress or its creatures, by an amendment to the Constitution, power to regulate (which in this connection means to control) the hours, wages, and conditions of all labor, the terms of its employment and discharge, production all production, industry all industry, business all business, and trade and commerce of all kinds wherever carried on. One of the proposed amendments, offered by Senator Costigan (S.J.Res. 3), goes on to provide that in exercising these powers Congress shall be free from any of the requirements of "due process" embodied in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. There is cause to wonder, in passing, whether some of the legislation of these last three years was not enacted in the belief that such an amendment was already on the books. The magnitude of the task suggested need not be enlarged upon, for it beggars all description. Throughout a continental area stretching from the pine trees to the palms, over industries as diverse as lumbering in Maine and mining in Arizona, dress-making in New York and pork-packing in Chicago, in every occupation whereby men serve their fellows and earn their livelihood, one will and that the will of the Congress and its creatures, is to reign supreme, unchecked it may even be by any constitutional guarantees! And yet some of our hot reformers can be satisfied with nothing less. What is put forward to justify such a drastic experiment in vivisection on the living body of our national life? We are admonished that modern life is very complex; that the commerce of the country has become a "seamless web"; and that, since transportation has improved, communication has grown easier, knowledge of nature and the world around us has advanced, trade between the States, along with these things and by reason of them, has finally grown so great that the rule of freedom which gave birth to the Constitution must now give way to the reign of regulation. The Federal Government, it is urged, must control the economic life of the nation henceforth, as it does the rivers from the mountains to the sea. The statement itself is a tribute, perhaps unintended, to the beneficence of the Constitution as it has been and is. The preservation of free- dom in commerce between the States was one of the cardinal objects of the Constitution, if not its primary concern. It has been under this freedom and by very reason of it that the trade and traffic of the country, without embargoes, without quotas, without restricted production, without price-fixing, and without artificial restraint, has grown to its present splendid proportions. Unless the very success of the experiment condemns it, why should the system that fostered all this be no longer trusted to preserve it? And if the physical agencies which man has learned to employ have changed, let it never be forgotten that the man himself has changed but little. He has gradually made for himself better tools, but he responds today to the same impulses, nurses the same hopes and ambitions, is stirred by the same fears and passions, as when history first began. Political science is not a thing of machines or statistics, but of human behavior and the lives of men. Every governmental policy must be tested primarily by its effect upon the character, virtues, and development of the human beings subject to it. surely the idea that nothing can go well unless government has a hand in it is one of the most insane delusions that has ever vexed the mind of man. As a matter of daily observation, the things that go best are precisely those with which government has least to do. I believe that it can be demonstrated to a mathematical certainty that the distress tormenting the whole round world today is due more to the folly of governments than to any and all other causes combined. Why must the American government be equipped with new and greater powers in order to enlarge upon the blunders into which it and others have fallen? It is not persuasive to argue that other national governments not all, God be praised! have and are exercising powers similar to 10 those which it is now proposed to confer upon our own. There is nothing in their example to tempt us to throw away those checks and balances, those limitations on authority, that jealousy of power, that scrupulous regard for the individual, which we have so long boasted to the world as our unique contribution to the science of free government. Nor is the argument helped in any way by demagogic appeals to passion. Wicked men, it is said, have abused the freedom they have enjoyed. The statement is undoubtedly true. I know of no period in which such things have not occurred. But the remedy is to be found in "ridding the earth of the bad," by specific laws, directed to known evils and enforced by appropriate sanctions. The evil conduct of some furnishes no warrant for putting gyves and fetters on the guilty and innocent alike and locking them all in an "immense and artificial organization of society." And if the indictment stops with a general charge of mere incompetency on the part of business leaders, the cure offered promises to be far worse than the disease. I have said and I repeat most of the economic illness of the modern world is directly traceable to government. It was the folly of governments, for instance, that brought on the World War. It was the folly of governments that forced the economic clauses of the peace. It was and is the folly of governments that followed the military conflict with an economic warfare that still persists. I might go further without exhausting the subject. Whether, with these handicaps, the most supreme wisdom on the part of private citizens, great and small, could have averted the depression, I gravely doubt. In any event, the creation of a great and cancerous bureaucracy is no substitute for private judgment and initiative nor a cure for its mistakes. Those who convince themselves and hope to 11 convince others of the superior wisdom and virtue of government officials suffer, it seems to me, from a curious form of sun-blindness that has afflicted man throughout the ages when gazing on his rulers. Always he has been able to delude himself into thinking of the governing power as a great and mysterious divinity behind the veil. Under theocracies his superstition led him to believe in the oracles delivered to his ruling priests. From such superstition was born the doctrine of the divine right of kings and a belief in the power of the monarch to heal by the laying on of his hands. We are witnessing today the spread throughout the world of a similar superstition which leads men to see in Government, the State, or Society, a mysterious and benevolent something above and beyond the imperfect and erring mortals who act in its name. There can be no sound thinking on the subject until we tear away the mask and see behind these names only fallible men who for a longer or a shorter time, with greater or less right, with less or more of wisdom, have power to impose their will upon their fellowmen. I SPEAK, and the adjectives are not original, of a great and cancerous bureaucracy. That such a bureaucracy has followed every increase of federal power history plainly tells. There is no slightest hope that Congress, invested with this broader jurisdiction, will exercise its newfound power for itself. Anyone familiar with Washington can testify that the number and variety of questions presented to Congress are already overwhelming. No man, however able or diligent, can grasp more than a small percentage of the whole. It was so twenty-five years ago; it is doubly so today. Every new addition to federal functions has lessened the attention that Congress can give to it or to anything else. Load Congress with sole responsibility for the labor, industry, and trade of the 12 nation and it will become something worse than an occasional rubber stamp. It will sink indeed, it is visibly sinking to the level of the Parlement of Paris, devoting itself to registering the edicts of the king. Burdened with the discharge of more duties than it can surmount, it will continuously wash its hands of them in the bureaucratic stream. It can do no less. And its influence on the ultimate form and details of the law of the country, as it issues in the rules and regulations of executive bureaus, will be little more than that of the present Congress of the Soviets, the Reichstag of Germany, or the Italian Parliament. Faced with the performance of impossible tasks the energies of its members will be more and more absorbed in securing their own re-election and, for the rest, obeying the orders they receive. IjOOK around you and see how fast bureaucracy grows in a system to which it has fastened itself. Already I read that the housing accommodation of Washington is exhausted and some governmental divisions must be translated to the satellite village of Baltimore a "rural resettlement," as it were. While each fresh bureau, forgetting what transient phantoms its members are at best, cries out in its blooming egotism, "Only give us more power and we will pour out such a blessing as there shall not be room to receive." The "blessing" when it comes usually proves to have been taken from the unforgotten pocket of the forgotten taxpayer. If experience teaches anything, it is that of all methods of government, bureaucracy is the least responsible, the least intelligent, and the most arrogant and tyrannical. "However faulty a legislative chamber may be," said Cavour, "an ante-chamber is worst." It is the nature of bureaucracies that responsibility is widely diffused, decision is anonymous, and action painfully slow. Questions, passed from desk to desk, are tardily disposed of or left to rot in bureaucratic files until time has relieved the official 13 from the unpleasant necessity of decision. Matters are decided on grounds not always removed from personal and political considerations. Once the halting, blundering hand of the bureaucrat has settled down on an industry or a country, a creeping paralysis sets in that betokens the end of growth or even of life itself. I BEG you to believe that in saying all this I level no personal reproach at any of the able and devoted men who now, as always in the past, are willing to enter the official service of the nation. With due allowance for degrees of worth and merit, it may be assumed that by and large they are fully equal in point of worth and intelligence to the mass of their countrymen. I regret to say that I cannot believe that mere induction into office gives men superior strength and wisdom or a sudden knowledge of the things which other men have spent their lives to learn. Miracles of that sort do not occur. And if the actions of these officers are not biased by a hope of personal gain, it is equally true that their judgment is not cooled and sobered by the fear of personal loss. Moreover, the mistakes made by men in private life are limited in their power to harm; while the errors of those in office spread their disastrous effect as far as the wide range of their authority. Again without making any personal allusions, there is room, is there not, for a lingering suspicion that mere party politics plays an occasional part in the selection of bureaucratic personnel? The irreverent say that such things have actually occurred. It is an impressive moment, no doubt, for the humble citizen when he gets a summons to appear before the Chief of the Division of Circumlocution in the Industrial Evolution Administration. But he must learn to hide his surprise when he finds behind the desk assigned to that potentate his erstwhile neighbor, Hiram Hokum a man not much reputed in his home for wisdom, but a faithful 14 party servant who has now entered into his reward. For ours is a government by parties, as is every democracy, and as such it has its obvious weaknesses, atoned for, we hope, by greater benefits. As Lord Bryce puts it, "No government demands so much from the citizen as democracy and none gives so much back." But the very existence of these weaknesses, of which the spoils system is among the greatest, warns us against a "fatal confidence in the men of our choice" or imposing on our government tasks that governments by nature are wholly unfitted to perform. BUREAUCRACY is a name of evil import. Regulation is a term behind which every form of tyranny, great and small, can hide itself. Yet there are collateral evils in this program of greater menace still. One of the most vigorous academic advocates of constitutional reform opines that the whole national government needs "to be reshaped to get a working machine that can respond to group needs without giving way to purely interested pressures by the more highly organized among them!" Here is romanticism at its best! Here is a truly millennial aspiration! The idea that men will tamely submit their daily lives and occupations, their economic welfare and their individual hopes and ambitions to the control of other men without struggling to capture the seats of decision for themselves is a lotus-eater's dream. If Congress is to have power either by its own actions or through its delegates to fix the hours and wages of labor, will that end the matter? Will employer and employee thereafter lie down in perpetual peace together? What assurance have those labor leaders who seem to favor such a plan as a step toward shorter hours and higher wages, what assurance have they that the advocates of longer hours and lower wages may not some day leap 15 into the saddle? Are they willing to surrender the bargaining power that has been won after so many years of painful effort for the mere chance of carrying this or that election? And if Congress or its bureaus are to fix wages throughout the continent, will it be a uniform rate for all the trades and all the sections? And if not, how long will one section or one worker be content if it appears, as a result of governmental action, that other men in other places are getting more money for the same hours of toil? Will skilled and unskilled, organized and unorganized labor fare alike? And if not, which will have the upper hand, or is a mere count of noses to name the arbiter between them? When the production of potatoes in Maine and Florida, of coal in Pennsylvania and Alabama, and of textiles in Massachusetts and Georgia, is submitted to a common control in Washington, who again is so fatuous as to believe that even-handed justice, peace, and harmony will result? If I have selected for my illustration States that commonly give their electoral votes to different candidates, the choice is not wholly inadvertent. The more favors and advantages government has to bestow, the fiercer must become the strife to possess them; and out of this perpetual warfare of man against man, class again class, industry against industry, section against section, all striving to influence the agencies of government for their selfish desires, there must come legislative blocs, organized lobbies, pressure politics, and the ultimate degradation and pollution of our whole political life. We have such evils in our midst today. In God's name, why aggravate them by broadening the field in which they can operate? IT IS in the nature of things that every increase in the powers and functions of the Federal Government must lessen the interest of the citizen in the government of his State. The sunflowers always turn toward the sun. To advocates of 16 centralization this seems perhaps no disadvantage. Indeed, when they think, as not infrequently they do, of themselves as the persons to be snugly ensconced in the comfortable offices they seek to create, such universal adulation must seem not undesirable. But when the States are reduced to mere administrative provinces, it is unlikely they can long survive, even with the mapmakers. Their life-blood will be drained away and the revenues necessary for their maintenance will be steadily siphoned off, as indeed they are being siphoned off today, into the national treasury. Surely there is something deeply humiliating in the present spectacle of a steady procession of mendicant Governors, Mayors, Boards of Trade, and private pilgrims marching on Washington, like beggars with their tin cups, for a share of Federal alms. Do they realize, I wonder, that the largesse they seek can come from one or other of two sources and two sources only? It must come either from taxes that men have toiled and labored to pay or from the proceeds of borrowings that mortgage the future not only of themselves, but of the children who will come after them. With every eye turned toward Washington and every hand outstretched for what Washington has to give, our federal system will soon lose all vigor. When that time comes, there must eventuate a union torn apart by the clash of group and sectional interests, or a despotism under what name it matters not strong enough to maintain our continental unity by force; and not by force only, but by that suppression of freedom of opinion, of speech, and of action to which every dictatorship instinctively resorts. "What," asked Jefferson, "has destroyed the liberty and the rights of man in every government that has ever existed under the sun?" And he answers, "The generalizing and concentrating of all cares into one body." Some of our high-flying gentry seem to find 17 one hundred and fifty years of American experience an untrustworthy guide. But five thousand years of human history hear witness to the truth of Jefferson's statement. Cause and effect are remorseless. They are, in Emerson's splendid phrase, "the chancellors of God." I DO not charge all those who advocate such changes as those we are considering with insincerity. Not all of them would stoop to delude the ignorant with promises of impossible benefits. But they force the drawing of a dividing line between those who love the shelter of autocracy with its supposed security and those who love freedom with all its risks. I know it has been said that the hungry cannot eat the Constitution and that it is useless to speak of liberty to those who are starving. But, if liberty cannot be eaten, without it all bread is bitter. Ask any Jew in Germany, any Kulak in Russia, any liberal in Italy, if he holds a different view. It is quite true that distress can be relieved, and in many cases should be relieved, by the use of money drawn from the public treasury. It is also true that one man's money may be forcibly taken and given to another to the great satisfaction of the recipient. But in the light of past and present experience it requires a more than robust faith to support the belief that federal regulation and control of the industrial and commercial life of the country will, in the long run, feed a single hungry man, put a single additional loaf of bread on any man's table, or conduce in any permanent sense to the general welfare. And even if it could, I should still assert that the price is one that the American people can never afford to pay. It IS evident that the aim of the proposed amendments is more far-reaching than a mere redistribution of existing power between the nation and the States. They do not stop with 18 asking that so much shall be taken from the one and transferred to the other. They wish to endow the Federal Government with power which no government whatever in America has hitherto been permitted to employ. Starting with what I believe to be the wholly unsound premise that the paramount duty of every government, if not its sole reason for existence, is to foster the economic life of the country, they ask that all restraints be removed from any experiments whatever directed to that end. No matter what cloak of expediency or benevolence or apparent novelty may be thrown about such ideas, their coming marks but another incident in the age-long combat between man and his would-be masters. It is the conflict between a glorified state and a self-reliant citizen, between an economy artificially planned and the self-corrective efforts of free men working out their own destiny, between a government above all law and a law above all government, between autocracy and freedom autocracy which has spelled stagnation wherever and whenever it has reigned and freedom which has been the beacon light of every step in mankind's forward march. It is not a new contest. Even the tactics employed in waging it are very old. There is nothing new in inventing opprobrious adjectives for one's adversaries. There is nothing new in telling a man, as Professor Sumner puts it, that if he wants anything he has not got, it is the fault of somebody else who ought to be found and compelled to give it to him. And three hundred years before Christ, Aristotle wrote that "Democracies will be most subject to revolutions from the dishonesty of their demagogues; for partly by informing against men of property and partly by rousing the common people against them, they induce them to join together, for a common fear will make the greatest enemies unite and this is what anyone may see continually practiced in many states." 19 BUT new ideas or old ideas, new methods or old methods, in this warfare there is no room for neutrals. I hear it said, sometimes, that it is useless to battle against the forces of centralization and collectivism; that the tide of the times, the Zeitgeist, is setting in that direction too strongly to be stemmed. Accordingly, all that is left to a dissenter is to keep his place in the boat with the rest, hoping that by his mere dead weight he can slow its progress, even if he cannot change its direction. i cannot agree. i do not believe that the tide cannot be stemmed. i do not believe the direction cannot be changed. I do not believe that the American people, once they understand the issue, can be bribed or wheedled or frightened into giving over their individual lives into the care and keeping of other men. To more despondent souls, prematurely despondent as i think, i can but offer the advice given by a philosophic father to a friend of mine as the young man left home to make his way in the world. "My son," said he, "when things go wrong, don't go with them." Mr. President, if in the course of these remarks i have said either more or less than is suitable to this occasion, let me make my apology in the words of Montaigne: "I speak truth," he wrote, "not so much as I would, but so much as I dare. And I dare more as i grow older." 20 PAMPHLETS AVAILABLE £|OPIES of the following pamphlets and other League literature may be obtained upon application to the League's national headquarters. Statement of Principles and Purposes American Liberty League Its Platform The $4,880,000,000 Emergency Relief Appropriation Act The Bonus Inflation The Thirty Hour Week Bill The Holding Company Bill The Bituminous Coal Bill Price Control The Labor Relations Bill The Farmers' Home Bill The TVA Amendments The Supreme Court and the New Deal The Revised AAA Amendments The President's Tax Program Expanding Bureaucracy Lawmaking by Executive Order New Deal Laws in Federal Courts Potato Control Consumers and the AAA Budget Prospects Dangerous Experimentation Economic Planning Mistaken But Not New Work Relief The AAA and Our Form of Government Alternatives to the American Form of Government A Program for Congress The 1937 Budget Professors and the New Deal The President Wants More Power {leaflet) The National Labor Relations Act Summary of Conclusions from Report of the National Lauryers Committee Straws Which Tell An Open Letter to the President By Dr. Neil Carothers How to Meet the Issue Speech by W. E. Borah The Duty of the Church to the Social Order Speech by S. Wells Vtley The American Bar The Trustee of American Institutions Speech by Albert C. Ritchie PAMPHLETS AVAILABLE (continued) Two Amazing Years Speech by Nicholas Roosevelt Legislation By Coercion or Constitution Speech by Jouett Shouse The Impediment of Democracy Speech by Fitzgerald Hall The Spirit of Americanism Speech by William H. Ellis The Test of Citizenship Speech by Dean Carl W. Ackerman Today's Lessons for Tomorrow Speech by Captain William H. Stayton "Breathing Spells" Speech by Jouett Shouse The Duty of the Lawyer in the Present Crisis Speech by James M. Beck The Constitution and the Supreme Court Speech by Borden Burr The Economic Necessity in the Southern jStates for a Return to the Constitution Speech by Forney Johnston The National Lawyers Committee of the American Liberty League Speech by Ethan A. H. Shepley Our Growing National Debt and Inflation Speech by Dr. E. W. Kemmerer Inflation is Bad Business Speech by Dr. Neil Carothers The Real Significance of the Constitutional Issue Speech by R. E. Desvernine Arousing Class Prejudices Speech by Jouett Shouse The Fallacies and Dangers of the Townsend Plan Speech by Dr. Walter E. Spahr What of 1936? Speech by James P. Warburg Americanism at the Crossroads Speech by R. E. Desvernine The Constitution and the New Deal Speech by James M. Carson The American Constitution Whose Heritage? Speech by Frederick H. Stinchfield The American Form of Government Let Us Preserve It Speech by Albert C. Ritchie