A like attitude and animus are seen in the other forms of legislative restriction upon great corporations. All the anti-monopoly laws and anti-trust suits, all the regulating statutes and the public-utilities commissions, have one principle at bottom, and it is to make all men stand equal before the law. On the one hand to strike down oppression, on the other to equalize opportunity, has been the intent of these new activities of government which, whatever else they show, leave no doubt of an altogether changed view of what governments owe.
In all these matters, the greatest peril that lurks in our path is that of being misled by abstractions. If we talk overmuch of “government,” we are in danger of forgetting the human beings who make it up. If we are afflicted by bad rulers, it is no help to us to fall back upon an ideal conception of “the state.” The state is simply men acting. Much amusement was created in Paris by an innocent peasant who passed from one public building to another demanding that he be allowed to see _l’état_. He had heard of it all his life; he thought it was something at the capital; being there, he wanted to inspect it at close range. He was an unsophisticated rustic, but was he not right in his instinct? We are not, after all, governed by an “entity.” Government is the most concrete of human affairs. It is vested in mortal men. And in all the agitations and the hopes and fears of our day respecting the extension of governmental functions, and the quickening of the whole idea of what the state owes to citizens, it would be fatal to forget that government cannot be made better except by putting better men in charge of it.
A NATIONAL BUDGET THE REMEDY FOR EXTRAVAGANCE IN APPROPRIATIONS
The time is overripe for a fundamental change in our method of making annual appropriations for the cost of the National Government. A glance at the result of the work done by the various congressional committees charged with the duty of preparing appropriation bills is enough to bring conviction that order and system must be substituted for the present chaotic methods; while, if we could penetrate the secrets of the committee-rooms, the country would stand appalled at the ignoble tricks and devices by which the “pork-barrel” is filled and the money of the taxpayers wantonly and wickedly wasted.