The National Association for Constitutional Government was formed for the purpose of preserving the representative institutions established by the founders of the Republic and of maintaining the guarantees embodied in the Constitution of the United States. The specific objects of the Association are: 1. To oppose the tendency towards class legislation, the unnecessary extension of public functions, the costly and dangerous multiplication of public offices, the exploitation of private wealth by political agencies, and its distribution for class or sectional advantage. 2. To condemn the oppression of business enterprise,—the vitalizing energy without which national prosperity is impossible; the introduction into our legal system of ideas which past experience has tested and repudiated, such as the Initiative, the Compulsory Referendum, and the Recall, in place of the constitutional system; the frequent and radical alteration of the fundamental law, especially by mere majorities; and schemes of governmental change in general subversive of our republican form of political organization. 3. To assist in the dissemination of knowledge regarding theories. of government and their practical effects; in extending a comprehension of the distinctive principles upon which our political institutions are founded; and in creating a higher type of American patriotism through loyalty to those principles. 4. To study the defects in the administration of law and the means by which social justice and efficiency may be more promptly and certainly realized in harmony with the distinctive principles upon which our government is based. 5. To preserve the integrity and authority of our courts; respect for and obedience to the law, as the only security for life, liberty, and property; and above all, the permanence of the principle that this Republic is "a government of laws and not of men." L 5915 JUN 7 1932 The Menace of Paternalism By Otto H. Kahn One who has noted the marvelous work and the magnificent achievements of the American Army in France may propound the following question: What is the underlying cause for the phenomenon that our boys, taken from the most diversified walks of life, brought up in surroundings and in a spirit which are the very negation of a martial disposition, became in an incredibly short space of time soldiers of first rate efficiency; that our business men, farmers, mechanics, college boys are making competent, indeed excellent officers; that our West Pointers, taken from small army posts or positions in Washington, were found qualified generally not only to command large bodies of troops, but that amongst them were discovered men fitted, when the emergency arose, to plan and execute the business undertakings of war on a stupendous scale with a high degree of organizing and administrative ability-though these men would be the last to dispute that a considerable share of the credit for the results accomplished is due to those who, at the very start of the war, eagerly volunteered from civil life? Why did our commanding officers, our engineers, and others at various French ports, at our army bases, along our great line of supplies, in a strange country, under conditions entirely new to them, demonstrate the capacity of rapidly sizing up situations, of boldly meeting and overcoming difficulties, of vigorously cutting the red tape of generations, of accomplishing to the admiring amaze ment of our French, friends and comrades things which the bureaucratic routine of ever so many years had found itself impotent to deal with? I have heard these questions asked and debated a good many times lately both in England and France, and.the consensus of replies was this: "Yoμ-in America have always been a nation of private enterprise and individual initiative. Your incentive has never been to get a governmental title or a bureaucratic position. Your incentive was zest and scope for doing things, the joy of creative effort, a certain crude, rough-hewn, unsystematic, but effective idealism, and also, of course, the material reward of successful achievement. You have had no caste or fixed class, either aristocratic or bureaucratic. You have given almost unlimited, perhaps too unlimited, scope to ambition, ability, force, imagination, hard work. Your employee of today was and is the employer of tomorrow. The state, far from enjoying the halo descended from kingly times of something resembling omnipotence and omniscience, and being all-pervasive in its functions, was largely limited in its activities, and you had a healthy skepticism of governmental capacity to do things well. Under the stimulus of these conditions you have produced a race, daring, keen, quick-witted, adaptable, self-reliant. The American of today, as we see him in the officers and men of your forces, and in the business men we have met, is the product of sturdy individualism." On the other hand, it cannot be gainsaid that there are a good many persons in France, as in Great Britain and America, who firmly believe that the era of individualism, or, as they prefer to call it, capitalism, has come to an end, and that an entirely new kind of social structure will be reared after the war. They are very active, zealous, and eager, these militant preachers of a new day. They possess the fervor of the prophet allied often to the plausibility and cunning of the demagogue. They have the enviable and persuasive cocksureness which goes with lack of responsibility and of practical experience. They pour the vials of scorn and contempt upon those benighted ones who still tie their boat to the old moorings of the teachings of history and of common-sense appraisal of human nature. And being vociferous and plausible, they are unquestionably making converts. They are offering the vista of a catching program to the popularity-seeking politician. They are perturbing the minds of a good many who honestly seek, as every right-minded man should, to bring about a better and more justly ordained world. They have not been without producing a certain effect even in high places. We hear a good deal nowadays of "the war after the war," meaning thereby the expected economic discord and strife in the markets of the world between Germany and her vassals on the one hand and the Powers arrayed against them on the other. But there is a "war after the war" for which the lines are now being drawn, and which indeed the attacking party has already some started. The opposing forces are, on the one side, the motley army ranging from the American variety of destructive Bolsheviks in various gradations to self-seeking demagogues, well-meaning utopianists, iconoclast theorists, intolerant and impetuous young writers strong in the assured consciousness of their mental and moral superiority, and alas! none too rarely, college professors and other teachers generally underpaid, frequently overworked, rather disgruntled and acidified, others carried away by untempered idealism and inclined to take the world as a theoretical proposition rather than a stubborn fact. Confronting that army, on the other hand, stand those who believe that the accumulated wisdom of centuries of human experience is wisdom still, and who see in individualism, ordered, enlightened, progressive, sympathetic, and adjusted to the changing needs and social conceptions of the age, the soundest and most effective instrument for the advancement and the happiness of humanity. When I speak of individualism, I do not mean the harsh doctrine of the socalled Manchester school of the nineteenth century, which, with a somewhat naive faith in the automatic and beneficent self-regulation of human forces, bade the individual to exploit his opportunities to the unrestrained limit of his strength, and the devil take the hindmost. Nor do I mean the picturesque, semi-romantic, but socially intolerable individualism which in the pioneer period of our country's development brought forth a body of men whose daring, vision, creative energy, and striving for wealth and power, ment of idealism and emotionalism, did much to produce the tremendous epic of America's unrivalled development, but who after all were more or less industrial despots, and as such (even though benevolent despots, which many of them were) rightly obnoxious to a free people. strangely mixed at times with an ele- of the rewards and joys of life, and to correct such shortcomings of the present social order as justly call for reform. But we will resolutely oppose those who in their impatient grasping for unattainable perfection would make of liberty a raging and destructive torrent instead of a majestic and fertilizing stream, who out of the ingredients of sentimental and emotional fallacies mixed with the deleterious substances of envy and demagogy, would concoct a fantastic political and social system, who ignorantly and arrogantly scorn the beneficent work and the wise teachings of the great architects of ordered freedom. We have seen into what an abyss of despair and disgrace and suffering the self-constituted fanatical or corrupt guides to the millennium have plunged the people of Russia who followed them confidingly. The individualism to which I adhere spells neither reaction nor greed, selfishness, class feeling, or callousness. No less than those who carry their hearts, visibly aching for the people and aflame against their oppressors, into magazine articles, political assemblies, and upon lecture platforms; no less than those who in the fervor of their world-improving pursuit discover cure-alls for the ills of humanity which they fondly believe new and unfailing remedies, but which, as a matter of fact, this old globe of ours, at one time or another, in one of its parts or another, has seen tried and discarded, after sad disillusionment-no less than they, are we desirous for the well-being and contentment of the masses of the people and sympathetic towards and responsive to their aspirations. In common with all right-minded and fair-thinking men, be they employers or employees, we are ready and glad to join in every sincere effort, consistent with sane recognition of the realities of things, to make life more worth living to the rank and file of humankind. So far from obstructing, we will zealously and earnestly co-operate towards all rational measures calculated to augment the opportunities and happiness of the mass of the people, to enhance their share of ease and comfort and I have complete confidence in the sober common sense of the American people. I believe that when they have been placed in possession of adequate information, when the pros and cons of a proposition have been fully discussed before them and by them, they can always be relied upon to reach sound conclusions. I am convinced that, while earnestly and determinedly contending for social justice and progress and the greatest attainable diffusion of well-being, contentment, and opportunity, they are not prepared to abandon the principles and underlying features of a governmental and social system which has created out of the heterogeneous elements of our population a strong and great, self-reliant and enterprising race, and procured for the people prosperity and other advantages superior on the whole to those possessed by any other nation. They will not, I feel assured, permit Americanism to be adulterated by a spirit or by methods having kinship to either world-destructive Prussianism or selfdestructive Russianism. They will not, I am certain, cast aside knowingly the theories and principles of institutions which we inherited from the wisest and most enlightened body of men that ever met in deliberative assembly and which are the envy and admiration of the world, in exchange for a regime of bureaucracy, paternalism, socialism, or bolshevism. And these institutions, the most perfect embodiment ever conceived of a true and workable democracy, are based upon the great principle of individualism, because the illustrious men who framed our fundamental instrument of government were led by a deep insight into and a wonderfully sagacious recognition of the trend of human affairs and the springs of human actions. They indeed made America "safe for democracy." Let us beware lest in aiming to make the world safe for democracy, we permit the safety of democracy in our own land to be jeopardized by having the foundations tampered with on which it has rested for a century and a half. By all means let us be open to new ideas, let us go forward and strive to realize what formerly were considered unattainable ideals, but in boldly venturing forth upon uncharted waters, do not let us throw overboard the compass of immutable principles. The menace which I see is not in the deliberate will of the people, but in the fact that under the emotional stress of war, under the patriotic impulse of the time, under the actual or fancied necessity of the war situation, tendencies have been tolerated and modes of thought and action permitted to gain a footing unopposed, which are apt to create very serious problems upon the return of normal conditions. What I mean to bring out is not any sins of omission or commission of the present administration, but unavoidable frailties and shortcomings which are inherent in the very essence of all government and which emphasize the need, particularly in a democracy, of confining the business functions of government to activities which private enterprise cannot undertake equally as well as or better than the state, or which, in the interest of the maintenance of free institutions, private enterprise ought not to be permitted to undertake. Liberty necessarily limits governmental efficiency. That is part of the price which we pay for freedom. We do not begrudge the price. We are prepared to pay any price for the supreme blessing of being free men, if necessary even the price of our lives, as many of those did who procured for us the great legacy of liberty. But why unnecessarily bid up the price against ourselves by extending the scope of governmental activities beyond the field which naturally belongs to them? Government, in its very essence, is the negation of competition. It is, by the very fact of its being, whatever its name or kind, the monopoly of monopolies. It cannot but be affected with those shortcomings which spring from the absence of competition and the exercise of monopoly. |