River Falls journal. [volume] (River Falls, Pierce County, Wis.) 1872-2019, 1906-04-19

from similar reasons results In their
| favor.
Untold Injury Is Done.
The effort to make financial or po-
litical effort out of the destruction OF
character can only result in public
calamity. Gross and reckless assaults
on character, whether on the stump or
in newspaper. magazine or book, Gre
ate a morbid and vicious public senri-
ment and at the same time act as a
profound deterrent to able men OF
normal sensitiveness and tend to pre-
vent them from entering the public
service at any price.
Damage to Whole Country.
'To assail the great and admitted
evils of our political and industrial
life with such crude and sweeping gen
ordinations as to include decent men
in the general condemnation means
the soaring of the public conscience.
There results general attitude ell
Their of cynical belief and indifference
to public corruption or else distrust-
full inability to discriminate between
the good and the bad. Either attl-
tude is fraught with untold damage TO
the country as whole.
"In his ecclesiastical polity that fine
old Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hook
err, wrote: He that goeth about to
persuade a multitude that they are
not so well governed as they ought to
be shall never want attention and IA
vorable hearers, because they know
IL Jnfn xrynn mt
kind of regimen is subject, but the Sc
cret let's and difficulties, which in pub
lie proceedings are innumerable and
inevitable, they have not ordinarily the
judgment to consider
'"This truth should be kept constant
ly in mind by every free people sdeslr-
ing to preserve the sanity and poise
indispensable to the permanent sue
cess of self government Yet, on the
other hand, it is vital not to permit
this spirit of sanity and self-command
to degenerate into mere mental stag
nation. Bad though state of hyster-
ical excitement is and evil though the
results are which come from the vio-
lent oscillations such excitement in
variably produces, yet a sodden &C
quiescence in evil is even worse.
Preachers of Unrest.
"At this moment we are passing
through a period of great unrest-so-
cial, political and industrial unrest.
1t is of the utmost Importance for our
future that this should prove to be
not the unrest of mere RIGHTEOUSNESS
against life, of mere dissatisfaction
with the inevitable inequality of con-
ditiOns, but the unrest of a resolute
and eager ambition to secure the bet
terment of the individual and the ma
Etion.
Progressive Tax onsWealth.
1T is important to this people to
grapple with the problems connected
with the amassing of enormous for
tunes and the use of those fortunes,
both corporate and individual, in bust
ness. We should discriminate in the
sharpest way between fortunes we'll
won and fortunes i'll won, between
those gained as an incident to per-
forming great services to the COM
muni.y as a whole and those gained
in evil fashion by keeping just within
the limits of mere law honesty.
Must Control Corporations.
Again, the national government
must in some form exercise superyis-
ion over corporations engaged in in
terstate business-and all large cor
porations are engaged in interstate
business-whether by license or other
wise, so as to permit us to deal with
the far-reaching evils of overcapitali-
cation.
1.-THE men of wealth who to-day are
trying to prevent the regulation and
control of their business in the inter-
est Of the public by the proper govern
ment authorities will not succeed, in
my Judgment, in checking the progress
of the movement But if they did sue
coed they would find that they had
sown the wind and would surely reap
the whirlwind, for they would ulti-
mately provoke the violent excesses
which accompany a reform coming by
CONFUSION instead of by steady and
natural growth.
eve can no more and no less afford
to condone evil in the man of capital
than evil in the man of no capital
The wealthy man who exults because
there is a failure of justice in the eff
fort to bring some trust magnate to
account for his misdeeds is as bad and
no worse than the so-called labor lead
er who DANGEROUSLY strives to excite
a foul class feeling on behalf of some
other labor leader who is implicated
in murder. One attitude is as bad as
the other and no worse; in each case
the accused is entitled to exact justice.
and in neither case is there need of ac-
ton by others which can be construed
into an expression of sympathy for
crime.