king to a distant city to find out what they might do, but looking
about among their neighbors, finding credit according to their
character, not according to their connections, finding credit in
proportion to what was known to be in them and behind them, not in
proportion to the securities they held that were approved where they
were not known. In order to start an enterprise now, you have to be
authenticated, in a perfectly impersonal way, not according to
yourself, but according to what you own that somebody else approves of
your owning. You can not begin such an enterprise as those that have
made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded
in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that
freedom? That is dependence, not freedom.

We used to think, in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple,
that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform
and say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the
ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not
interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that
the best government was the government that did as little governing as
possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. But we
are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not
dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and
create the conditions under which we live, the conditions which will
make it tolerable for us to live.

Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that
every family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family
had its own little premises, that every family was separated in its
life from every other family. That is no longer the case in our great
cities. Families live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on
floors; they are piled layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of
our crowded districts, and not only are they piled layer upon layer,
but they are associated room by room, so that there is in every room,
sometimes, in our congested districts, a separate family. In some
foreign countries they have made much more progress than we in handling
these things. In the city of Glasgow, for example (Glasgow is one of
the model cities of the world), they have made up their minds that the
entries and the hallways of great tenements are public streets.
Therefore, the policeman goes up the stairway and pa