nment, all the artifices of the politician to depreciate the
value of those franchises, to threaten their holders with confiscation,
to hamper and harass them by all the ways that are open to a
democratically governed people? I say unhesitatingly that it is
dishonest to do these things, and I will go so far as to say--believing
as I do in the good faith of the great majority--that most of those who
noisily advocate such measures would be ashamed to do so if they would
but face the facts and understand what it is that they are actually
doing and the wrong that they are inflicting upon innocent men and
women. If mistakes have been made in granting franchises, then take care
to avoid such mistakes in the future, but do not enter into a bargain
that seemed advantageous to yourselves and then repudiate it when you
find that it is not so advantageous as you thought. There is no way
to reconcile such a thing with common honesty, and it is in no way
mitigated by the fact that it is done by a community and by means of a
vote rather than by an individual and in the ordinary small affairs of
life. We all know what we should say of the man who acted in this way
toward ourselves personally, but in advocating some of the schemes that
are now recommended to us by sensational politicians, newspapers, and
magazines we are making ourselves responsible for a dishonesty far
greater than the evils that we are trying to remedy. Let us by all means
reform whatever needs to be reformed, but let us do it with clean hands.

Now, I think that I have said enough to justify my belief that these
great problems of our social life are not of a kind to be settled
off-hand by violent or radical legislation. They are not to be settled
by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is
by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts
at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and
business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty
that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you
would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. You will find that honesty
is the royal road to success in commercial life, and it is also the
royal road to all reform in our communal life. Do not go out into the
world with any expectation that you will be required to surrender the
ideals that you have formed in your youth, or that you will be asked to
choose between honor and