State; and the nation for that which concerns all the
people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for
lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can
hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both
jurisdictions.
"I do not ask for overcentralization; but I do ask that we work in
a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we work for what
concerns our people as a whole.
"We must have the right kind of character--character that makes a
man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, a good
husband--that makes a man a good neighbor.... The prime problem of our
nation is to get the right kind of good citizenship, and to get it, we
must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.
"I stand for the Square Deal. But when I say that I am for the square
deal I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present
rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as
to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for
equally good service."
These generalizations Roosevelt accompanied by specific recommendations.
They included proposals for publicity of corporate affairs; prohibition
of the use of corporate funds, for political purposes; governmental
supervision of the capitalization of all corporations doing an
interstate business; control and supervision of corporations and
combinations controlling necessaries of life; holding the officers and
directors of corporations personally liable when any corporation breaks
the law; an expert tariff commission and revision of the tariff schedule
by schedule; a graduated income tax and a graduated inheritance tax,
increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate; conservation
of natural resources and their use for the benefit of all rather than
their monopolization for the benefit of the few; public accounting for
all campaign funds before election; comprehensive workmen's compensation
acts, state and national laws to regulate child labor and work for
women, the enforcement of sanitary conditions for workers and the
compulsory use of safety appliances in industry.
There was nothing in all these proposals that should have seemed
revolutionary or extreme. But there was much that disturbed the
reactionaries who were thinking primarily in terms of property and only
belatedly or not at all of human rights. The Bourbons in the R
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