members. I am not prepared to defend all that the Irish members have said and done. No, and I am not prepared to defend all that English members have done. But I ask here, as I asked in Dublin, is there to be no amnesty? Is there never to be an act of oblivion? These men, after all, have forced upon the British- legislature, and have extorted from the British legislature, laws for the benefit of their own down-trodden and oppressed people. Those laws were either right or wrong. If they were wrong, the British legislature ought not to have passed them. If they were right, you ought to be very much obliged to the Irish members for awakening your sense of equity and of right.

I return again—I am going to conclude in a moment-I return again to the point. You have the future in your hands, because what has been said is true; the future depends upon the opinions of the men between twenty and thirty, which, I take it, is the average of the audience I have the honor of addressing. What is the condition of Ireland? Here, too, I will repeat what I said in Dublin. In Ireland you have a beggared gentry; a bewildered peasantry; a random and harsh and aimless system of government; a population fevered by political power and not sobered by political responsibility. This is what you have to deal with; and I say here, with a full sense of important responsibility, that rather than go on in face of that distracted picture, with the present hard, incoherent, cruel system of government in Ireland, rather than do that I would assent to the proposal that has been made, if that were the only alternative, by a great representative of the Unionist party, by Lord Grey.

And what does Lord Grey suggest? Lord Grey suggests that the Lord-Lieutenant should be appointed for ten years, and during those ten years it is a strong order-during those ten years he is to make what laws he thinks fit without responsibility either to ministers or to Parliament. It is a strong order, but I declare-and I believe that Mr. Parnell has said that he agrees that I would rather see Ireland made a Crown colony to-morrow than go on in the present hypocritical and inefficient system of sham representation. You may then have the severity of paternal repression, but you will have the beneficence of paternal solicitude and supervision. What you now have is repression and neglect; and repression and neglect you will have until you call the Irish leaders into council and give to the majority of the Irish people that power in reality which now they have only in name.

One minute more and I will sit down.

The resolution raises very fairly the great issue that now divides and engages all serious minds in this country-the issue which has broken up a great political party, which has tried and tested more than one

splendid reputation, and in which the Liberal party have embarked all their hopes and fortunes as resolutely and as ungrudgingly as their forefathers did in the case of Catholic Emancipation. The opponents of this Resolution ought to have told us, what no opponent to-night did tell us-for I listened very carefully-they ought to have told us what it is they mean. Merely to vote a blank and naked negative to this resolution? It is not enough, it cannot be all, merely to say "No" to this resolution. You are not going through the familiar process of rejecting an academic motion or an abstract proposition.

In refusing this proposition you are adopting an amendment. I have taken the liberty to draft a Unionist amendment. I will gladly place it in the hands of any Unionist member who may think it expedient to move it. This is the alternative amendment to the resolution of the honorable mover.

"That, inasmuch as Coercion, after being tried in every form and under all varieties, has failed to bring to Ireland that order and content we all earnestly desire, Coercion shall be made the permanent law of the land; That as perfect equality between England and Ireland is the key to a sound. policy, Coercion shall be the law in Ireland and shall not be the law in England; That as decentralization and local government have been long recognized and constantly promised as a necessary reform in Irish affairs, the time has at length arrived for definitely abandoning all reform in Irish local government; That since the backward condition, and the many admitted needs of Ireland urgently call for the earnest and unremitting attention of her rulers, the exclusive attention of this Parliament shall be devoted to the consideration of English, Scotch, and Welsh affairs; That, in view of the fact that representative institutions are the glory and strength of the United Kingdom, the Constitutional demands of the great majority of the Irish representatives shall be disregarded, and these representatives shall have no voice in Irish affairs and no share in Irish government; and, finally, That as Mr. Pitt declared the great object of the Union to be to make the Empire more secure by making Ireland more free and more happy, it is the duty of every true Unionist to make Ireland more miserable in order to prevent her from being free."

That, sir, is the amendment which you are, I fear, presently going to vote. [Cries of "No!"] Yes, you are. That is what you are going to vote, and I have failed in the speech which you have most kindly and indulgently listened to, if you do not see that that amendment, with its stream of paradoxes and incoherencies, represents the Unionist policy. That is a policy which judgment condemns and which conscience forbids.

§ 20

OPENING OF THE 1916 REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN

By Albert J. Beveridge

(Delivered at the Auditorium in Chicago, on the night of October 5, 1916.)

We are concerned not so much with the past as with the present and the future; we are interested, not so much in criticism as in construction. The task at hand and the word before us are big enough to engage our best thought and all our thought.

We must build for to-morrow and our plan must be as wide as the horizon now opening before us. A new world is being born. Just as the Napoleonic wars destroyed an outworn political dispensation, so the present conflict is ending an old economic system. In this new day, and amidst these changed conditions, there must be a new America. Let us be thankful and glad that we are privileged to lay its foundations.

This work means, first of all, a broader, deeper, stronger nationalism. The philosophy of localism is dead. The practice of it must no longer interfere with the unity of the Republic. National law and national authority must deal with all things that help or hurt the entire people.

Our railways in their management and service, are national. They are the highways of the Republic as a whole. The well-being of the entire American people depends upon the service they render, and the solvency of the railroads depends upon the common prosperity of the Nation. Yet American railways, unlike those of every other country, are under control of forty-eight local sovereignties, as well as that of the general government. Hundreds of conflicting state regulations and an army of state officials complicate their operation.

The plain remedy is to place the railways of the Nation under the exclusive control of the national government.

That is the national government should have the exclusive supervision and regulation of the railroads, and not the sovereign states.

They are vital to national defense. It is useless to train men unless they can be transported quickly and in immense numbers. In the confusion caused by our multiple and discordant control of the railways, we could not promptly transport so small an army as half a million men.

ALBERT JEREMIAH BEVERIDGE. Born in Highland County, Ohio, October 6, 1862; graduated from De Pauw University, 1885; United States Senator from Indiana, 1899-1911.

Under national control American railways could be coördinated and systematized. This is only a logical step in the practical development of that nationalism required by the needs of the people.

Another constructive advance is the nationalization of business. Great industrial units are indispensable to modern trade. Yet our laws are so hostile to business organization that American business men can never be sure that they are not legal criminals. We are the only nation in the world that treats its business in such fashion. In economic legislation America is to-day the most backward of modern nations.

Not only does our treatment of the business problem shackle American business, but it has not prevented and cannot prevent a single business abuse which injures the people. For instance, it does not prevent overcapitalization; financial adventurers can to-day form a corporation under state laws and float it on an ocean of watered stock. It does not interfere with manipulation of prices; they are juggled with impunity.

Long ago we ought to have replaced our laws meant to break up business with laws meant to build up business. Now we must do it without a moment's delay. The war has made constructive coöperation the watchword of the new industrial era into which the world is entering. Destructive individual competition has been buried in the ruins of an economic structure which it could not support.

We must make our laws fit conditions of the day instead of trying to make the conditions of to-day fit laws of yesterday. Our great business concerns must be nationalized and standardized by law. National incorporation and control will solve that problem. National charters will safeguard the people on the one hand, and make industrial organization normal and steady on the other hand. A national commission made up of the ablest and most experienced of American business men will counsel and guide American enterprise. The members of it should be so eminent that this Business Commission would rival in its province the Supreme Court in its province.

These constructive reforms are stages in the making of that greater America which will arise in the time now opening-a period that will be known to history as the age of the builders.

The Progressive and Republican platforms of 1916 agree upon all these plans so vital to our national welfare. These platforms declare the will of the two great bodies of citizens which together constitute the army of constructive liberalism in America. In this campaign that army is fighting as a unit to free the American people from the rusty chains of an age that is past and give them their rightful place among the nations. The party in power failed to do this work because it still is ruled by the spirit of localism, still obeys the voice of the demagogue, still

heeds the counsels of the charlatan. The Clayton law adds to the confusion with which the Sherman law already had maddened business; and the Trade Commission admits that it cannot tell the meaning of either. It is so feeble that it menaces by the distrust which its inefficiency creates the establishment hereafter of a real commission to do the real work for which American business has so long been pleading. The administration boasts of "constructive laws." Where did they come from? Who originated the Currency Law? A Republican. Who was the author of the National Child Labor Law? A Progressive and Republican. Who proposed and framed the Tariff Commission Law? The same man who originated National Child Labor legislation. Who advanced the idea of a National Trade Commission? An eminent American business man-a Progressive and Republican.

And during all the long years of fighting for these reforms Mr. Wilson and his party frowned upon and opposed them. Only when the fight was finished and public opinion so firmly behind these progressive measures that the forces of reaction and localism dared oppose them no longer, did Mr. Wilson change his mind and force a reluctant and grumbling party to half-heartedly support them. And this was done at the twelfth hour under the compulsion of terror of the impending election. How will laws, so originated and so enacted, be executed by a power thus belated and unfriendly?

America must heed the world changes now taking place-fundamental changes, permanent changes. Even before the war the industries of France and Germany were so highly organized that, in comparison, American business was chaotic. But in the smithy of the European conflict is being forged an industrial coöperation infinitely more effective than the old. And after the war this improved industrial coöperation will be wielded by a mutual spirit born of that titanic combat. That man is blind who does not see what must and will happen when the tremendous intellectual, moral, and physical energies now waging that struggle and being disciplined by it, are suddenly turned from trench to factory, from smoking gun to shop and mill, from all heavy tasks of war to the lighter work of peace.

The agencies of production and distribution will work with a unity and smoothness that will soon make up for the human loss that battlefields have wrought and, at no distant day, leave far behind those nations that cling to ancient industrial methods.

In Great Britain this economic revolution already has occurred. Before the war that country was far behind in her industrial development. She was living upon her mighty past, smugly content with the ideas of great men that in a former age and amidst conditions that have van