t
and ruthless destruction of plume birds for the millinery trade; the
Tortugas Key, Florida, where, in connection with the Carnegie Institute,
experiments have been made on the homing instinct of birds; and the
great bird colonies on Laysan and sister islets in Hawaii, some of the
greatest colonies of sea birds in the world.

CHAPTER XII

THE BIG STICK AND THE SQUARE DEAL

One of the vital questions with which as President I had to deal was the
attitude of the Nation toward the great corporations. Men who understand
and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of
American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief
in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their
belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare
of the people as the end of Government. The men who first applied the
extreme Democratic theory in American life were, like Jefferson, ultra
individualists, for at that time what was demanded by our people was the
largest liberty for the individual. During the century that had elapsed
since Jefferson became President the need had been exactly reversed.
There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism,
under which complete freedom for the individual--that ancient license
which President Wilson a century after the term was excusable has called
the "New" Freedom--turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for
the strong to wrong the weak. The total absence of governmental control
had led to a portentous growth in the financial and industrial world
both of natural individuals and of artificial individuals--that is,
corporations. In no other country in the world had such enormous
fortunes been gained. In no other country in the world was such power
held by the men who had gained these fortunes; and these men almost
always worked through, and by means of, the giant corporations which
they controlled. The power of the mighty industrial overlords of
the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of
controlling them, or checking abuses by them, on the part of the people,
through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically
impotent. The courts, not unnaturally, but most regrettably, and to
the grave detriment of the people and of their own standing, had for a
quarter of a century been on the whole the agents of reaction, and by
conflicting decisions which, however, in their sum were