ors, shippers, and consumers of trust products can only
protect themselves by securing control of the government, or at least
sharing it on equal terms with the large capitalists.

The reason that Mr. Roosevelt's proposal was hailed with equal
enthusiasm by the more far-sighted capitalists, whether radical or
conservative, small or large, was that they have an approximately equal
hope of controlling the government, or sharing in its control. The
unbiased observer can well conclude that they are likely to divide this
control between them--and, indeed, that the complete victory of either
party is economically and politically unthinkable. Already banks,
railways, industrial "trusts," mining and lumber interests, are being
forced to follow a policy satisfactory to small capitalist investors,
borrowers, customers, furnishers of raw material, and taxpayers--while
small capitalist competitors are being forced to abandon their effort to
use the government to restore competition and destroy the "trusts."

In the reorganization of capitalism, the non-capitalists, the wage and
salary earning class are not to be consulted. Taken together with those
among the professional and salaried class who are small investors or
expect to become independent producers, the small capitalists constitute
a majority of the electorate (though not of the population), or at
least hold the political balance of power. It is capitalist interests
alone that really count in present-day politics, and it is for
capitalists alone that government control would be instituted.

Viewed in this light the statements of Mr. Woodrow Wilson that "business
is no longer in any proper sense a private matter," or that "our
program, from which we cannot be turned aside, is, that we are going to
take possession of the control of our own economic life," and the
similar statements of Mr. Roosevelt, are not so Socialistic as they
seem. What their use by the leading "conservative-progressive" statesmen
of both parties means is that a partnership of capital and government is
at hand.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Lincoln Steffens in _Everybody's Magazine_, beginning September,
1910.

[32] _McClure's Magazine_, 1911.

[33] Governor Woodrow Wilson, Speech of April 13, 1911.

[34] The _Outlook_, Nov. 18, 1911.

CHAPTER III

THE POLITICS OF THE NEW CAPITALISM

We are told that the political issue as viewed by American radicals is,
"Shall property rule, or shall the people r