The Rights of the Individual
"Other republics have fallen," said President Roosevelt in the opening speech at the Jamestown Exposition, "because the citizen gradually grew to consider the interests of a class before the interests of the whole; for when such was the case it mattered little whether it was the poor who plundered the rich, or the rich who exploited the poor; in either event the end of the republic was at hand." And yet it is not the consideration of the interests of the whole that will preserve the republic; that is Socialism, pure and simple. When the republic fails it will be because the interests of the individual are not conserved, the guarding of these rights of the individual against the mob and against the plutocracy. It is strange that men taught in republican principles can not see that the conservation of the rights of the individual, be he poor or rich, let his politics or religion be what they will, is the conservation of the rights of the whole; but the doctrine of the whole against the one or the class, means the tyrannizing of those who may in all conscience and right feel the opposition the most. The President further declares: "This great government of ours shall never become the government of a plutocracy, and it shall never become the government of a mob." The New York World adds, "There is no surer way of making it the government of a mob than by first permitting it to become the government of a plutocracy." The average politician, and that means the majority of them, is controlled either by money or by threat. Money purchases him, and the mob or the class organizations overawe him. In the constantly multiplying revelations of increasing iniquity there certainly seem to be no prospects of rejuvenating the republic.