314 PUBLIC PAPERS OF GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT
give us all serious concern, as we try to front them, as we try to work
out some satisfactory solution from the complex difficulties of the
social organization of this extreme end of the nineteenth century in
our great Republic, among all those problems there is no one problem
that is so difficult to deal with as the problem of how to do justice to
wealth, either in the hands of the individual or the corporation, on the
one hand, or, on the other, how to see that that wealth in return is used
for the benefit of the whole community. The tendency, as is natural, is
for men to range themselves in two extreme camps, each taking a
position that, in the long run, would be almost equally fatal to the
community. We have, on the one hand, the ignorant declaimer against
all men of means; the man who paints his fellows who are well off as
being, because of that very fact, the foes of the community as a whole,
and, on the other, we find him, who, whether honestly or dishonestly,
permits his fear of improper interference with property to take the
form of shrinking from and avoiding all proper interference with it,
who fears to take any attitude which any of his friends, any of those
with whom he associates, may denounce as being an attitude hostile to
men of means. Too often what I have said to you before of the
relations of the politician to the reformers and the organization
obtains, in even aggravated form, as to the relations of such a public
man to corporations and to those who follow the lead of demagogues.
I know no general rule that can be laid down to meet all such cases.
I am going to speak, as you would have the right to expect me to
speak, of what affects us at the present moment here in this State, of
one of those problems with which we, who are for the time being your
ser-