CHARACTER AND NATIONAL PROGRESS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 359, 10 May 1911, Page 5

CHARACTER AND NATIONAL PROGRESS.

Mr Roosevelt is contributing to an American magazine a series of articles on "Nationalism and Progress," which make interesting reading. In his latest contribution he defines his conception of good government and the duty of democracy. The true object of government, he says, has been happily defined as the effort to accomplish 'a general distribution of welfare. The true object of democracy should be to guarantee each man hia rights, with the purpose that each man shall be thereby, enabled better to do his duty. Government is a failure, no matter how well it preserves law and order, if it results only in securing fora few people an enormously disproportionate share of power and material wellbeing, while the conditions for the great mass of men are such as to forbid them achieving success by hard, honest, intelligent work. Similarly, democracy merely means failure*" if it substitutes a big privileged class for a small privileged class, and if this big privileged class in its turn desires nothing more than selfish, material enjoyment. The man who receives what he has not earned and does not earn, the man who does not render service in full for all that he has, is out of place in a democratic community, and he is equally out of place whether he is a man living in idle luxury on millions which he has not earned or which he has won in ways that represent no service to the State, or whether he is a man living in idle poverty, enjoying the luxury of squalid sloth, content to exist on some form of charity, or, what is still worse, on what is in its nature the plunder of the industrious. The division between the worthy and the unworthy citizen must be drawn on conduct and good character, and not on wealth or poverty. Still we need good laws, just as a carpenter needs good instruments, and unless the man and the woman are of the right type the laws can accomplish nolhing. If betterment of social and industrial conditions means merely an increase in ease and sensual enjoyment, no good can permanently follow such betterment. This is an exposition of the highest ideals of; Socialism by an authority that cannot fail to command attention. ' Equality of opportunity" and "equality of sacrifice" are both embodied in Mr Roosevelt's conception of good government, and of course they represent the first word and the last in every argument j for the betterment of mankind.