no Presidential Addresses 



and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his 

 neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his 

 business relations, he must do all those every-day 

 ordinary duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But 

 he must do more. In this country of ours the aver 

 age citizen must devote a good deal of thought and 

 time to the affairs of the State as a whole or those 

 affairs will go backward; and he must devote that 

 thought and that time steadily and intelligently. If 

 there is any one quality that is not admirable, 

 whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, 

 either in religion or in anything else. The man or 

 woman who makes up for ten days' indifference to 

 duty by an eleventh-day morbid repentance about 

 that duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the 

 same way it is of no possible use to decline to go 

 through all the ordinary duties of citizenship for a 

 long space of time and then suddenly to get up 

 and feel very angry about something or somebody, 

 not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it 

 were a concrete substance to be handed out forth 

 with. 



This is preliminary to what I want to say to you 

 about the whole question of great corporations as 

 affecting the public. There are very many and very 

 difficult problems with which we are faced as' the 

 results of the forces which have been in play for 

 more than the lifetime of a generation. It is worse 

 than useless for any of us to rail at or regret the 

 great growth of our industrial civilization during the 

 last half century. Speaking academically, we can, 



