THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



757 



State over the sphere of private exploi- 

 tation, is one of the astonishing things 

 to those who know the intensity of the 

 individualism of the American people 

 in all the achievements of modern 

 American history. 



President Eliot said at Harvard quite 

 recently, "American people are oppor- 

 tunists ; they will adopt institutions, 

 socialistic or not, if they are practical, 

 but they will not follow an idea beyond 

 the stage where it becomes inefficient." 

 All of this, and more, is exactly true, 

 and President Eliot might have said that 

 until the Roosevelt administration the 

 American people were not, and even 

 to-day are not, willing to follow an idea 

 as far as it is efficient, or else they hesi- 

 tated to make any new application of 

 the idea, on the principle of keeping 

 out of the water until they knew how to 

 swim. But the time has come when 

 policies no longer answer. The oppor- 

 tunist temper is inadequate. We want 

 an idea. World-making is no piece- 

 meal, laissez-faire, individualist job. 

 The Roosevelt work is of one piece. It 

 shows one mind and one idea. It re- 

 quires that one mind and that one idea 

 in the coordination of scientific effort, in 

 the direction of the investigation and 

 observations for data, in the application 

 of one administration toward the utili- 

 zation of these data, and the framing 

 of a single engineering scheme for its 

 support by the National Government- 

 nothing less. The control of rivers and 

 harbors cannot intelligently be left in 

 the hands of one set of men in one de- 

 partment of the Federal Government, 

 and that of the control of water sources 

 and supplies left in another department 

 of the Federal Government. This 

 great work is of one piece : it should be 

 administered as one scheme. 



A great and immediate need of the 

 United States Government is a new 

 Federal department. Mr. Roosevelt 

 created the Department of Commerce 

 and Labor. Perhaps Mr. Taft will 

 create the Department of Public Works. 

 Instead of being administered with 

 more or less duplication and omission 

 and economic loss by the Federal De- 

 partments of Agriculture. War. Inte- 



rior, and Commerce and Labor, these 

 functions, together with such new ones 

 as are necesary, should be synthesized 

 and coordinated under one Federal 

 department. While the results already 

 achieved by the Government are bril- 

 liant, the mass of scientific data neces- 

 sary to the intelligent administration of 

 such a complicated scheme are still very 

 meager and imperfectly correlated. So 

 vast a scheme, upon which so many 

 scientists and engineering experts are 

 engaged, presents a complication and in- 

 terrelation of problems which can be 

 satisfactorily administered only by one 

 department under the control of one 

 mind according to one overruling idea. 



XATIOXAL PROGRESS RATIONAL, NOT 



FORTUITOUS 



It should be apparent by this time 

 that we have here a new kind of poli- 

 tics. What we have all been taught 

 heretofore, when, indeed, we have been 

 taught anything on the subject, has 

 been political science. Just what this 

 is, nobody seems to have a very clear 

 idea, and for the most part it has been 

 confined to a classification of historical 

 systems. Although it has been vaguely 

 and erroneously confused with political 

 philosophy, the two are as separate and 

 distinct as either one is from the study 

 of history. 



But here we have something differ- 

 ent. Instead of political science we have 

 scientific politics, and it seems to be 

 what we have been waiting for a long 

 time. To be sure, we can find scientific 

 politics, as, for example, in Germany, 

 where politics are rational and not for- 

 tuitous. But in the Roosevelt scheme 

 scientific politics is laid on democratic 

 foundations, or, perhaps, what would 

 be just as accurate to say, democracy 

 has been laid on scientific foundations. 

 This new movement seems to have 

 come not a moment too soon in the 

 evolution of civilization. 



A swift glance ahead 100 years with 

 Asia in possession of our industrial and 

 military secrets, with its own unequaled 

 natural resources untouched and our 

 own squandered, should occasion a 



