The government is
appealing to the courts to protect the shippers against the railroads.
The corporations are appealing to the Federal courts to protect them
from the unfair treatment of state legislatures. Employers are fighting
trades-unionism, because it denies equal rights to their employers. The
unionists are entreating public opinion to protect them against the
unfairness of "government by injunction." To the free trader the whole
protectionist system seems a flagrant discrimination on behalf of a
certain portion of the community. Everybody seems to be clamoring for a
"Square Deal" but nobody seems to be getting it.
The ambiguity of the principle of equal rights and the resulting
confusion of counsel are so obvious that there must be some good reason
for their apparently unsuspected existence. The truth is that Americans
have not readjusted their political ideas to the teaching of their
political and economic experience. For a couple of generations after
Jefferson had established the doctrine of equal rights as the
fundamental principle of the American democracy, the ambiguity resident
in the application of the doctrine was concealed.
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