ARTICLE BY OSCAR S. STRAUS

The following Intercollegiate Civic League article on "The National Department of Commerce and Labor" is written by Hon. Oscar S. Straus, Secretary of that department. Mr. Straus was born in Atterberg, Rhenish Bavaria, but came to this country early in life. His first important diplomatic office after his graduation from Columbia was his appointment in 1887 by President Cleveland as United States Minister to Turkey. He was elected a member of the permanent court of arbitration at the Hague six years ago, and entered his present position last year.

"The Department of Commerce and Labor."

Commerce has been variously described as an art and a science. Industry is an art, finance is a science, and I suppose when finance takes industry under its wings it becomes an artful science. One of the chief functions of the Department which I administer is to open up the highways and byways of this artful science to the sunlight of public opinion, and so long as public opinion is sound and healthy it will kill off all the wriggling and squirming vermin that burrow through the moral fabric of our financial and political systems.

That the stock-ticker, which after all is a delicate and sensitive electrical instrument, should register this moral regeneration, is a sign of health and not of disease, and the physician who detects the germs of that disease which is sapping public confidence and poisoning the industrial and political body, is a benefactor of his country and prophet of his day and his generation. When Jenner introduced vaccination into the domain of curative and preventive medicine, the reactionaries pronounced him as an enemy of mankind, but the next generation held him up as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race and erected statues to his skill, his service and his memory.

Far more important to the well-being of a state than the increased production of commodities, is the upholding of public morals. We are on the crest of a commercial age. Our foreign commerce alone exceeds our past records, three thousand, three hundred millions of dollars for the past year, and year by year it will mount higher, if we do not lose sight of economic laws and of the moral and human principles in which these laws in the last analysis are embedded.

There are no considerations of higher import than the just relations of capital and labor. The organization of capital, which is a normal and logical development of our times, should welcome reasonable laws which place wholesome restraints upon its activities, so that through competition or otherwise it will not be induced or forced to overstep the safeguards of industrial rights and block the highways of opportunity for the humblest citizen of the land. There can be no liberty without opportunity, and to the extent that opportunity is abridged, whether by the state or by cor- porate power, it is denial of liberty. It is oppression, and it is no less oppression when it emanates from organized capital or from organized labor. The fundamental principles of individual liberty lie at the basis of our political system, and no more sacred duty rests upon the Chief Executive under the Constitution than to see that the laws are faithfully executed. No Executive has been more watchful and vigorous in the fulfilling of that trust than our present Executive. The most powerful interests in the land recognize that, and the masses are grateful in their recognition of his services. The more powerful the capitalistic interests grow, the more need is there that the rights of the masses be guarded, and that their justified grievances be redressed. And so long as we are faithful to this fundamental doctrine there is not now, nor can there ever be, any room in our country for communism, collectivism, socialism, or any other imported "ism," but only for Americanism.

As head of this Executive Department, charged with the administration of some of the laws affecting the commerce and labor, I am deeply sensible, not only of the close mutual relations of capital and labor, but of their respective rights, duties and limitations.

The Department is desirous of exerting its utmost efforts to further commerce. As our foreign commerce increases in volume we come more and more in competition with our rivals in the marts of the world. We have trade agents in foreign countries studying conditions and markets in the principal countries of the world which draw, or can draw, upon the products of our mills and factories. Their reports are disseminated throughout the country, as well as the reports of our consuls bearing upon commerce.

The Department has taken steps to come into closer relations with the commercial interests of the country, and with that view invited delegates in December last from the leading commercial and trade organizations of the principal cities, with a view, not of creating a new national board of trade, but a small delegated body with a permanent seat in Washington, which would represent the entire commercial and trade interests of the country, and would not only co-operate, but be constantly in touch, with it and other departments in promoting the best interests of commerce at home and abroad. The governments of our leading commercial rivals have such co-operation, and they are largely profiting by the arrangement. I am pleased to tell you that this organization of commercial interests is making excellent progress, under the direction of an Executive Council, and that the Department is ready to heartily grasp its hands. Further than this, the Department, upon a request laid before it by the President, has warmly endorsed a plan to establish commercial instruction in the leading state universities and other institutions in states where no such universities exist, so that the science, as well as all the arts of commerce may be taught to the youth of the country