Jasper County Democrat, Volume 14, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 August 1911 — Keep Politics Out of Business and City Problems Will Be Solved [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Keep Politics Out of Business and City Problems Will Be Solved

By JAMES BRYCE,

English Ambassador to United States

XT is often said that business enters TOO MUCH INTO POLITICS—that is to say, that “the interests,” as they ( are technically called, the men, and especially the corporations of great wealth, are too frequently trying to MANIPULATE POLITICS for their own purposes and to use their power over political bodies to enrich themselves. That may be true, and, of course, in parts of the country IT HAS BEEN TRUE, where railroads, for instance, have practically gained the control of whole states. But it is also true that if business has too much encroached upon politics, there is a sense in which cities have thought too much of themselves as political bodies and too little of the business side. After all, a city is for some purposes to be regarded not so much a political entity, like a nation, but rather as a GREAT BUSINESS UNDERTAKING which is trying to carry out a large number of kinds of work for the citizen, which is a great employer of labor, which supplies to the private citizen much that he is obliged to have and which he would have to get from private firms or corporations if the city did not undertake to supply him. The care of streets, of water, of gas, of light, is all business, and politics, in the sense of party politics, should not be allowed to get into it at all. IF CITIES CAN KEEP OUT OF POLITICS IN THAT SENSE—NAMELY, THE INTRUSION OF POLITICAL DIFFERENCES WHERE THEY OUGHT NOT TO BE CONSIDERED OR ALLOWED ANY WEIGHT—THEY WOULD FIND THAT HALF OR MORE THAN HALF OF THEIR DIFFICULTIES WOULD DISAPPEAR.