them and behind them, not in proportion to the securities they held that
were approved where they were not known. In order to start an enterprise
now, you have to be authenticated, in a perfectly impersonal way, not
according to yourself, but according to what you own that somebody else
approves of your owning. You cannot begin such an enterprise as those that
have made America until you are so authenticated, until you have succeeded
in obtaining the good-will of large allied capitalists. Is that freedom?
That is dependence, not freedom.

We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that
all that government had to do was to put on a policeman's uniform, and
say, "Now don't anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal
of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with,
except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government
was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the
idea that obtained in Jefferson's time. But we are coming now to realize
that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old
conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions
under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for
us to live.

Let me illustrate what I mean: It used to be true in our cities that every
family occupied a separate house of its own, that every family had its own
little premises, that every family was separated in its life from every
other family. That is no longer the case in our great cities. Families
live in tenements, they live in flats, they live on floors; they are piled
layer upon layer in the great tenement houses of our crowded districts,
and not only are they piled layer upon layer, but they are associated room
by room, so that there is in every room, sometimes, in our congested
districts, a separate family. In some foreign countries they have made