What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so t… - Theodore Roosevelt

Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world's progress is essential to the world's well-being.

Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more contemptible. [...] If you have any stuff in you at all, and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics, go to your district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are going to carry the convention against him!

Therefore a simple and poor society can exist as a democracy on a basis of sheer individualism. But a rich and complex industrial society cannot so exist; for some individuals, and especially those artificial individuals called corporations, become so very big that the ordinary individual is utterly dwarfed beside them, and cannot deal with them on terms of equality. It therefore becomes necessary for these ordinary individuals to combine in their turn, first in order to act in their collective capacity through that biggest of all combinations called the Government, and second, to act, also in their own self-defense, through private combinations, such as farmers' associations and trade unions.