gramme. Mr. Wilson in opposing them is the mere apostle of reaction.
He says that I got my "ideas from the gentlemen who form the Steel
Corporation." I did not. But I will point out to him something in
return. It was he himself, and Mr. Taft, who got the votes and the money
of these same gentlemen, and of those in the Harvester Trust.

Mr. Wilson has promised to break up all trusts. He can do so only by
proceeding at law. If he proceeds at law, he can hope for success
only by taking what I have done as a precedent. In fact, what I did as
President is the base of every action now taken or that can be now
taken looking toward the control of corporations, or the suppression
of monopolies. The decisions rendered in various cases brought by my
direction constitute the authority on which Mr. Wilson must base any
action that he may bring to curb monopolistic control. Will Mr. Wilson
deny this, or question it in any way? With what grace can he describe
my Administration as satisfactory to the trusts when he knows that he
cannot redeem a single promise that he has made to war upon the trusts
unless he avails himself of weapons of which the Federal Government had
been deprived before I became President, and which were restored to
it during my Administration and through proceedings which I directed?
Without my action Mr. Wilson could not now undertake or carry on a
single suit against a monopoly, and, moreover, if it had not been for my
action and for the judicial decision in consequence obtained, Congress
would be helpless to pass a single law against monopoly.

Let Mr. Wilson mark that the men who organized and directed the Northern
Securities Company were also the controlling forces in the very Steel
Corporation which Mr. Wilson makes believe to think was supporting me.
I challenge Mr. Wilson to deny this, and yet he well knew that it was
my successful suit against the Northern Securities Company which first
efficiently established the power of the people over the trusts.

After reading Mr. Wilson's book, I am still entirely in the dark as to
what he means by the "New Freedom." Mr. Wilson is an accomplished and
scholarly man, a master of rhetoric, and the sentences in the book are
well-phrased statements, usually inculcating a morality which is sound
although vague and ill defined. There are certain proposals (already
long set forth and practiced by me and by others who have recently
formed the Progressive party) made by Mr. W