rs in unlimited
competition, unlimited individualism, were in the actual state of
affairs false and mischievous. They realized that the Government must
now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation
to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as
centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which
does wrong by violence.

The big reactionaries of the business world and their allies and
instruments among politicians and newspaper editors took advantage of
this division of opinion, and especially of the fact that most of their
opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to keep matters absolutely
unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an immunity from
governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as
foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. Many of them
were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were some of
these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval
castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was. There
have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at
stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for
our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of
tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere
wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.

When I became President, the question as to the method by which the
United States Government was to control the corporations was not yet
important. The absolutely vital question was whether the Government had
power to control them at all. This question had not yet been decided in
favor of the United States Government. It was useless to discuss methods
of controlling big business by the National Government until it was
definitely settled that the National Government had the power to control
it. A decision of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness,
settled that the National Government had not the power.

This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered
it; and the present power of the National Government to deal effectively
with the trusts is due solely to the success of the Administration in
securing this reversal of its former decision by the Supreme Court.

The Constitution was formed very largely because it had become
imperative to give to some central authority the power to regulate and
control interstate commerce. At