business. For business is nothing but the industrial
and trade activities of all the people. Men grow the products of the
field, cut ripe timber from the forest, dig metal from the mine, fashion
all for human use, carry them to the market place and exchange them
according to their mutual needs--and this is business.

With our vast advantages, contrasted with the vast disadvantages of
other nations, American business all the time should be the best and
steadiest in the world. But it is not. Germany, with shallow soil, no
mines, only a window on the seas and a population more than ten times as
dense as ours, yet has a sounder business, a steadier prosperity, a more
contented because better cared for people.

What, then, must we do to make American business better? We must do what
poorer nations have done. We must end the abuses of business by striking
down those abuses instead of striking down business itself. We must try
to make little business big and all business honest instead of striving
to make big business little and yet letting it remain dishonest.

Present-day business is as unlike old-time business as the old-time
ox-cart is unlike the present-day locomotive. Invention has made the
whole world over again. The railroad, telegraph, telephone have bound
the people of modern nations into families. To do the business of these
closely knit millions in every modern country great business concerns
came into being. What we call big business is the child of the economic
progress of mankind. So warfare to destroy big business is foolish
because it can not succeed and wicked because it ought not to succeed.
Warfare to destroy big business does not hurt big business, which always
comes out on top, so much as it hurts all other business which, in such
a warfare, never comes out on top.

With the growth of big business came business evils just as great. It is
these evils of big business that hurt the people and injure all other
business. One of these wrongs is over capitalization which taxes the
people's very living. Another is the manipulation of prices to the
unsettlement of all normal business and to the people's damage. Another
is interference in the making of the people's laws and the running of
the people's government in the unjust interest of evil business. Getting
laws that enable particular interests to rob the people, and even to
gather criminal riches from human health and life is still another.

An example of s