illusion, the illusion of greatness. It had
framed tariff laws based upon a fear of foreign trade, a fundamental
doubt as to American skill, enterprise, and capacity, and a very tender
regard for the profitable privileges of those who had gained control of
domestic markets and domestic credits; and yet had enacted anti-trust
laws which hampered the very things they meant to foster, which were
stiff and inelastic, and in part unintelligible. It had permitted the
country throughout the long period of its control to stagger from one
financial crisis to another under the operation of a national banking
law of its own framing which made stringency and panic certain and the
control of the larger business operations of the country by the bankers
of a few reserve centers inevitable; had made as if it meant to reform
the law but had faint-heartedly failed in the attempt, because it could
not bring itself to do the one thing necessary to make the reform
genuine and effectual, namely, break up the control of small groups of
bankers. It had been oblivious, or indifferent, to the fact that the
farmers, upon whom the country depends for its food and in the last
analysis for its prosperity, were without standing in the matter of
commercial credit, without the protection of standards in their market
transactions, and without systematic knowledge of the markets
themselves; that the laborers of the country, the great army of men who
man the industries it was professing to father and promote, carried
their labor as a mere commodity to market, were subject to restraint by
novel and drastic process in the courts, were without assurance of
compensation for industrial accidents, without federal assistance in
accommodating labor disputes, and without national aid or advice in
finding the places and the industries in which their labor was most
needed. The country had no national system of road construction and
development. Little intelligent attention was paid to the army, and not
enough to the navy. The other republics of America distrusted us,
because they found that we thought first of the profits of American
investors and only as an afterthought of impartial justice and helpful
friendship. Its policy was provincial in all things; its purposes were
out of harmony with the temper and purpose of the people and the timely
development of the nation's interests.

So things stood when the Democratic Party came into power. How do they
stand now? A