these men
who are controlling the government of the United States realize how they
are creating every year a thickening atmosphere of suspicion, in which
presently they will find that business cannot breathe?

So I take it to be a necessity of the hour to open up all the processes of
politics and of public business,--open them wide to public view; to make
them accessible to every force that moves, every opinion that prevails in
the thought of the people; to give society command of its own economic
life again, not by revolutionary measures, but by a steady application of
the principle that the people have a right to look into such matters and
to control them; to cut all privileges and patronage and private advantage
and secret enjoyment out of legislation.

Wherever any public business is transacted, wherever plans affecting the
public are laid, or enterprises touching the public welfare, comfort, or
convenience go forward, wherever political programs are formulated, or
candidates agreed on,--over that place a voice must speak, with the divine
prerogative of a people's will, the words: "Let there be light!"

VII

THE TARIFF--"PROTECTION," OR SPECIAL PRIVILEGE?

Every business question, in this country, comes back, sooner or later, to
the question of the tariff. You cannot escape from it, no matter in which
direction you go. The tariff is situated in relation to other questions
like Boston Common in the old arrangement of that interesting city. I
remember seeing once, in _Life_, a picture of a man standing at the door
of one of the railway stations in Boston and inquiring of a Bostonian the
way to the Common. "Take any of these streets," was the reply, "in either
direction." Now, as the Common was related to the winding streets of
Boston, so the tariff question is related to the economic questions of our
day. Take any direction and you will sooner or later get to the Common.
And, in discussing the tariff you may start at the centre and go in any
direction you please.

Let us illustrate by standing at the centre, the Common itself. As far
back as 1828, when they knew nothing about "practical politics" as
compared with what we know now, a tariff bill was passed which was called
the "Tariff of Abominations," because it had no beginning nor end nor
plan. It had no traceable pattern in it. It was as if the demands of
everybody in the United States had all been thrown indiscriminately into
one basket and that bask