gh to
pay their bills? And this in one of the giants among our industries, one
of the undertakings which have thriven to gigantic size upon this very
system.

Ah, the whole mass of the fraud is falling away, and men are beginning to
see disclosed little groups of persons maintaining a control over the
dominant party and through the dominant party over the government, in
their own interest, and not in the interest of the people of the United
States!

* * * * *

Let me repeat: There cannot be free trade in the United States so long as
the established fiscal policy of the federal government is maintained. The
federal government has chosen throughout all the generations that have
preceded us to maintain itself chiefly on indirect instead of direct
taxation. I dare say we shall never see a time when it can alter that
policy in any substantial degree; and there is no Democrat of
thoughtfulness that I have met who contemplates a program of free trade.

But what we intend to do, what the House of Representatives has been
attempting to do and will attempt to do again, and succeed in doing, is to
weed this garden that we have been cultivating. Because, if we have been
laying at the roots of our industrial enterprises this fertilization of
protection, if we have been stimulating it by this policy, we have found
that the stimulation was not equal in respect of all the growths in the
garden, and that there are some growths, which every man can distinguish
with the naked eye, which have so overtopped the rest, which have so
thrown the rest into destroying shadow, that it is impossible for the
industries of the United States as a whole to prosper under their
blighting shade. In other words, we have found out that this that
professes to be a process of protection has become a process of
favoritism, and that the favorites of this policy have flourished at the
expense of all the rest. And now we are going into this garden and weed
it. We are going into this garden and give the little plants air and light
in which to grow. We are going to pull up every root that has so spread
itself as to draw the nutriment of the soil from the other roots. We are
going in there to see to it that the fertilization of intelligence, of
invention, of origination, is once more applied to a set of industries now
threatening to be stagnant, because threatening to be too much
concentrated. The policy of freeing the country from