ty, restrict the
field of originative achievement, and you have cut out the heart and root
of all prosperity.

The only thing that can ever make a free country is to keep a free and
hopeful heart under every jacket in it. Honest American industry has
always thriven, when it has thriven at all, on freedom; it has never
thriven on monopoly. It is a great deal better to shift for yourselves
than to be taken care of by a great combination of capital. I, for my
part, do not want to be taken care of. I would rather starve a free man
than be fed a mere thing at the caprice of those who are organizing
American industry as they please to organize it. I know, and every man in
his heart knows, that the only way to enrich America is to make it
possible for any man who has the brains to get into the game. I am not
jealous of the size of any business that has _grown_ to that size. I am
not jealous of any process of growth, no matter how huge the result,
provided the result was indeed obtained by the processes of wholesome
development, which are the processes of efficiency, of economy, of
intelligence, and of invention.

IX

BENEVOLENCE, OR JUSTICE?

The doctrine that monopoly is inevitable and that the only course open to
the people of the United States is to submit to and regulate it found a
champion during the campaign of 1912 in the new party, or branch of the
Republican party, founded under the leadership of Mr. Roosevelt, with the
conspicuous aid,--I mention him with no satirical intention, but merely to
set the facts down accurately,--of Mr. George W. Perkins, organizer of the
Steel Trust and the Harvester Trust, and with the support of more than
three millions of citizens, many of them among the most patriotic,
conscientious and high-minded men and women of the land. The fact that its
acceptance of monopoly was a feature of the new party platform from which
the attention of the generous and just was diverted by the charm of a
social program of great attractiveness to all concerned for the
amelioration of the lot of those who suffer wrong and privation, and the
further fact that, even so, the platform was repudiated by the majority of
the nation, render it no less necessary to reflect on the significance of
the confession made for the first time by any party in the country's
history. It may be useful, in order to the relief of the minds of many
from an error of no small magnitude, to consider now, the heat of a
pre