sidential contest being past, exactly what it was that Mr. Roosevelt
proposed.

Mr. Roosevelt attached to his platform some very splendid suggestions as
to noble enterprises which we ought to undertake for the uplift of the
human race; but when I hear an ambitious platform put forth, I am very
much more interested in the dynamics of it than in the rhetoric of it. I
have a very practical mind, and I want to know who are going to do those
things and how they are going to be done. If you have read the trust plank
in that platform as often as I have read it, you have found it very long,
but very tolerant. It did not anywhere condemn monopoly, except in words;
its essential meaning was that the trusts have been bad and must be made
to be good. You know that Mr. Roosevelt long ago classified trusts for us
as good and bad, and he said that he was afraid only of the bad ones. Now
he does not desire that there should be any more bad ones, but proposes
that they should all be made good by discipline, directly applied by a
commission of executive appointment. All he explicitly complains of is
lack of publicity and lack of fairness; not the exercise of power, for
throughout that plank the power of the great corporations is accepted as
the inevitable consequence of the modern organization of industry. All
that it is proposed to do is to take them under control and regulation.
The national administration having for sixteen years been virtually under
the regulation of the trusts, it would be merely a family matter were the
parts reversed and were the other members of the family to exercise the
regulation. And the trusts, apparently, which might, in such
circumstances, comfortably continue to administer our affairs under the
mollifying influences of the federal government, would then, if you
please, be the instrumentalities by which all the humanistic, benevolent
program of the rest of that interesting platform would be carried out!

I have read and reread that plank, so as to be sure that I get it right.
All that it complains of is,--and the complaint is a just one,
surely,--that these gentlemen exercise their power in a way that is
secret. Therefore, we must have publicity. Sometimes they are arbitrary;
therefore they need regulation. Sometimes they do not consult the general
interests of the community; therefore they need to be reminded of those
general interests by an industrial commission. But at every turn it is the
trusts who ar