e to do us good, and not we ourselves.

Again, I absolutely protest against being put into the hands of trustees.
Mr. Roosevelt's conception of government is Mr. Taft's conception, that
the Presidency of the United States is the presidency of a board of
directors. I am willing to admit that if the people of the United States
cannot get justice for themselves, then it is high time that they should
join the third party and get it from somebody else. The justice proposed
is very beautiful; it is very attractive; there were planks in that
platform which stir all the sympathies of the heart; they proposed things
that we all want to do; but the question is, Who is going to do them?
Through whose instrumentality? Are Americans ready to ask the trusts to
give us in pity what we ought, in justice, to take?

The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has
come to stay. Mind you, these artificially built up things, these things
that can't maintain themselves in the market without monopoly, have come
to stay, and the only thing that the government can do, the only thing
that the third party proposes should be done, is to set up a commission to
regulate them. It accepts them. It says: "We will not undertake, it were
futile to undertake, to prevent monopoly, but we will go into an
arrangement by which we will make these monopolies kind to you. We will
guarantee that they shall be pitiful. We will guarantee that they shall
pay the right wages. We will guarantee that they shall do everything kind
and public-spirited, which they have never heretofore shown the least
inclination to do."

Don't you realize that that is a blind alley? You can't find your way to
liberty that way. You can't find your way to social reform through the
forces that have made social reform necessary.

The fundamental part of such a program is that the trusts shall be
recognized as a permanent part of our economic order, and that the
government shall try to make trusts the ministers, the instruments,
through which the life of this country shall be justly and happily
developed on its industrial side. Now, everything that touches our lives
sooner or later goes back to the industries which sustain our lives. I
have often reflected that there is a very human order in the petitions in
our Lord's prayer. For we pray first of all, "Give us this day our daily
bread," knowing that it is useless to pray for spiritual graces on an
empty stomach,