too high even to serve the interests of
those who are directly "protected" ought in his view to be lowered. He
declares that he is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of
money is taken out of the pocket of the general taxpayer and put into the
pocket of particular classes of "protected" manufacturers, but that his
concern is that so little of this money gets into the pocket of the
laboring man and so large a proportion of it into the pockets of the
employers. I have searched his program very thoroughly for an indication
of what he expects to do in order to see to it that a larger proportion
of this "prize" money gets into the pay envelope, and have found none. Mr.
Roosevelt, in one of his speeches, proposed that manufacturers who did not
share their profits liberally enough with their workmen should be
penalized by a sharp cut in the "protection" afforded them; but the
platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing.

Moreover, under the system proposed, most employers,--at any rate,
practically all of the most powerful of them,--would be, to all intents
and purposes, wards and proteges of the government which is the master of
us all; for no part of this program can be discussed intelligently without
remembering that monopoly, as handled by it, is not to be prevented, but
accepted. It is to be accepted and regulated. All attempt to resist it is
to be given up. It is to be accepted as inevitable. The government is to
set up a commission whose duty it will be, not to check or defeat it, but
merely to regulate it under rules which it is itself to frame and develop.
So that the chief employers will have this tremendous authority behind
them: what they do, they will have the license of the federal government
to do.

And it is worth the while of the workingmen of the country to recall what
the attitude toward organized labor has been of these masters of
consolidated industries whom it is proposed that the federal government
should take under its patronage as well as under its control. They have
been the stoutest and most successful opponents of organized labor, and
they have tried to undermine it in a great many ways. Some of the ways
they have adopted have worn the guise of philanthropy and good-will, and
have no doubt been used, for all I know, in perfect good faith. Here and
there they have set up systems of profit sharing, of compensation for
injuries, and of bonuses, and even pensions; but every one of th