ese plans
has merely bound their workingmen more tightly to themselves. Rights under
these various arrangements are not legal rights. They are merely
privileges which employees enjoy only so long as they remain in the
employment and observe the rules of the great industries for which they
work. If they refuse to be weaned away from their independence they
cannot continue to enjoy the benefits extended to them.

* * * * *

When you have thought the whole thing out, therefore, you will find that
the program of the new party legalizes monopolies and systematically
subordinates workingmen to them and to plans made by the government both
with regard to employment and with regard to wages. Take the thing as a
whole, and it looks strangely like economic mastery over the very lives
and fortunes of those who do the daily work of the nation; and all this
under the overwhelming power and sovereignty of the national government.
What most of us are fighting for is to break up this very partnership
between big business and the government. We call upon all intelligent men
to bear witness that if this plan were consummated, the great employers
and capitalists of the country would be under a more overpowering
temptation than ever to take control of the government and keep it
subservient to their purpose.

What a prize it would be to capture! How unassailable would be the
majesty and the tyranny of monopoly if it could thus get sanction of law
and the authority of government! By what means, except open revolt, could
we ever break the crust of our life again and become free men, breathing
an air of our own, living lives that we wrought out for ourselves?

You cannot use monopoly in order to serve a free people. You cannot use
great combinations of capital to be pitiful and righteous when the
consciences of great bodies of men are enlisted, not in the promotion of
special privilege, but in the realization of human rights. When I read
those beautiful portions of the program of the third party devoted to the
uplift of mankind and see noble men and women attaching themselves to that
party in the hope that regulated monopoly may realize these dreams of
humanity, I wonder whether they have really studied the instruments
through which they are going to do these things. The man who is leading
the third party has not changed his point of view since he was President
of the United States. I am not asking him to chan