the vast
majority of the people, and I feel as if I were being asked to separate
myself, as belonging to a particular class, from that great body of my
fellow-citizens who sustain and conduct the enterprises of the country.
Until we get away from that point of view it will be impossible to have a
free government.

I have listened to some very honest and eloquent orators whose sentiments
were noteworthy for this: that when they spoke of the people, they were
not thinking of themselves; they were thinking of somebody whom they were
commissioned to take care of. They were always planning to do things _for_
the American people, and I have seen them visibly shiver when it was
suggested that they arrange to have something done by the people for
themselves. They said, "What do they know about it?" I always feel like
replying, "What do _you_ know about it? You know your own interest, but
who has told you our interests, and what do you know about them?" For the
business of every leader of government is to hear what the nation is
saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to
judge _for_ the nation, but to judge _through_ the nation as its spokesman
and voice. I do not believe that this country could have safely allowed a
continuation of the policy of the men who have viewed affairs in any other
light.

The hypothesis under which we have been ruled is that of government
through a board of trustees, through a selected number of the big business
men of the country who know a lot that the rest of us do not know, and who
take it for granted that our ignorance would wreck the prosperity of the
country. The idea of the Presidents we have recently had has been that
they were Presidents of a National Board of Trustees. That is not my
idea. I have been president of one board of trustees, and I do not care to
have another on my hands. I want to be President of the people of the
United States. There was many a time when I was president of the board of
trustees of a university when the undergraduates knew more than the
trustees did; and it has been in my thought ever since that if I could
have dealt directly with the people who constituted Princeton University I
could have carried it forward much faster than I could dealing with a
board of trustees.

Mark you, I am not saying that these leaders knew that they were doing us
an evil, or that they intended to do us an evil. For my part, I am very
much more afraid o