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 are 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?