It is part of the indictment against the protective policy of the United States that it has weakened and not enhanced the vigor of our people.  American manufacturers who know that they can make better things than are made elsewhere in the world, that they can sell them cheaper in foreign markets than they are sold in these very markets of domestic manufacture, are afraid,—­afraid to venture out into the great world on their own merits and their own skill.  Think of it, a nation full of genius and yet paralyzed by timidity!  The timidity of the business men of America is to me nothing less than amazing.  They are tied to the apron strings of the government at Washington.  They go about to seek favors.  They say:  “For pity’s sake, don’t expose us to the weather of the world; put some homelike cover over us.  Protect us.  See to it that foreign men don’t come in and match their brains with ours.”  And, as if to enhance this peculiarity of ours, the strongest men amongst us get the biggest favors; the men of peculiar genius for organizing industries, the men who could run the industries of any country, are the men who are most strongly intrenched behind the highest rates in the schedules of the tariff.  They are so timid morally, furthermore, that they dare not stand up before the American people, but conceal these favors in the verbiage of the tariff schedule itself,—­in “jokers.”  Ah! but it is a bitter joke when men who seek favors are so afraid of the best judgment of their fellow-citizens that they dare not avow what they take.

Happily, the general revival of conscience in this country has not been confined to those who were consciously fighting special privilege.  The awakening of conscience has extended to those who were enjoying special privileges, and I thank God that the business men of this country are beginning to see our economic organization in its true light, as a deadening aristocracy of privilege from which they themselves must escape.  The small men of this country are not deluded, and not all of the big business men of this country are deluded.  Some men who have been led into wrong practices, who have been led into the practices of monopoly, because that seemed to be the drift and inevitable method of supremacy, are just as ready as we are to turn about and adopt the process of freedom.  For American hearts beat in a lot of these men, just as they beat under our jackets.  They will be as glad to be free as we shall be to set them free.  And then the splendid force which has lent itself to things that hurt us will lend itself to things that benefit us.

And we,—­we who are not great captains of industry or business,—­shall do them more good than we do now, even in a material way.  If you have to be subservient, you are not even making the rich fellows as rich as they might be, because you are not adding your originative force to the extraordinary production of wealth in America.  America is as rich, not as Wall Street, not as the financial centres in Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco; it is as rich as the people that make those centres rich.  And if those people hesitate in their enterprise, cower in the face of power, hesitate to originate designs of their own, then the very fountains which make these places abound in wealth are dried up at the source.  By setting the little men of America free, you are not damaging the giants.