I never saw a purple cow,
      I never hope to see one,
    But this I’ll tell you anyhow,
      I’d rather see than be one.

That is the way I feel about this saving of my fellow-countrymen.  I’d rather see a savior of the United States than set up to be one; because I have found out, I have actually found out, that men I consult with know more than I do,—­especially if I consult with enough of them.  I never came out of a committee meeting or a conference without seeing more of the question that was under discussion than I had seen when I went in.  And that to my mind is an image of government.  I am not willing to be under the patronage of the trusts, no matter how providential a government presides over the process of their control of my life.

I am one of those who absolutely reject the trustee theory, the guardianship theory.  I have never found a man who knew how to take care of me, and, reasoning from that point out, I conjecture that there isn’t any man who knows how to take care of all the people of the United States.  I suspect that the people of the United States understand their own interests better than any group of men in the confines of the country understand them.  The men who are sweating blood to get their foothold in the world of endeavor understand the conditions of business in the United States very much better than the men who have arrived and are at the top.  They know what the thing is that they are struggling against.  They know how difficult it is to start a new enterprise.  They know how far they have to search for credit that will put them upon an even footing with the men who have already built up industry in this country.  They know that somewhere, by somebody, the development of industry is being controlled.

I do not say this with the slightest desire to create any prejudice against wealth; on the contrary, I should be ashamed of myself if I excited class feeling of any kind.  But I do mean to suggest this:  That the wealth of the country has, in recent years, come from particular sources; it has come from those sources which have built up monopoly.  Its point of view is a special point of view.  It is the point of view of those men who do not wish that the people should determine their own affairs, because they do not believe that the people’s judgment is sound.  They want to be commissioned to take care of the United States and of the people of the United States, because they believe that they, better than anybody else, understand the interests of the United States.  I do not challenge their character; I challenge their point of view.  We cannot afford to be governed as we have been governed in the last generation, by men who occupy so narrow, so prejudiced, so limited a point of view.