As a matter of fact, their thought does not cover the processes of their own undertakings.  As a university president, I learned that the men who dominate our manufacturing processes could not conduct their business for twenty-four hours without the assistance of the experts with whom the universities were supplying them.  Modern industry depends upon technical knowledge; and all that these gentlemen did was to manage the external features of great combinations and their financial operation, which had very little to do with the intimate skill with which the enterprises were conducted.  I know men not catalogued in the public prints, men not spoken of in public discussion, who are the very bone and sinew of the industry of the United States.

Do our masters of industry speak in the spirit and interest even of those whom they employ?  When men ask me what I think about the labor question and laboring men, I feel that I am being asked what I know about 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.