No country has ever occupied a higher plane of material well-being than ours at the present moment.  This well-being is due to no sudden or accidental causes, but to the play of the economic forces in this country for over a century; to our laws, our sustained and continuous policies; above all, to the high individual average of our citizenship.  Great fortunes have been won by those who have taken the lead in this phenomenal industrial development, and most of these fortunes have been won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.  Never before has material well-being been so widely diffused among our people.  Great fortunes have been accumulated, and yet in the aggregate these fortunes are small Indeed when compared to the wealth of the people as a whole.  The plain people are better off than they have ever been before.  The insurance companies, which are practically mutual benefit societies—­especially helpful to men of moderate means—­represent accumulations of capital which are among the largest in this country.  There are more deposits in the savings banks, more owners of farms, more well-paid wage-workers in this country now than ever before in our history.  Of course, when the conditions have favored the growth of so much that was good, they have also favored somewhat the growth of what was evil.  It is eminently necessary that we should endeavor to cut out this evil, but let us keep a due sense of proportion; let us not in fixing our gaze upon the lesser evil forget the greater good.  The evils are real and some of them are menacing, but they are the outgrowth, not of misery or decadence, but of prosperity—­of the progress of our gigantic industrial development.  This industrial development must not be checked, but side by side with it should go such progressive regulation as will diminish the evils.  We should fail in our duty if we did not try to remedy the evils, but we shall succeed only if we proceed patiently, with practical common sense as well as resolution, separating the good from the bad and holding on to the former while endeavoring to get rid of the latter.

In my Message to the present Congress at its first session I discussed at length the question of the regulation of those big corporations commonly doing an interstate business, often with some tendency to monopoly, which are popularly known as trusts.  The experience of the past year has emphasized, in my opinion, the desirability of the steps I then proposed.  A fundamental requisite of social efficiency is a high standard of individual energy and excellence; but this is in no wise inconsistent with power to act in combination for aims which can not so well be achieved by the individual acting alone.  A fundamental base of civilization is the inviolability of property; but this is in no wise inconsistent with the right of society to regulate the exercise of the artificial powers which it confers upon the owners of property,