exclude those who
are at the bottom; that it was meant to shut out beginners, to prevent
new entries in the race, to prevent the building up of competitive
enterprise that would interfere with the monopolies which the great
trusts have built up.

What this country needs, above everything else, is a body of laws which
will look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are
already made. Because the men who are already made are not going to
live indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to leave sons as
able and as honest as they are.

The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new
enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted working man
makes his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes,
that presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope
and character--that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by
the processes which we have been taught to call processes of
prosperity. Its members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what
alarms me is that they are not _originating_ prosperity. No country can
afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class.
The treasury of America does not lie in the brains of the small body of
men now in control of the great enterprises that have been concentrated
under the direction of a very small number of persons. The treasury of
America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that can not be
restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions
of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the
ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of
the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful
and in control.

There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which
enables a small number of men who control the Government to get favors
from the Government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from
equal business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of
control that will presently drive every industry in the country, and so
make men forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when
America was to be seen on every fair valley, when America displayed her
great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up
over the mountain sides and down into the bowels of the earth, and
eager men were everywhere captains of industry, not employees; not
loo