s should have swollen fortunes at their
expense? Let him who dares deny that there is wickedness in grinding
the faces of the poor, or assert that these are not moral questions
which strike the very homes of our people. If these are not moral
questions, there are no moral questions.

The people of this country have lost vastly more than they can ever
regain by gifts of public property, forever and without charge, to men
who gave nothing in return. It is true that, we have made superb
material progress under this system, but it is not well for us to
rejoice too freely in the slices the special interests have given us
from the great loaf of the property of all the people.

The people of the United States have been the complacent victims of a
system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised
beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their
private lives were model citizens. But they have suffered from a curious
moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a
corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to
do for themselves. Fortunately for us all that delusion is passing
rapidly away.

President Hadley well said that "the fundamental division of powers in
the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand
and property-owners on the other." When property gets possession of the
voting power also, little is left for the people. That is why the unholy
alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous fact in our
political life. I believe the American people are tired of that
alliance. They are weary of politics for revenue only. It is time to
take business out of politics, and keep it out--time for the political
activity of this Nation to be aimed squarely at the welfare of all of
us, and squarely away from the excessive profits of a few of us.

A man is not bad because he is rich, nor good because he is poor. There
is no monopoly of virtue. I hold no brief for the poor against the rich
nor for the wage-earner against the capitalist. Exceptional capacity in
business, as in any other line of life, should meet with exceptional
reward. Rich men have served this country greatly. Washington was a rich
man. But it is very clear that excessive profits from the control of
natural resources, monopolized by a few, are not worth to this Nation
the tremendous price they cost us.

We have allowed the great corporations to occ