they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether
we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough,
to take possession again of the government which is our own. We haven't
had free access to it, our minds have not touched it by way of guidance,
in half a generation, and now we are engaged in nothing less than the
recovery of what was made with our own hands, and acts only by our
delegated authority.

I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs and of the
trusts, you are discussing the very lives of yourselves and your children.
I believe that I am preaching the very cause of some of the gentlemen whom
I am opposing when I preach the cause of free industry in the United
States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that bears the
inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are permitted to gird it
entirely nature will take her revenge and the tree will die.

I do not believe that America is securely great because she has great men
in her now. America is great in proportion as she can make sure of having
great men in the next generation. She is rich in her unborn children;
rich, that is to say, if those unborn children see the sun in a day of
opportunity, see the sun when they are free to exercise their energies as
they will. If they open their eyes in a land where there is no special
privilege, then we shall come into a new era of American greatness and
American liberty; but if they open their eyes in a country where they must
be employees or nothing, if they open their eyes in a land of merely
regulated monopoly, where all the conditions of industry are determined by
small groups of men, then they will see an America such as the founders of
this Republic would have wept to think of. The only hope is in the release
of the forces which philanthropic trust presidents want to monopolize.
Only the emancipation, the freeing and heartening of the vital energies of
all the people will redeem us. In all that I may have to do in public
affairs in the United States I am going to think of towns such as I have
seen in Indiana, towns of the old American pattern, that own and operate
their own industries, hopefully and happily. My thought is going to be
bent upon the multiplication of towns of that kind and the prevention of
the concentration of industry in this country in such a fashion and upon
such a scale that towns that own themselves will be impossible. You know