advantage of
individual liberty and opportunity, is taken away, all the energy of her
people begins to subside, to slacken, to grow loose and pulpy, without
fibre, and men simply cast about to see that the day does not end
disastrously with them?

So we must put heart into the people by taking the heartlessness out of
politics, business, and industry. We have got to make politics a thing in
which an honest man can take his part with satisfaction because he knows
that his opinion will count as much as the next man's, and that the boss
and the interests have been dethroned. Business we have got to untrammel,
abolishing tariff favors, and railroad discrimination, and credit denials,
and all forms of unjust handicaps against the little man. Industry we have
got to humanize,--not through the trusts,--but through the direct action
of law guaranteeing protection against dangers and compensation for
injuries, guaranteeing sanitary conditions, proper hours, the right to
organize, and all the other things which the conscience of the country
demands as the workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our
people with the sure prospects of social justice and due reward, with the
vision of the open gates of opportunity for all. We have got to set the
energy and the initiative of this great people absolutely free, so that
the future of America will be greater than the past, so that the pride of
America will grow with achievement, so that America will know as she
advances from generation to generation that each brood of her sons is
greater and more enlightened than that which preceded it, know that she is
fulfilling the promise that she has made to mankind.

Such is the vision of some of us who now come to assist in its
realization. For we Democrats would not have endured this long burden of
exile if we had not seen a vision. We could have traded; we could have got
into the game; we could have surrendered and made terms; we could have
played the role of patrons to the men who wanted to dominate the interests
of the country,--and here and there gentlemen who pretended to be of us
did make those arrangements. They couldn't stand privation. You never can
stand it unless you have within you some imperishable food upon which to
sustain life and courage, the food of those visions of the spirit where a
table is set before us laden with palatable fruits, the fruits of hope,
the fruits of imagination, those invisible things of the spir