Again, I absolutely protest against being put into the hands of trustees. Mr.
Roosevelt's conception of government is Mr. Taft's conception, that the
Presidency of the United States is the presidency of a board of directors. I
am willing to admit that if the people of the United States cannot get
justice for themselves, then it is high time that they should join the third
party and get it from somebody else. The justice proposed is very beautiful;
it is very attractive; there were planks in that platform which stir all the
sympathies of the heart; they proposed things that we all want to do; but the
question is, Who is going to do them? Through whose instrumentality? Are
Americans ready to ask the trusts to give us in pity what we ought, in
justice, to take?

The third party says that the present system of our industry and trade has
come to stay. Mind you, these artificially built up things, these things that
can't maintain themselves in the market without monopoly, have come to stay,
and the only thing that the government can do, the only thing that the third
party proposes should be done, is to set up a commission to regulate them. It
accepts them. It says: "We will not undertake, it were futile to undertake,
to prevent monopoly, but we will go into an arrangement by which we will make
these monopolies kind to you. We will guarantee that they shall be pitiful.
We will guarantee that they shall pay the right wages. We will guarantee that
they shall do everything kind and public-spirited, which they have never
heretofore shown the least inclination to do."

Don't you realize that that is a blind alley? You can't find your way to
liberty that way. You can't find your way to social reform through the forces
that have made social reform necessary.

The fundamental part of such a program is that the trusts shall be recognized
as a permanent part of our economic order, and that the government shall try
to make trusts the ministers, the instruments, through which the life of this
country shall be justly and happily developed on its industrial side. Now,
everything that touches our lives sooner or later goes back to the industries
which sustain our lives. I have often reflected that there is a very human
order in the petitions in our Lord's prayer. For we pray first of all, "Give
us this day our daily bread," knowing that it is useless to pray for
spiritual graces on an empty stomach, and that the amount of wages we get,
the kind of clothes we wear, the kind of food we can afford to buy, is
fundamental to everything else.

Those who administer our physical life, therefore, administer our spiritual
life; and if we are going to carry out the fine purpose of that great chorus
which supporters of the third party sang almost with religious fervor, then
we have got to find out through whom these purposes of humanity are going to
be realized. It is a mere enterprise, so far as that part of it is concerned,
of making the monopolies philanthropic.