I don't care how benevolent the master is going to be, I will not live under
a master. That is not what America was created for. America was created in
order that every man should have the same chance as every other man to
exercise mastery over his own fortunes. What I want to do is analogous to
what the authorities of the city of Glasgow did with tenement houses. I want
to light and patrol the corridors of these great organizations in order to
see that nobody who tries to traverse them is waylaid and maltreated. If you
will but hold off the adversaries, if you will but see to it that the weak
are protected, I will venture a wager with you that there are some men in the
United States, now weak, economically weak, who have brains enough to compete
with these gentlemen and who will presently come into the market and put
these gentlemen on their mettle. And the minute they come into the market
there will be a bigger market for labor and a different wage scale for labor.

Because it is susceptible of convincing proof that the high-paid labor of
America,-where it is high paid,-is cheaper than the low-paid labor of the
continent of Europe. Do you know that about ninety per cent. of those who are
employed in labor in this country are not employed in the "protected"
industries, and that their wages are almost without exception higher than the
wages of those who are employed in the "protected" industries? There is no
corner on carpenters, there is no corner on bricklayers, there is no corner
on scores of individual classes of skilled laborers; but there is a corner on
the poolers in the furnaces, there is a corner on the men who dive down into
the mines; they are in the grip of a controlling power which determines the
market rates of wages in the United States. Only where labor is free is labor
highly paid in America.

When I am fighting monopolistic control, therefore, I am fighting for the
liberty of every man in America, and I am fighting for the liberty of
American industry.

It is significant that the spokesman for the plan of adopting monopoly
declares his devoted adherence to the principle of "protection." Only those
duties which are manifestly too high even to serve the interests of those who
are directly "protected" ought in his view to be lowered. He declares that he
is not troubled by the fact that a very large amount of money is taken out of
the pocket of the general taxpayer and put into the pocket of particular
classes of "protected" manufacturers, but that his concern is that so little
of this money gets into the pocket of the laboring man and so large a
proportion of it into the pockets of the employers. I have searched his
program very thoroughly for an indication of what he expects to do in order
to see to it that a larger proportion of this "prize" money gets into the pay
envelope, and have found none. Mr. Roosevelt, in one of his speeches,
proposed that manufacturers who did not share their profits liberally enough
with their workmen should be penalized by a sharp cut in the "protection"
afforded them; but the platform, so far as I could see, proposed nothing.