There is a great deal that needs reconstruction in the United States.  I should like to take a census of the business men—­I mean the rank and file of the business men—­as to whether they think that business conditions in this country, or rather whether the organization of business in this country, is satisfactory or not.  I know what they would say if they dared.  If they could vote secretly they would vote overwhelmingly that the present organization of business was meant for the big fellows and was not meant for the little fellows; that it was meant for those who are at the top and was meant to exclude those who are at the bottom; that it was meant to shut out beginners, to prevent new entries in the race, to prevent the building up of competitive enterprise that would interfere with the monopolies which the great trusts have built up.

What this country needs, above everything else, is a body of laws which will look after the men who are on the make rather than the men who are already made.  Because the men who are already made are not going to live indefinitely, and they are not always kind enough to leave sons as able and as honest as they are.

The originative part of America, the part of America that makes new enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted working man makes his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes, that presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope and character—­that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity.  Its members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms me is that they are not originating prosperity.  No country can afford to have its prosperity originated by a small controlling class.  The treasury of America does not lie in the brains of the small body of men now in control of the great enterprises that have been concentrated under the direction of a very small number of persons.  The treasury of America lies in those ambitions, those energies, that can not be restricted to a special, favored class.  It depends upon the inventions of unknown men, upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men.  Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.

There has come over the land that un-American set of conditions which enables a small number of men who control the Government to get favors from the Government; by those favors to exclude their fellows from equal business opportunity; by those favors to extend a network of control that will presently drive every industry in the country, and so make men forget the ancient time when America lay in every hamlet, when America was to be seen on every fair valley, when America displayed her great forces on the broad prairies, ran her fine fires of enterprise up over the mountain sides and down into the bowels of the