never be renewed.  They favor development by private capital and not by the Government, but they also favor attaching such reasonable conditions to the right to develop as will protect the public and control water-power monopoly in the public interest, while at the same time giving to enterprising capital its just and full reward.  They believe that to grant rights to water power in perpetuity is a wrongful mortgage of the welfare of our descendants, and to grant them without insisting on some return for value received is to rob ourselves.

I believe in dividends for the people as well as taxes.  Fifty years is long enough for the certainty of profitable investment in water power, and to fix on the amount of return that will be fair to the public and the corporation is not impossible.  What city does not regret some ill-considered franchise?  And why should not the Nation profit by the experience of its citizens?

There is no reason why the water-power interests should be given the people’s property freely and forever except that they would like to have it that way.  I suspect that the mere wishes of the special interests, although they have been the mainspring of much public action for many years, have begun to lose their compelling power.  A good way to begin to regulate corporations would be to stop them from regulating us.

The sober fact is that here is the imminent battle-ground in the endless contest for the rights of the people.  Nothing that can be said or done will suffice to postpone longer the active phases of this fight; and that is why I attach so great importance to the attitude of administrative officers in protecting the public welfare in the enforcement of the law.

From time to time a few strong leaders have tried to unite the people in the fight of the many for the equal opportunities to which they are entitled.  But the people have only just begun to take this fight, in earnest.  They have not realized until recently the vital importance and far-reaching consequences of their own passive position.

Now that the fight is passing into an acute stage it is easily seen that the special interests have used the period of public indifference to manoeuvre themselves into a position of exceeding strength.  In the first place, the Constitutional position of property in the United States is stronger than in any other nation.  In the second place, it is well understood that the influence of the corporations in our law-making bodies is usually excessive, not seldom to the point of defeating the will of the people steadily and with ease.  In the third place, cases are not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of evils in the body politic, an unjust judge.

When an interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy, to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has been made.  Fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point of view, have failed to see the essential fact in this great conflict.  They do not understand that this is far more than an economic question, that in its essence and in every essential characteristic it is a moral question.