To the special interest an unjust rise in the cost of living means simply higher profit, but to those who pay it, that profit is measured in schooling, warm clothing, a reserve to meet emergencies, a fair chance to make the fight for comfort, decency, and right living.

I believe in our form of government and I believe in the Golden Rule.  But we must face the truth that monopoly of the sources of production makes it impossible for vast numbers of men and women to earn a fair living.  Right here the conservation question touches the daily life of the great body of our people, who pay the cost of special privilege.  And the price is heavy.  That price may be the chance to save the boys from the saloons and the corner gang, and the girls from worse, and to make good citizens of them instead of bad; for an appalling proportion of the tragedies of life spring directly from the lack of a little money.  Thousands of daughters of the poor fall into the hands of the white-slave traders because their poverty leaves them without protection.  Thousands of families, as the Pittsburg survey has shown us, lead lives of brutalizing overwork in return for the barest living.  Is it fair that these thousands of families should have less than they need in order that a few families should have swollen fortunes at their expense?  Let him who dares deny that there is wickedness in grinding the faces of the poor, or assert that these are not moral questions which strike the very homes of our people.  If these are not moral questions, there are no moral questions.

The people of this country have lost vastly more than they can ever regain by gifts of public property, forever and without charge, to men who gave nothing in return.  It is true that, we have made superb material progress under this system, but it is not well for us to rejoice too freely in the slices the special interests have given us from the great loaf of the property of all the people.

The people of the United States have been the complacent victims of a system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their private lives were model citizens.  But they have suffered from a curious moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to do for themselves.  Fortunately for us all that delusion is passing rapidly away.

President Hadley well said that “the fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property-owners on the other.”  When property gets possession of the voting power also, little is left for the people.  That is why the unholy alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous fact in our political life.  I believe the American people are tired of that alliance.  They are weary of politics for revenue only.  It is time to take business out of politics, and keep it out—­time for the political activity of this Nation to be aimed squarely at the welfare of all of us, and squarely away from the excessive profits of a few of us.