At the least, under the plan I am opposing, there will be an avowed partnership between the government and the trusts.  I take it that the firm will be ostensibly controlled by the senior member.  For I take it that the government of the United States is at least the senior member, though the younger member has all along been running the business.  But when all the momentum, when all the energy, when a great deal of the genius, as so often happens in partnerships the world over, is with the junior partner, I don’t think that the superintendence of the senior partner is going to amount to very much.  And I don’t believe that benevolence can be read into the hearts of the trusts by the superintendence and suggestions of the federal government; because the government has never within my recollection had its suggestions accepted by the trusts.  On the contrary, the suggestions of the trusts have been accepted by the government.

There is no hope to be seen for the people of the United States until the partnership is dissolved.  And the business of the party now entrusted with power is going to be to dissolve it.

* * * * *

Those who supported the third party supported, I believe, a program perfectly agreeable to the monopolies.  How those who have been fighting monopoly through all their career can reconcile the continuation of the battle under the banner of the very men they have been fighting, I cannot imagine.  I challenge the program in its fundamentals as not a progressive program at all.  Why did Mr. Gary suggest this very method when he was at the head of the Steel Trust?  Why is this very method commended here, there, and everywhere by the men who are interested in the maintenance of the present economic system of the United States?  Why do the men who do not wish to be disturbed urge the adoption of this program?  The rest of the program is very handsome; there is beating in it a great pulse of sympathy for the human race.  But I do not want the sympathy of the trusts for the human race.  I do not want their condescending assistance.

And I warn every progressive Republican that by lending his assistance to this program he is playing false to the very cause in which he had enlisted.  That cause was a battle against monopoly, against control, against the concentration of power in our economic development, against all those things that interfere with absolutely free enterprise.  I believe that some day these gentlemen will wake up and realize that they have misplaced their trust, not in an individual, it may be, but in a program which is fatal to the things we hold dearest.

If there is any meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this:  that the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic organization of our industrial life.  That is the thing which certain Republicans became “insurgents” in order to throw off.  And yet some of them allowed themselves to be so misled as to go into the camp of the third party in order to remove what the third party proposed to legalize.  My point is that this is a method conceived from the point of view of the very men who are to be controlled, and that this is just the wrong point of view from which to conceive it.