We make our industrial machines.  We are Americans.  Our machines must have our American temperament.

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If an American employer were to insist on butting his American temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer’s temperament to be like?

The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the American people, in its goods and in itself.

The typical American business man of the highest class—­the man who is expressing his American temperament best in his business—­is the one who is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for his government.  He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts on them with nonchalance.

If he is running a trust—­our most characteristic, recklessly difficult American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big American business is like, what will he do?

He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so.

If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public.

He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say “I am a certain sort of man.  If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a whole nation in these things that I make.  I am a certain sort of man.  Do you think I am, or do you think that I am not?  I want to know.”

The government looks noncommittally at him.  It says it cannot discriminate.

He says nothing for a time, but he thinks in his heart that it is incompetent and cowardly to run a great government of a great nation as a vast national sweep or flourish of getting out of brains and of evading vision.  It seems to him lazy and effeminate in a government to treat all combinations and all monopolies alike.  He says:  “Look me in the eyes!  I demand of you as a citizen of this country the right to be looked by my government in the eyes.  What sort of man am I?  Here are all my doors open.  My safes are your safes and my books are your books.  Am I or am I not a man who can conduct his business as a great profession, one of the dignities and energies and joys of a great people?