We mean to remedy these conditions.  We mean not only to make prosperity steady, but to give to the many who earn it a just share of that prosperity instead of helping the few who do not earn it to take an unjust share.  The progressive motto is “Pass prosperity around.”  To make human living easier, to free the hands of honest business, to make trade and commerce sound and steady, to protect womanhood, save childhood and restore the dignity of manhood—­these are the tasks we must do.

What, then, is the progressive answer to these questions?  We are able to give it specifically and concretely.  The first work before us is the revival of honest business.  For business is nothing but the industrial and trade activities of all the people.  Men grow the products of the field, cut ripe timber from the forest, dig metal from the mine, fashion all for human use, carry them to the market place and exchange them according to their mutual needs—­and this is business.

With our vast advantages, contrasted with the vast disadvantages of other nations, American business all the time should be the best and steadiest in the world.  But it is not.  Germany, with shallow soil, no mines, only a window on the seas and a population more than ten times as dense as ours, yet has a sounder business, a steadier prosperity, a more contented because better cared for people.

What, then, must we do to make American business better?  We must do what poorer nations have done.  We must end the abuses of business by striking down those abuses instead of striking down business itself.  We must try to make little business big and all business honest instead of striving to make big business little and yet letting it remain dishonest.

Present-day business is as unlike old-time business as the old-time ox-cart is unlike the present-day locomotive.  Invention has made the whole world over again.  The railroad, telegraph, telephone have bound the people of modern nations into families.  To do the business of these closely knit millions in every modern country great business concerns came into being.  What we call big business is the child of the economic progress of mankind.  So warfare to destroy big business is foolish because it can not succeed and wicked because it ought not to succeed.  Warfare to destroy big business does not hurt big business, which always comes out on top, so much as it hurts all other business which, in such a warfare, never comes out on top.

With the growth of big business came business evils just as great.  It is these evils of big business that hurt the people and injure all other business.  One of these wrongs is over capitalization which taxes the people’s very living.  Another is the manipulation of prices to the unsettlement of all normal business and to the people’s damage.  Another is interference in the making of the people’s laws and the running of the people’s government in the unjust interest of evil business.  Getting laws that enable particular interests to rob the people, and even to gather criminal riches from human health and life is still another.