It is under the compulsion of what seems to me a clear and imperative duty that I have a second time this session sought the privilege of addressing you in person.  I know, of course, that the heated season of the year is upon us, that work in these chambers and in the committee rooms is likely to become a burden as the season lengthens, and that every consideration of personal convenience and personal comfort, perhaps, in the cases of some of us, considerations of personal health even, dictate an early conclusion of the deliberations of the session; but there are occasions of public duty when these things which touch us privately seem very small, when the work to be done is so pressing and so fraught with big consequence that we know that we are not at liberty to weigh against it any point of personal sacrifice.  We are now in the presence of such an occasion.  It is absolutely imperative that we should give the business men of this country a banking and currency system by means of which they can make use of the freedom of enterprise and of individual initiative which we are about to bestow upon them.

We are about to set them free; we must not leave them without the tools of action when they are free.  We are about to set them free by removing the trammels of the protective tariff.  Ever since the Civil War they have waited for this emancipation and for the free opportunities it will bring with it.  It has been reserved for us to give it to them.  Some fell in love, indeed, with the slothful security of their dependence upon the Government; some took advantage of the shelter of the nursery to set up a mimic mastery of their own within its walls.  Now both the tonic and the discipline of liberty and maturity are to ensue.  There will be some readjustments of purpose and point of view.  There will follow a period of expansion and new enterprise, freshly conceived.  It is for us to determine now whether it shall be rapid and facile and of easy accomplishment.  This it cannot be unless the resourceful business men who are to deal with the new circumstances are to have at hand and ready for use the instrumentalities and conveniences of free enterprise which independent men need when acting on their own initiative.

It is not enough to strike the shackles from business.  The duty of statesmanship is not negative merely.  It is constructive also.  We must show that we understand what business needs and that we know how to supply it.  No man, however casual and superficial his observation of the conditions now prevailing in the country, can fail to see that one of the chief things business needs now, and will need increasingly as it gains in scope and vigor in the years immediately ahead of us, is the proper means by which readily to vitalize its credit, corporate and individual, and its originative brains.  What will it profit us to be free if we are not to have the best and most accessible instrumentalities of commerce and enterprise?