I remember once, a good many years ago, I was attending one of the local chambers of commerce of the United States at a time when everybody was complaining that Congress was interfering with business.  If you have heard that complaint recently and supposed that it was original with the men who made it, you have not lived as long as I have.  It has been going on ever since I can remember.  The complaint came most vigorously from men who were interested in large corporate development.  I took the liberty to say to that body of men, whom I did not know, that I took it for granted that there were a great many lawyers among them, and that it was likely that the more prominent of those lawyers were the intimate advisors of the corporations of that region.  I said that I had met a great many lawyers from whom the complaint had come most vigorously, not only that there was too much legislation with regard to corporations, but that it was ignorant legislation.  I said, “Now, the responsibility is with you.  If the legislation is mistaken, you are on the inside and know where the mistakes are being made.  You know not only the innocent and right things that your corporations are doing, but you know the other things, too.  Knowing how they are done, you can be expert advisors as to how the wrong things can be prevented.  If, therefore, this thing is handled ignorantly, there is nobody to blame but yourselves.”  If we on the outside cannot understand the thing and cannot get advice from the inside, then we will have to do it with the flat hand and not with the touch of skill and discrimination.  Isn’t that true?  Men on the inside of business know how business is conducted and they cannot complain if men on the outside make mistakes about business if they do not come from the inside and give the kind of advice which is necessary.

The trouble has been that when they came in the past—­for I think the thing is changing very rapidly—­they came with all their bristles out; they came on the defensive; they came to see, not what they could accomplish, but what they could prevent.  They did not come to guide; they came to block.  That is of no use whatever to the general body politic.  What has got to pervade us like a great motive power is that we cannot, and must not, separate our interests from one another, but must pool our interests.  A man who is trying to fight for his single hand is fighting against the community and not fighting with it.  There are a great many dreadful things about war, as nobody needs to be told in this day of distress and of terror, but there is one thing about war which has a very splendid side, and that is the consciousness that a whole nation gets that they must all act as a unit for a common end.  And when peace is as handsome as war there will be no war.  When men, I mean, engage in the pursuits of peace in the same spirit of self-sacrifice and of conscious service of the community with which, at any rate, the common soldier engages in war, then shall there be wars no more.  You have moved the vanguard for the United States in the purposes of this association just a little nearer that ideal.  That is the reason I am here, because I believe it.