trusts when he knows that he cannot redeem a single promise that he has made to war upon the trusts unless he avails himself of weapons of which the Federal Government had been deprived before I became President, and which were restored to it during my Administration and through proceedings which I directed?  Without my action Mr. Wilson could not now undertake or carry on a single suit against a monopoly, and, moreover, if it had not been for my action and for the judicial decision in consequence obtained, Congress would be helpless to pass a single law against monopoly.

Let Mr. Wilson mark that the men who organized and directed the Northern Securities Company were also the controlling forces in the very Steel Corporation which Mr. Wilson makes believe to think was supporting me.  I challenge Mr. Wilson to deny this, and yet he well knew that it was my successful suit against the Northern Securities Company which first efficiently established the power of the people over the trusts.

After reading Mr. Wilson’s book, I am still entirely in the dark as to what he means by the “New Freedom.”  Mr. Wilson is an accomplished and scholarly man, a master of rhetoric, and the sentences in the book are well-phrased statements, usually inculcating a morality which is sound although vague and ill defined.  There are certain proposals (already long set forth and practiced by me and by others who have recently formed the Progressive party) made by Mr. Wilson with which I cordially agree.  There are, however, certain things he has said, even as regards matters of abstract morality, with which I emphatically disagree.  For example, in arguing for proper business publicity, as to which I cordially agree with Mr. Wilson, he commits himself to the following statement: 

“You know there is temptation in loneliness and secrecy.  Haven’t you experienced it?  I have.  We are never so proper in our conduct as when everybody can look and see exactly what we are doing.  If you are off in some distant part of the world and suppose that nobody who lives within a mile of your home is anywhere around, there are times when you adjourn your ordinary standards.  You say to yourself, ’Well, I’ll have a fling this time; nobody will know anything about it.’  If you were on the Desert of Sahara, you would feel that you might permit yourself—­well, say, some slight latitude of conduct; but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors coming the other way on a camel, you would behave yourself until he got out of sight.  The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where nobody knows you.  I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and then you may keep out of jail.  That is the only way some of us can keep out of jail.”

I emphatically disagree with what seems to be the morality inculcated in this statement, which is that a man is expected to do and is to be pardoned for doing all kinds of immoral things if he does them alone and does not expect to be found out.  Surely it is not necessary, in insisting upon proper publicity, to preach a morality of so basely material a character.