If Mr. Wilson’s promises mean anything except the very emptiest words, he is pledged to accomplish the beneficent purposes he avows by breaking up all the trusts and combinations and corporations so as to restore competition precisely as it was fifty years ago.  If he does not mean this, he means nothing.  He cannot do anything else under penalty of showing that his promise and his performance do not square with each other.

Mr. Wilson says that “the trusts are our masters now, but I for one do not care to live in a country called free even under kind masters.”  Good!  The Progressives are opposed to having masters, kind or unkind, and they do not believe that a “new freedom” which in practice would mean leaving four Fuel and Iron Companies free to do what they like in every industry would be of much benefit to the country.  The Progressives have a clear and definite programme by which the people would be the masters of the trusts instead of the trusts being their masters, as Mr. Wilson says they are.  With practical unanimity the trusts supported the opponents of this programme, Mr. Taft and Mr. Wilson, and they evidently dreaded our programme infinitely more than anything that Mr. Wilson threatened.  The people have accepted Mr. Wilson’s assurances.  Now let him make his promises good.  He is committed, if his words mean anything, to the promise to break up every trust, every big corporation—­perhaps every small corporation—­in the United States—­not to go through the motions of breaking them up, but really to break them up.  He is committed against the policy (of efficient control and mastery of the big corporations both by law and by administrative action in cooperation) proposed by the Progressives.  Let him keep faith with the people; let him in good faith try to keep the promises he has thus repeatedly made.  I believe that his promise is futile and cannot be kept.  I believe that any attempt sincerely to keep it and in good faith to carry it out will end in either nothing at all or in disaster.  But my beliefs are of no consequence.  Mr. Wilson is President.  It is his acts that are of consequence.  He is bound in honor to the people of the United States to keep his promise, and to break up, not nominally but in reality, all big business, all trusts, all combinations of every sort, kind, and description, and probably all corporations.  What he says is henceforth of little consequence.  The important thing is what he does, and how the results of what he does square with the promises and prophecies he made when all he had to do was to speak, not to act.

APPENDIX C

THE BLAINE CAMPAIGN