public.  We do not object to the concentration of wealth and administration; but we do believe in the distribution of the wealth in profits to the real owners, and in securing to the public the full benefit of the concentrated administration.  We believe that with concentration in administration there can come both be advantage of a larger ownership and of a more equitable distribution of profits, and at the same time a better service to the commonwealth.  We believe that the administration should be for the benefit of the many; and that greed and rascality, practiced on a large scale, should be punished as relentlessly as if practiced on a small scale.

We do not for a moment believe that the problem will be solved by any short and easy method.  The solution will come only by pressing various concurrent remedies.  Some of these remedies must lie outside the domain of all government.  Some must lie outside the domain of the Federal Government.  But there is legislation which the Federal Government alone can enact and which is absolutely vital in order to secure the attainment of our purpose.  Many laws are needed.  There should be regulation by the National Government of the great interstate corporations, including a simple method of account keeping, publicity, supervision of the issue securities, abolition of rebates, and of special privileges.  There should be short time franchises for all corporations engaged in public business; including the corporations which get power from water rights.  There should be National as well as State guardianship of mines and forests.  The labor legislation hereinafter referred to should concurrently be enacted into law.

To accomplish this, means of course a certain increase in the use of—­not the creation of—­power, by the Central Government.  The power already exists; it does not have to be created; the only question is whether it shall be used or left idle—­and meanwhile the corporations over which the power ought to be exercised will not remain idle.  Let those who object to this increase in the use of the only power available, the national power, be frank, and admit openly that they propose to abandon any effort to control the great business corporations and to exercise supervision over the accumulation and distribution of wealth; for such supervision and control can only come through this particular kind of increase of power.  We no more believe in that empiricism which demand, absolutely unrestrained individualism than we do in that empiricism which clamors for a deadening socialism which would destroy all individual initiative and would ruin the country with a completeness that not even an unrestrained individualism itself could achieve.  The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands.  It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use.