Why do a few men, who will work with no machinery, want to own all of the machinery in the country?
Would these men care to own any machinery if there were not an opportunity in such ownership to get money?
Where can the money they get come from except from the wealth that is produced by the men who work with their machinery?
So long as a few men own all of the machinery, must not all other men be at their mercy?
How can anyone get a job so long as the men who own the machinery say he can have no job?
How can anyone demand a wage that represents the full value of his product so long as the capitalist refuses to pay any wages that do not assure a profit to him?
Mr. Roosevelt and some others would have you believe that all of these wrongs can be “regulated” into rights. They would have you believe that only “strong” commissions are necessary to make all of these wrongs right. But Mr. Roosevelt and some others do not know what they are talking about. This is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact. Men have talked as they talk since robbery began. History records no instance of one of them that made good. During all of the years that Mr. Roosevelt was in the White House, he never appointed a commission that was “strong” enough to make good.
We have it upon the authority of no less a man than Dr. Wiley that Mr. Roosevelt’s commission to prevent the poisoning of food was not strong enough to make good. The food-poisoning went on.
I mention Mr. Roosevelt’s food commission because it is a shining example of what his “strong” commission theory of government cannot do. Mr. Roosevelt, unquestionably, is and was opposed to the poisoning of food. He appointed a commission to stop one kind of poisoning. But, for reasons that you, as well as anyone else, can surmise, the commission decided in favor of the food-poisoners instead of in favor of the public. Which brings us to this question: If Mr. Roosevelt could not appoint a commission “strong” enough even to prevent the poisoning of food, what reason have you to believe that he or anyone else could appoint a commission strong enough to prevent capitalists from robbing workingmen?
You who oppose Socialism do so, no doubt, largely because you believe the people could not advantageously own and manage their own industrial machinery. We who advocate Socialism reply that it is much easier to manage what you own than it is to manage what someone else owns. The facts of history show that it is practically impossible to manage what someone else owns. That is what we are trying to do to-day—and we are failing at it. We are trying to manage the trusts. Fight as we will, the trusts are managing us. They fix almost every fact in our lives. They begin fixing the facts of our lives even before we are born. They determine even whether all of us shall be born. It is a well-known fact that when times are bad, the birth-rate decreases. Having the power to make bad times, the trusts also have the power to diminish the number of births. The trust panic of 1907 unquestionably prevented thousands of children from being born. No one can ever know how many, but we do know that both marriages and births decreased.