"The statistics of the future shall record the existence in this land of thousands, hundreds of thousands of independent business men. The columns devoted to enumerating the Child Labor of the land will be dispensed with; there will be an increase in the number of mothers and a decrease in the number of women who are forced to earn a living by manual toil.
"The platform we adopt must contain a plank providing for the imposition of a tax on a man according to his ability to pay. There is no sanction for a law to govern a community, however large, however populous, if this law is in contradiction of the principles that govern a household; for we cannot conceive of a government that is not built on the household as the unit.
"Where is the father so inhuman that he will demand of the stripling, the infirm, the feminine members of his family to procure the means of support, before he has exhausted every other effort that can be made by himself and his stalwart sons? Even the insatiate Trust Magnates, were they suddenly to be reduced to penury, would shield their wives, their daughters and their indigent.
"Then who shall say that this Republic, a household on a mammoth scale, is not justified in collecting the taxes necessary for its maintenance from the incomes of the rich, and not from the paltry possessions of the wage-earner? The hundredth part of the income of the rich will more than pay for the legitimate expenses of the Government.
"I am a firm believer in 'vested rights' and carry my adherence back to the dawn of creation. Then it was that God vested mankind with the right to live upon this earth. He endowed man with the ability to earn a living, and gave to each and every man an equal inheritance—opportunity.
"Any laws that man has made which abridge this right of equal opportunity are unconstitutional in the broad sense of being at variance with God's will. Applied to our Constitution, the vested right of the people to the equal opportunity to labor is higher than the right of the few to retain the fruits of the labor of the many.
"I advocate the taxing of the incomes of our citizens before we tax their wages, which is their capital." Cheers interrupt the speaker for a full minute.
"It is my hope, the people's hope, that the bulwark of this country be once more as it was for a century, not a standing army of idle soldiers, but an active army of free men, busied by day in the fields and in the workshops; resting by night under cover of their homes, surrounded by their happy families; an army that is ready at an instant's call to fight for the protection of their Flag and their Homes."
"The united armies of the world would hesitate to face the legions of contented freemen. Our power in the world will be increased more by a fleet of merchant ships than by squadrons of steel battleships.
"We want a National Militia, to be composed of every able bodied man, who in the hours of peace prepares against the possibility of war. We want a Navy strong enough to represent our interest on every sea; a Naval Reserve strong enough to convert our Merchant Marine into the greatest fleet in the world, should need arise.