"Now the other half is to the labor man himself. My appeal to him is to remember that as he wants justice, so he must do justice. I want every labor man, every labor leader, every organized union man to take the lead in denouncing crime or violence. (Applause.) I want them to take the lead (applause) in denouncing disorder and inciting riot, that in this country we shall proceed under the protection of our laws and with all respect to the laws and I want the labor men to feel in their turn that exactly as justice must be done them so they must do justice. That they must bear their duty as citizens, their duty to this great country of ours and that they must not rest content without unless they do that duty to the fullest degree. (Interruption.)
"I know these doctors when they get hold of me they will never let me go back and there are just a few things more that I want to say to you.
"And here I have got to make one comparison between Mr. Wilson and myself simply because he has invited it and I can not shrink from it.
"Mr. Wilson has seen fit to attack me, to say that I did not do much against the trusts when I was president. I have got two answers to make to that. In the first place what I did and then I want to compare what I did while I was president with what Mr. Wilson did not do while he was governor. (Applause and laughter.)
"When I took office as president"—(turning to stage) "How long have I talked?"
Answer: "Three-quarters of an hour."
"Well, I will take a quarter of an hour more. (Laughter and applause.) When I took office the anti-trust law was practically a dead letter and the interstate commerce law in as poor a condition. I had to revive both laws. I did. I enforced both. It will be easy enough to do now what I did then, but the reason that it is easy now is because I did it when it was hard. (Applause and cheers.)
"Nobody was doing anything. I found speedily that the interstate commerce law by being made more perfect could be a most useful instrument for helping solve some of our industrial problems with the anti-trust law. I speedily found that almost the only positive good achieved by such a successful lawsuit as the Northern Securities suit, for instance, was for establishing the principle that the government was supreme over the big corporation, but that by itself, or that law did not do—did not accomplish any of the things that we ought to have accomplished, and so I began to fight for the amendment of the law along the lines of the interstate commerce, and now we propose, we progressives, to establish an interstate commission having the same power over industrial concerns that the interstate commerce commission has over railroads, so that whenever there is in the future a decision rendered in such important matters as the recent suits against the Standard Oil, the sugar—no, not that—tobacco—the tobacco trust—we will have a commission which will see that the decree of the court is really made effective; that it is not made a merely nominal decree.
"Our opponents have said that we intend to legalize monopoly. Nonsense. They have legalized monopoly. At this moment the Standard Oil and Tobacco trust monopolies are legalized; they are being carried on under the decree of the Supreme Court. (Applause.)
"Our proposal is really to break up monopoly. Our proposal is to put in the law—to lay down certain requirements and then require the commerce commission—the industrial commission to see that the trusts live up to those requirements. Our opponents have spoken as if we were going to let the commission declare what the requirements should be. Not at all. We are going to put the requirements in the law and then see that the commission makes the trust. (Interruption.) You see they don't trust me. (Laughter.) That the commission requires them to obey that law.