Why, my friends, they didn't even put the patents on record, because the tax collector of the county would put them on the assessment roll if they did (laughter). And so they grabbed millions of acres, that they had no idea of using in the present; they were holding it for the profit which would come from scarcity of timber through the waste and use which is going on. Why, people living in the very neighborhood of the timber grabbed don't know that it has passed out of Government ownership! And yet those are some of the people who have been living "extravagantly." I believe that some of them wear shoes that cost the high price of a dollar, and eat bacon that is four-fifths fat. (Laughter and applause)
Let me tell you that extravagance is largely a matter of trying to copy after the Higher-ups. No nation was ever destroyed until it had a large leisure class to set a bad example (applause) in living to the common people; and this Nation has a leisure class which is rapidly growing, and which is more wealthy than any leisure class ever known to the world, civilized or barbarian. Why? My friends, solely because Congress has by bad laws permitted all this vast property of the people to get into the hands of the few (applause). There is not a fortune in this country today large enough to be a menace to the liberties of the common people which has not been acquired by despoiling the people through legislation that was either corrupt or the result of such ignorance that it ought to be punished as criminal negligence, or else through unfair discrimination made by common carriers giving one man an advantage over his competitors. (Applause)
Now, I haven't time to finish—I am afraid I have overstepped my time already—(Voices: "Go on, go on," and applause) but I want to "go on" just a little longer (laughter and applause) because I have something on my mind that I want to put on yours. (Laughter)
We didn't lose our great inheritance until after the Civil War. Practically all of the rapes of this Nation by Congress have been committed since the Civil War, and every land law which Congress has placed upon the statute books since 1860 has been vicious—absolutely vicious—in its tendencies, and the Commissioner of the General Land Office and the Secretary of the Interior have constantly, every year, told Congress about it in printed reports and begged and urged Congress to change the laws: and it has refused to do it! (Applause)
Of course all members of Congress are not to blame for that; because this fight which Hadley says is going on always, and always will go on, in the division of power fundamentally between the voters and the property owners, has resulted in the property owners having more representatives in Congress than the people ever had. (Applause)
Now, I am not here to abuse anybody. I heard a man tell a homely story last night that went directly to my heart; it's exactly in line with what I think about most of the men who are responsible for the present condition; I don't say these men are bad, but only that they have a wrong viewpoint—and that was illustrated in the story. This gentleman said that one day his boy brought home a fox-terrier. They had poultry at his home, some brown leghorns and some white chickens. This fox-terrier had been born and raised on a ranch where they had nothing but brown leghorns, and consequently when he went out in the chicken-yard and saw the feed thrown out he rushed out immediately—of course, without being told to do it—and weeded out the white chickens from the brown leghorns and drove them away from the feed and let the brown leghorns have it all (laughter). Now, it wasn't the fault of the dog that the white chickens lost their feed (laughter); we mustn't blame him; that had become second nature, from what we would call, speaking in reference to human beings, environment (laughter and applause); and it's a rare dog who can discover for himself that the white chickens ought to have an equal right with the brown leghorns to get some of the feed. (Laughter and applause)
When, after the Civil War, business commenced to swing with great strides in this country, owing to the great inventions in machinery, the discovery of the cotton-gin and so many other things that we can't stop to enumerate them, and the growth of the use of electricity in later days, a few men commenced to see business enlarge—and they were not the men who fought in the War, but the men who remained at home and reflected (laughter and applause). Some of them were like the man pictured in one of the illustrated papers where there was a cartoon of Thomas Jefferson signing the Declaration of Independence, with one of the imaginary corporation men of the day—a Tory—rushing in through the door and saying, "Hold on, Thomas, don't sign that document; it'll hurt business" (laughter); and these men said, "Let's stop this War, it's hurting business." And there were others who thought the War made business, though that was before they had commenced to can beef (laughter). Then after the War, when the men who had made the fight for human liberty and the continuance of equal opportunities in this country came home and went to work, they went ahead satisfied to make a living for their little families in the best way they could, while these business men who had remained at home had discovered that if a man can get possession of those natural resources which can be turned into energy—the energy which drives modern machinery, which can do the work of human hands—he can sit back and fold his arms and say to the eighty million people in the United States, "Go ahead; when you want energy to run your machinery, you'll have to come to me and buy it; when your money is gone the eighty millions of you will have to work for me; and when you get to be one hundred and sixty millions, you'll still have to work for me." Now, it requires some imagination to see that, but it is just as fundamentally true as that the earth is spherical—flattened at the poles, as Cook tells us (laughter); and Peary corroborates it. (Laughter)
Let me explain; because I want you to take home something, besides figures, that you will remember. When a man in the old days, when they had no machinery, employed four or five men, he commenced to be a business man; and when he began to put profit in his pocket—even at the rate of only ten cents a day for the labor of each man working for him, if he had five men he was making a clear profit of fifty cents a day, and if he had fifty men the profit was five dollars a day—he got on the road to "big business." If he could have five hundred men and could make fifty cents a day off the labor of each one, he would be making two hundred and fifty dollars a day; and if he could have factories spread out over the United States in which he had an aggregate of ten million men working for him—as in shoe factories when they made shoes entirely by hand—and could make fifty cents a day off each of the ten million men, he would make five million dollars a day. The figures stagger us. Now, with machinery you can take coal, oil, timber, gas, or water-power—those are the energy-creating natural resources—and make machinery run with them; and if you own enough of those energy-creating natural resources to be equivalent to the labor of ten million men, and apply it to the right machinery, you can compete with the man who has ten million slaves to work for him and does not possess this other energy—and you can do better than merely compete, because your water-power doesn't wear out shoes at the toes nor coats at the elbows nor trousers at the knees; so, my friends, the man who owns the water-power is a greater slave-owner—has more energy that can be turned into wealth—than all the planters who owned the colored men of the South.
Now, at the time of the Civil War we didn't understand this great power and the importance of preserving it in the ownership of the people—because it all belonged to us then. There is available—so the report of the National Conservation Commission says—37,000,000 horsepower in the streams of this country. What does this mean? Why, my friends, the energy expended by an average draft-horse working eight hours a day is equal to only four-fifths of the unit horsepower, as we use it in speaking of water-power, so that it would be equivalent, for an eight-hour day's work, to more than fifty-four million average draft horses. Now, machinery used to be driven by man-power before the draft horse was made to work in place of the man; that was what they did in the old tread-mill before the discovery of steam, which has only been in effective use about a hundred years; and in man-power, what does the forty million horsepower available immediately for use mean? You don't conceive of it, I am sure. A horsepower is equal to the work of at least ten men, and forty million horsepower would be equal to the work of 400,000,000 men! Why, all the people in the United States today are only 90,000,000, including babies. Four-hundred-million-of-men power! And just as sure as the sun will rise, if we permit that to go into perpetual ownership of individuals, the day will come when one corporation will own it all and one man will dictate and dominate that corporation (applause). If you want this country to have material progress at the cost of human liberty, let this source of energy slip out of your hands (applause); but if you want to hold on to any kind of a chance for your children and children's children to have equal opportunities like yours, then follow the policies laid down by Theodore Roosevelt the other day in regard to those energy-producing resources—coal, oil, gas, and water, as well as timber—and this country will be so great that all earlier history will never have told of such progress as the human race will make within these confines. (Applause)
It seems to me that we all ought to be able to realize that no human being in the short space of a lifetime can have earned a hundred million dollars—he cannot have given an equivalent to mankind for $100,000,000; and when we see the example set by some of these great captains of industry who go over to Monte Carlo and risk a fortune on one bet and one turn of the wheel, and come back to this country and talk about their great benevolence, and then find that the Pittsburg "Survey" found conditions of human life at their workshops so low that it is bound to degrade and pull down the human race—surely it is time to stop and consider. (Tremendous and prolonged applause)