It has undoubtedly benefited the great mass of the American people; but it has been of far more benefit to a comparatively few individuals.

Americans are just beginning to learn that the great freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed is having the inevitable result of all unrestrained exercise of freedom.

It has tended to create a powerful but limited class whose chief object it is to hold and to increase the power which they have gained; and this unexpected result has presented the American democracy with the most difficult and radical of its problems.

Is it to the interest of the American people as a democracy to permit the increase or the perpetuation of the power gained by this aristocracy of money?
A candid consideration of the foregoing question will, I believe, result in a negative answer.

A democracy has as much interest in regulating for its own benefit the distribution of economic power as it has the distribution of political power, and the consequences of ignoring this interest would be as fatal in one case as in the other.