To you, men and women who have come here to this great
city of this great State formally to launch a new party,
a party of the people of the whole Union, the National
Progressive Party, I extend my hearty greeting. You are
taking a bold and a greatly needed step for the service
of our beloved country. The old parties are husks, with
no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines,
boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of
incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out
wisely and fearlessly what should be said on the vital
issues of the day. This new movement is a movement of
truth, sincerity, and wisdom, a movement which proposes
to put at the service of all our people the collective
power of the people, through their Governmental agencies,
alike in the Nation and in the several States. We propose
boldly to face the real and great questions of the day,
and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties.
We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest
men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter
what their past political differences, if they are
content to face the future and no longer to dwell among
the dead issues of the past. We propose to put forth a
platform which shall not be a platform of the ordinary
and insincere kind, but shall be a contract with the
people; and, if the people accept this contract by
putting us in power, we shall hold ourselves under
honorable obligation to fulfill every promise it contains
as loyally as if it were actually enforceable under the
penalties of the law. ...
THE FARMER
There is no body of our people whose interests are
more inextricably interwoven with the interests of all
the people than is the case with the farmers. The Country
Life Commission should be revived with greatly increased
powers; its abandonment was a severe blow to the
interests of our people. The welfare of the farmer is a
basic need of this Nation. It is the men from the farm
who in the past have taken the lead in every great
movement within this Nation, whether in time of war or in
time of peace. It is well to have our cities prosper, but
it is not well if they prosper at the expense of the
country. I am glad to say that in many sections of our
country there has been an extraordinary revival of recent
years in intelligent interest in and work for those who
live in the open country. In this movement the lead must
be taken by the farmers themselves; but our people as a
whole, through their governmental agencies, should back
the farmers. Everything possible should be done
to better the economic condition of the farmer, and also
to increase the social value of the life of the farmer,
the farmer's wife, and their children. The burdens of
labor and loneliness bear heavily on the women in the
country; their welfare should be the especial concern of
all of us. Everything possible should be done to make
life in the country profitable so as to be attractive
from the economic standpoint and also to give an outlet
among farming people for those forms of activity which
now tend to make life in the cities especially desirable
for ambitious men and women. There should be just the
same chance to live as full, as well-rounded, and as
highly useful lives in the country as in the
city.
The Government must co-operate with the farmer to make
the farm more productive. There must be no skinning of
the soil. The farm should be left to the farmer's soil in
better, and not worse, condition because of its
cultivation. Moreover, every invention and improvement,
every discovery and economy, should be at the service of
the farmer in the work of production; and, in addition,
he should be helped to co-operate in business fashion
with his fellows, so that the money paid by the
consumer for the product of the soil shall to as large a
degree as possible go into the pockets of the man who
raised that product from the soil. So long as
the farmer leaves co-operative activities with their
profit-sharing to the city man of business, so long will
the foundations of wealth be undermined and the comforts
of enlightenment be impossible in the country
communities. In every respect this Nation has to learn
the lessons of efficiency in production and distribution,
and of avoidance of waste and destruction; we must
develop and improve instead of exhausting our resources.
It is entirely possible by improvements in production, in
the avoidance of waste, and in business methods on the
part of the farmer to give him all increased income from
his farm while at the same time reducing to the consumer
the price of the articles raised on the farm. Important
although education is everywhere, it has a special
importance in the country. The country school must fit
the country life; in the country, as elsewhere, education
must be hitched up with life. The country church and the
country Young Men's and Young Women's Christian
Associations have great parts to play. The
farmers must own and work their own land; steps must be
taken at once to put a stop to the tendency towards
absentee landlordism and tenant farming; this is one of
the most imperative duties confronting the
Nation. The question of rural banking and rural
credits is also of immediate importance. ...
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
There can be no more important question than the high
cost of living necessities. The main purpose of the
Progressive movement is to place the American people in
possession of their birthright, to secure for all
the American people unobstructed access to the fountains
of measureless prosperity which their Creator offers
them. We in this country are blessed with great
natural resources, and our men and women have a very high
standard of intelligence and of industrial capacity.
Surely such being the case, we cannot permanently
support conditions under which each family finds it
increasingly difficult to secure the necessaries of life
and a fair share of its comforts through the earnings of
its members. The cost of living in this country has risen
during the last few years out of all proportion to the
increase in the rate of most salaries and wages; the same
situation confronts alike the majority of wage-workers,
small business men, small professional men, the clerks,
the doctors, clergymen. Now, grave though the
problem is, there is one way to make it graver, and that
is to deal with it insincerely, to advance false
remedies, to promise the impossible. Our opponents,
Republicans and Democrats alike, propose to deal with it
in this way. The Republicans in their platform promise
all inquiry into the facts. Most certainly there should
be such inquiry. But the way the present Administration
has failed to keep its promises in the past, and the rank
dishonesty of action on the part of the
Penrose-Barnes-Guggenheim National Convention, makes
their every promise worthless. The Democratic platform
affects to find the entire cause of the high cost of
living in the tariff, and promises to remedy it by free
trade, especially free trade in the necessaries of life.
In the first place, this attitude ignores the patent fact
that the problem is world-wide, that everywhere, in
England and France, as in Germany and Japan, it appears
with greater or less severity; that in England, for
instance, it has become a very severe problem, although
neither the tariff nor, save to a small degree, the
trusts can there have any possible effect upon the
situation. In the second place, the Democratic platform,
if it is sincere, must mean that all duties will be taken
off the products of the farmer. Yet most certainly we
cannot afford to have the farmer struck down. The
welfare of the tiller of the soil is as important as the
welfare of the wage worker himself, and we must
sedulously guard both. The farmer, the producer of the
necessities of life, can himself live only if he raises
these necessities for a profit. On the other hand, the
consumer who must have that farmer's product in order to
live, must be allowed to purchase it at the lowest cost
that can give the farmer his profit, and everything
possible must be done to eliminate any middleman whose
function does not tend to increase the cheapness of
distribution of the product; and, moreover, everything
must be done to stop all speculating, all gambling with
the bread-basket which has even the slightest deleterious
effect upon the producer and consumer. There
must be legislation which will bring about a closer
business relationship between the farmer and the
consumer. Recently experts in the Agricultural Department
have figured that nearly fifty per cent of the price for
agricultural products paid by the consumer goes into the
pockets, not of the farmer, but of various middlemen; and
it is probable that over half of what is thus paid to
middlemen is needless, can be saved by wise business
methods (introduced through both law and custom), and can
therefore be returned to the farmer and the consumer.
Through the proposed Inter-State Industrial Commission we
can effectively do away with any arbitrary control by
combinations of the necessities of life. Furthermore, the
Governments of the Nation and of the several States must
combine in doing everything they can to make the farming
business profitable, so that he shall get more out of the
soil, and enjoy better business facilities for marketing
what he thus gets. In this manner his return will be
increased while the price to the consumer is diminished.
The elimination of the middleman by agricultural
exchanges and by the use of improved business methods
generally, the development of good roads, the reclamation
of arid lands and swamp lands, the improvement in the
productivity of farms, the encouragement of all agencies
which tend to bring people back to the soil and to make
country life more interesting as well as more profitable
— all these movements will help not only the farmer
but the man who consumes the farmer's products.
There is urgent need of non-partisan expert
examination into any tariff schedule which seems to
increase the cost of living, and, unless the increase
thus caused is more than countervailed by the benefit to
the class of the community which actually receives the
protection, it must of course mean that that particular
duty must be reduced. The system of levying a tariff for
the protection and encouragement of American industry so
as to secure higher wages and better conditions of life
for American laborers must never be perverted so as to
operate for the impoverishment of those whom it was
intended to benefit. But, in any event, the effect of the
tariff on the cost of living is slight; any householder
can satisfy himself of this fact by considering the
increase in price of articles, like milk and eggs, where
the influence of both the tariff and the trusts is
negligible. No conditions have been shown which warrant
us in believing that the abolition of the protective
tariff as a whole would bring any substantial benefit to
the consumer, while it would certainly cause unheard of
immediate disaster to all wage-workers, all business men,
and all farmers, and in all probability would permanently
lower the standard of living here. In order to show the
utter futility of the belief that the abolition of the
tariff and the establishment of free trade would remedy
the condition complained of, all that is necessary is to
look at the course of industrial events in England and in
Germany during the last thirty years, the former under
free trade, the latter under a protective system. During
these thirty years it is a matter of common knowledge
that Germany has forged ahead relatively to England, and
this not only as regards the employers, but as regards
the wage-earners — in short, as regards all members
of the industrial classes. Doubtless, many causes have
combined to produce this result; it is not to be ascribed
to the tariff alone, but, on the other hand it is evident
that it could not have come about if a protective tariff
were even a chief cause among many other causes of the
high cost of living.
It is also asserted that the trusts
are responsible for the high cost of living. I have no
question that, as regards certain trusts, this is true. I
also have no question that it will continue to be true
just as long as the country confines itself to acting as
the Baltimore platform demands that we act. This demand
is, in effect, for the States and National Government to
make the futile attempt to exercise forty-nine sovereign
and conflicting authorities in the effort jointly to
suppress the trusts, while at the same time the National
Government refuses to exercise proper control over them.
There will be no diminution in the cost of trust-made
articles so long as our Government attempts the
impossible task of restoring the flint-lock conditions of
business sixty years ago by trusting only to a succession
of lawsuits under the Anti-Trust Law — a method
which it has been definitely shown usually results to the
benefit of any big business concern which really ought to
be dissolved, but which cause disturbance and distress to
multitudes of smaller concerns. Trusts which increase
production — unless they do it wastefully, as in
certain forms of mining and lumbering — cannot
permanently increase the cost of living; it is the trusts
which limit production, or which without limiting
production, take advantage of the lack of governmental
control, and eliminate competition by combining to
control the market, that cause all increase in the cost
of living. There should be established at once, as I have
elsewhere said, under the National Government an
inter-State industrial commission, which should exercise
full supervision over the big industrial concerns doing
an inter-State business into which an element of monopoly
enters. Where these concerns deal with the necessaries of
life the commission should not shrink, if the necessity
is proved, of going to the extent of exercising
regulatory control over the conditions that create or
determine monopoly prices.
By such action we shall certainly be able to remove
the element of contributory causation on the part of the
trusts and the tariff towards the high cost of living.
There will remain many other elements. Wrong
taxation, including failure to tax swollen inheritances
and unused land and other natural resources held for
speculative purposes, is one of these elements.
The modern tendency to leave the country for the town is
another element; and exhaustion of the soil and poor
methods of raising and marketing the products of the soil
make up another element, as I have already shown. Another
element is that of waste and extravagance, individual and
National. No laws which the wit of man can devise will
avail to make the community prosperous if the average
individual lives in such fashion that his expenditure
always exceeds his income.
National extravagance — that is, the expenditure
of money which is not warranted — we can ourselves
control, and to some degree we can help in doing away
with the extravagance caused by international
rivalries.
These are all definite methods by which something can
be accomplished in the direction of decreasing the cost
of living. All taken together will not fully meet the
situation. There are in it elements which as yet we do
not understand. We can be certain that the remedy
proposed by the Democratic party is a quack remedy. It is
just as emphatically a quack remedy as was the quack
remedy, the panacea, the universal cure-all which they
proposed sixteen years ago. It is instructive to compare
what they now say with what they said in 1896. Only
sixteen years ago they were telling us that the decrease
in prices was fatal to our people, that the fall in the
production of gold, and, as a consequence, the fall in
the prices of commodities, was responsible for our ills.
Now they ascribe these ills to diametrically opposite
causes, such as the rise in the price of commodities. It
may well be that the immense output of gold during the
last few years is partly responsible for certain phases
of the present trouble — which is an instructive
commentary on the wisdom of those men who sixteen years
ago insisted that the remedy for everything was to be
found in the mere additional output of coin, silver and
gold alike. There is no more curious delusion than that
the Democratic platform is a Progressive platform. The
Democratic platform, representing the best thought of the
acknowledged Democratic leaders at Baltimore, is purely
retrogressive and reactionary. There is no progress in
it. It represents an effort to go back; to put this
Nation of a hundred millions, existing under modern
conditions, back to where it was as a Nation of
twenty-five millions in the days of the stage-coach and
canal boat. Such an attitude is toryism, not
Progressivism.
In addition, then, to the remedies that we can begin
forthwith, there should be a fearless, intelligent, and
searching inquiry into the whole subject made by an
absolutely non-partisan body of experts, with no
prejudices to warp their minds, no object to serve, who
shall recommend any necessary remedy, heedless of what
interest may be helped or hurt thereby, and caring only
for the interests of the people as a whole. ...
CONSERVATION
There can be no greater issue than that of
Conservation in this country. Just as we must conserve
our men, women, and children, so we must conserve the
resources of the land on which they live. We must
conserve the soil so that our children shall have a land
that is more and not less fertile than that our fathers
dwelt in. We must conserve the forests, not by disuse but
by use, making them more valuable at the same time that
we use them. We must conserve the mines. Moreover,
we must insure so far as possible the use of
certain types of great natural resources for the benefit
of the people as a whole. The public should not alienate
its fee in the water power which will be of incalculable
consequence as a source of power in the immediate future.
The Nation and the States within their several spheres
should by immediate legislation keep the fee of the water
power, leasing its use only for a reasonable length of
time on terms that will secure the interests of the
public. Just as the Nation has gone into the
work of irrigation in the West, so it should go into the
work of helping reclaim the swamp lands of the South. We
should undertake the complete development and control of
the Mississippi as a National work, just as we have
undertaken the work of building the Panama Canal. We can
use the plant, and we call use the human experience, left
free by the completion of the Panama Canal in so
developing the Mississippi as to make it a mighty
highroad of commerce, and a source of fructification and
not of death to the rich and fertile lands lying along
its lower length.
In the West, the forests, the grazing lands, the
reserves of every kind, should be so handled as to be in
the interests of the actual settler, the actual
home-maker. He should be encouraged to use them at once,
but in such a way as to preserve and not exhaust them.
We do not intend that our natural resources shall
be exploited by the few against the interests of the
many, nor do we intend to turn them over to any man who
will wastefully use them by destruction, and leave to
those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so
much. The man in whose interests we are working is the
small farmer and settler, the man who works with his own
hands, who is working not only for himself but for his
children, and who wishes to leave to them the fruits of
his labor. His permanent welfare is the prime
factor for consideration in developing the policy of
Conservation; for our aim is to preserve our natural
resources for the public as a whole, for the average man
and the average woman who make up the body of the
American people.
ALASKA
Alaska should be developed at once, but in the
interest of the actual settler. In Alaska the Government
has an opportunity of starting in what is almost a fresh
field to work out various problems by actual experiment.
The Government should at once construct, own, and
operate the railways in Alaska. The Government should
keep the fee of all the coal-fields and allow them to be
operated by lessees with the condition in the lease that
non-use shall operate as a forfeit. Telegraph
lines should be operated as the railways are.
Moreover, it would be well in Alaska to try a
system of land taxation which will, so far as possible,
remove all the burdens from those who actually use the
land, whether for building or for agricultural purposes,
and will operate against any man who holds the land for
speculation, or derives an income from it based, not on
his own exertions, but on the increase in value due to
activities not his own. There is very real need
that this Nation shall seriously prepare itself for the
task of remedying social injustice and meeting social
problems by well-considered governmental effort; and the
best preparation for such wise action is to test by
actual experiment under favorable conditions the device
which we have reason to believe will work well, but which
it is difficult to apply in old settled communities
without preliminary experiment. ...
Surely there never was a fight better worth making
than the one in which we are engaged. It little matters
what befalls any one of us who for the time being stand
in the forefront of the battle. I hope we shall win, and
I believe that if we can wake the people to what the
fight really means we shall win. But, win or lose, we
shall not falter. Whatever fate may at the moment
overtake any of us, the movement itself will not stop.
Our cause is based on the eternal principles of
righteousness; and even though we who now lead may for
the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph.
Six weeks ago, here in Chicago, I spoke to the honest
representatives of a Convention which was not dominated
by honest men; a Convention wherein sat, alas! a majority
of men who, with sneering indifference to every principle
of right, so acted as to bring to a shameful end a party
which had been founded over half a century ago by men in
whose souls burned the fire of lofty endeavor. Now to you
men, who, in your turn, have corne together to spend and
be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who
face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive
in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our
Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new
fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of
humankind, I say in closing what in that speech I said in
closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the
Lord.