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Newspaper Page Text
'achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoufht'fully enough to count the human cost, '..the cost of lives snuffed out, of I energies overtaxed and Tsroken, th'e fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and ,, children upon whom the dead j weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony r of it all had not yet reached our " ears, the solemn, moving under ' tone of our life, coming upjout of I'th'e mines arid factories and out of every home where the struggle had its' intimate arid familiar seat. With, the'great government went . f mariy deep secret things which we ; too long delayed to look into and 3 scrutinize with candid, fearless . 1 eyes. The "great government we 1 loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish pur r' poses, and those who used it had forgotten the people. ' . A't last a vision has been ' vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the . good, the debased and decadent. ; with the sound and vital. With ' this vision we approach new af fairs. Our, duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize " every process of our common life without weakening or sentiment alizing it. There has been ,'some- ' 'thing crude and heartless and un feeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been 'Let every man look' out for himself, let every generation look l,;out for itself 'While we reared , giant machinery whicli made it" impossible .that any but those who stood at the levers of con trol should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We re membered well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remem bered it with pride. But we were very heedless and ina hurry to be great. We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen- from our eyes. We have made up our mind's to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration. We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates the just prin ciples of taxation, and makes the government a facile instrument in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency' system based upon the necessity of the government to sell its bonds fifty years "ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and re stricting credits; - an industrial system, which, take it on all its sides, financial as well as admin istrative, holds capital in leading Strings, restricts' the liberties arid